Here you go.
I’m still kinda a noob myself, too. Even after going through all the tutorials in Adobe TV myself, I’m still somewhat inexperienced in unleashing the full potential of this powerful program. So, don’t expect to grab hold of Photoshop straight away, even after taking up these lessons.
The program’s some hard stuff… But I’ve got somewhat of the basic’s down, like the brushes, coloring, stuff like that. I still don’t know how to do animations though, but it’s pretty interesting and fun to mess with… Just not to mess with it too much xD
Edited. There is no need to quote the entire post. – Mitch
Ugh, animation. Don’t get the wrong idea, animation’s fun to watch, but working with it is another story altogether for me.
If you want to work with animation, however, I would recommend using Adobe Illustrator. You could download the trial off the Adobe website as well. It has a more specific focus on animating purposes than Photoshop, of which the latter is naturally used specifically for photographs than drawn artwork.
The most important is just practice, practice and more practice. Draw till your hands are cramped and then draw some more. Oh and look up tutorials on the internet, if you have aquestion there is a big chance someone else posted some helpfull things there.
lol What’s the point of layers? My friend, they not only ensure you could edit over an image safely (think of it as drawing over a picture with a transparent paper), they are also great when importing into Premiere Pro as you could move individual layers into different positions of a video.
Basically, they are like different sheets of paper for you to play around with without worrying about ruining the original copy. It’s a very useful tool, actually, despite the much improvement it could use.
Just what Dragon of Omnipotency said. They allow you to work on different aspects of an image without unintentionally messing up another part. I usually have my line work on one layer, base color on a next, then shading, etc…
Layers is what make the life easy when working with photoshop. let me show you.
What you start with is a clean sheet of “paper” this is your background layer
(If you dont see anything here, its a white rectangle)
Then on the top layer you make a lineart. (insert new layer and draw on that)
The you add more layers in between and start colouring in those. the advantage is that your linart always stays on top so you dont draw over the lines. Here are seperate layers for different parts of the drawing.
When all those layers are shown at the smae time the whole picture shows.
So to overcome difficulties of different colours on the same layers crossing each other it is best to make seperate layers
I made seperate layers for the base colour and one for the shadows and also divided up those layers for different parts of the pic so the colours dont cross each other. Learning how to work with layers really makes life easy!
You can do alot with photoshop. I’m sure even if you’re experienced with it you’ll find there’s always something you didn’t know about. Layers are very useful, same with layer masks, which allow you to ‘erase’ things on the layer without actually erasing them, just making them invisible.
Just play around, find some tutorials. What kind of things were you planning to do with photoshop? Colouring? Image Editing? Etc…
I have CS4 myself, but I’m more used to the CS3 we use at school so far. I can hlp if you have any specific questions. I’ll try my best to help.
Just kidding!
Sorry.