Photoshop Basics

El Puncho McCrazy Fists

It's been a long time coming but I'm finally starting to use photoshop. For years, whenever I have needed to do any photo manipulation I just used mspaint. It's simple and familiar but recently I have started doing a lot of drawing and graphic stuff, mainly for t-shirts. I would like to be able do it all in photoshop, starting with the basics.

I have done several google searches but haven't really found any good tutorials and the ones that I do find are geared towards people who are much more advanced than I am.



tl;dr: Does anyone know of any good photoshop tutorials, starting from the basics?

Reznik

The 'You Suck at Photoshop' series of tutorials is pretty good and also funny. I do believe you can find them on youtube.

Also, try good-tutorials.com.

edit: [vidURL="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_X5uR7VC4M&feature=PlayList&p=D19BCF9D57320E03&index=0&playnext=1"]here is the playlist[/vidURL] for the You Suck at Photoshop tuts

yalborap

I'm a fan of PixelPerfect, myself.

http://revision3.com/pixelperfect/ The guy explain stuff as he does it, so you learn how to do more than what he's telling you to do.

OremLK

The first thing you should do is download fifty pictures and put a Lens Flare filter on every one of them. Get it out of your system right now.

There. Now you don't ever have to use that filter again.

The second thing you should do is to start working with layers. Open a photo of somebody. Right click on the Background layer in the layers window, Duplicate it, and then press the little eye next to it to hide it. Now click on the duplicate layer you just made to select it. Then select the eraser tool and delete everything that isn't the person in your photo (hint: You can adjust the Brush Size and Hardness as necessary around the top left under the menu bar). Finally, go to Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation and screw with the hue until they have green skin. Now show the background layer again by clicking where the eye was in the layers window.

There are lots of details to learn in Photoshop, but once you understand layers, everything else will gradually fall into place.

Dalboz

If you want a book (or just need to find something similar for free), I would recommend Adobe's Classroom in a Book for Photoshop. It's actually quite good and give you actual exercises to work through with specific instruction so you can see how the tools and such actually work. I don't know if there is something similar online, though.

El Puncho McCrazy Fists

Wow this is some good stuff. Thanks guys.

Keep it coming, if anyone has anything else that'll help a guy out, it'd be greatly appreciated.

Hypatia

It might be too advanced for you, but check out: Russell Brown's Photoshop stuff. He is really really good at explaining in his videos what he's doing and he's got really great presentation skills.

MagicToaster

Anything in particular you're interested in doing?

projectmayhem

Just a simple hint:

Use Layers and Folders.
Name said Layers and Folders.

Most of the goods sites have been listed, here is one I really like though:
www.psdtuts.com
Not really 'basic' stuff, but yeah, good to know stuff.