Great Tutorial: ’10 Things Beginners Want to Know How To Do’ in Photoshop CC

It’s likely one of the reasons Adobe decided to shift to a subscription model was so that they could bring in more beginners and amateurs that had never had affordable access to the software.

For them, justifying a several hundred-dollar purchase wasn’t always feasible, but $10 per month through Adobe’s perpetually-extended Photoshop Photography Program is more than reasonable, and so we’d bet there are more beginners on Photoshop CC than ever before. Now the hard part… actually using the software.

Super helpful Photoshop CC beginner tutorial to the rescue!

As Spiderman was told, “with great power comes great responsibility.” But while that does apply to Photoshop (think before you ‘shop folks) the better quote might be “with great power comes great confusion.”

You first time opening up Photoshop, especially if you’re only jumping on board now with Photoshop CC, is going to be confusing. You’ve seen some examples of the incredible art and photo manipulation capabilities of this program, but you don’t even know what a ‘mask’ is. Have no fear, Adobe is here to help.

In this recently released episode of Adobe Creative Cloud TV, Photoshop master Terry White shows you how to do the 10 things most beginners are wanting to do when they first open up the program. We won’t go into specifics — it took White 45 minutes of video to cover it and we don’t want to make you read a novel — but here’s quick list of what you’ll be covering in the tutorial:

How to remove blemishes or ‘touch up’ a portrait (using the Spot Healing Tool) Working with Layers and Adjustment Layers Working with Masks How to Crop How to adjust exposure and fix colour-cast problems (using the Camera RAW filter) How to remove an object from a photo (using Content Aware Fill) How to move an object in a photo (using Content Aware Move) and duplicate/transform content How to remove a subject from a photo and place it on a new background (using Smart Select and Refine Edge) How to add text How to save your photos in both editable and sharable formats

Check out the video at the top to see all of these skills demonstrated. And if you’re just getting started with Photoshop of photography in general, be sure to head over to our Tutorials category! It’s packed full of interesting and helpful posts that’ll help make your first experiences in the world of photography much more enjoyable.

(via Reddit)

How to Get Started With Adobe Photoshop CC

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Photoshop Elements 10: The Missing Manual [Book]

Unlike the past several versions of Elements, with Elements 10 there’s not much difference in how you start up the program, regardless of whether you have a Mac or a Windows computer.

When you install Elements in Windows, the installer creates a desktop shortcut for you. Just double click that to launch Elements.

In the Mac version, you can launch Elements as the last step in the installation process (Beyond This Book explains how to install Elements), or you can go to Applications→Adobe Photoshop Elements 10 and double-click its icon there. (Incidentally, the only other thing in there besides the uninstaller is a folder called Support Files [you won’t see this if you have the App Store version]. That’s where you’ll find the actual Editor application.) If you want to make a Dock icon for future convenience, start Elements and then go to the Dock and click its icon. Keep holding the mouse button down till you see a menu, and then choose Options→Keep in Dock.

If you don’t care for Elements’ dark color scheme, unfortunately you’re out of luck in Elements 10. While some previous versions gave you a way to choose a lighter color for the background of the program’s windows, this is gone from Elements now. On the plus side, the contrast between the program’s background and the text on it is a bit better than in previous versions.

You can still use this book if you have an earlier version of Elements because a lot of the basic editing procedures are the same. But Elements 10 is a little different, so you’d probably feel more comfortable with a reference book for the version you have. There are Missing Manuals for Elements 3 through 9, too, and you may prefer to track down the book that matches your version of Elements. (For Elements 6 and 8, there are separate editions for the Mac and Windows versions.)

If you’re still not sure, in Windows, click once on the Elements icon on your desktop, and Windows displays the full name of the program—including the version number—below the icon, if it wasn’t already visible. You can also check the Windows Start menu, where Elements is listed along with its version number. On a Mac, check in your Applications folder to see the version number. Or, if Elements is already running, go to Help→About Photoshop Elements in Windows or Adobe Photoshop Elements Editor→About Photoshop Elements on a Mac.

This book covers Photoshop Elements 10. If you’re not sure which version you’ve got, the easiest way to find out is to look at the program’s icon (the one you click to launch Elements). The icon for Elements 10 is a dark blue square with a stylized outline of two photographs on it in lighter blue.

The Welcome Screen

When you launch Elements for the first time, you’re greeted by the Welcome screen (Figure 1-1). This is where you sign up for your free account (which you can only get if you live in the U.S.; explains how), which also registers Elements. (If you have a Mac, you also have the option to create your account while installing Elements, as well as doing that here.)

Note The App Store version has no Welcome Screen and no option for a free account. When you launch this version, you go straight to the Editor (Editing Your Photos).

Figure 1-1. Elements’ Welcome screen. What you see in the right part of the window changes occasionally, so it may not exactly match this image. The left part of the window is always the same, though; it’s where you choose whether to organize or edit photos. The bottom of the screen has links for signing into your account, if you have one. You can’t bypass the Welcome screen just by clicking the upper-right Close (X) button. If you do that, this screen goes away—but so does Elements. Fortunately, the box on page 18 tells you how to permanently say goodbye to this screen.

The Welcome screen is a launchpad that lets you choose which part of Elements you want to use:

Organize button . This starts the Organizer, which lets you store and organize your image files.

Edit button. Click this for the Editor, which lets you modify your images.

You can easily hop back and forth between the Editor and the Organizer—which you can think of as the two halves of Elements—and you probably won’t do much in one without eventually needing to get into the other. But in some ways, they function as two separate programs. For example, if you start in the Organizer, then once you’ve picked a photo to edit, you have to wait a few seconds while the Editor loads. And when you have both the Editor and the Organizer running, quitting the Editor doesn’t close the Organizer—you have to close both parts of Elements independently.

In the upper-right part of the Editor’s main window is a button that you can click to launch the Organizer or switch over to it if it’s already running. Click the word “Organizer” or the dark blue square with four smaller light blue squares on it. If you want to do the opposite—get photos from the Organizer to the Editor—select the photo(s) and then either right-click/Control-click one of the selected thumbnails and choose “Edit with Photoshop Elements;” go to Fix→Edit Photos; or click the down arrow to the right of the word “Fix” and choose Full, Quick, or Guided Edit. Whichever method you use, your photo(s) appear in the Editor so you can work on them. Once both programs are running, you can also just click the Editor’s or the Organizer’s icon in the Windows taskbar or the Mac Dock to switch from one to the other.

One helpful thing to keep in mind is that Adobe built Elements around the assumption that most people work on their photos in the following way: First, you bring photos into the Organizer to sort and keep track of them. Then, you open photos in the Editor to work on them and save them back to the Organizer when you’ve finished making changes. You can work differently, of course—by opening photos directly in the Editor and bypassing the Organizer altogether, for example—but you may feel like you’re always swimming against the current if you choose a different workflow. (The next chapter has a few hints for disabling some of Elements’ features if you find they’re getting in your way.)

The Welcome screen can also serve as your connecting point for signing onto has more about this website, but for now you just need to know that a basic account is free if you’re in the United States (it’s not available in other countries), and it gives you access to all the interesting features in Elements that require an Internet connection.

If you’re already signed into you can see how much of your online storage you’ve already used by looking at the graph at the bottom of the Welcome screen. There’s also a reminder of your personal URL at and links to online help, tips, and tricks for using Elements. However, you can also get to all these things from within the Editor or the Organizer, so there’s no need to keep the Welcome screen around just for that. The box below explains how to get rid of the Welcome Screen.