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10 Steps to Improve Your Photoshop Skills

admin August 7,2017

Photoshop is an amazing tool for graphic designers, so there is definitely a lot to learn for new designers, and professionals. If you are working as a designer and looking to improve your skills, you can see that time is a big obstacle for improving your ability.

If so, you will need to develop a plan to improve your skills with the time you have. In this article, there are ten steps you can take to gradually build your skills using the available resources.

1. Follow the guide

Photoshop Tutorials clearly focus on providing excellent quality guides to the reader. Of course, there is an increasing number of other websites and blogs that regularly publish Photoshop tutorials. These sites are valuable resources, whether you are looking to develop specific skills or just looking for ways to improve.

To take advantage of the available guide sites, subscribe to follow up articles then you do not miss new posts.

With the amount of content published, you would never be able to work through each tutorial.

Try to get in the habit, spend one week or two to try. For most of us, learning is much easier when we are actually doing something for ourselves. So working through the tutorials is essential rather than just browsing through them. If you use Google Reader, you can copy the guides so most of you will be able to easily find them.

Here I have a list of my favorite tutorials, including Tutorial9, PS Hero, Tutzor, PhotoshopStar, Tutorial Dog, Abduzeedo, PhotoshopGUIDesign, Worth1000, Digital Grin, and Photoshop Support. In addition to the list of Collis, PSD Learning, PSDFAN, Photoshop Essentials are good resources and do not forget to Drawvn.Net.

2. Experience

The best way to learn anything new is to experience it for yourself. While the following guidelines can be extremely helpful, you should also spend your time to see what you can create. You can try applying what you learned from the tutorial, or just experience things you are not familiar with. Photoshop has a lot of different functions, features, and settings that you really need to be familiar with.

Experiments can open up your creativity and make you feel more comfortable with Photoshop. Have you ever put the lessons you learned from others into the design. There may be some guides that teach you exactly what you need to do, they will teach you a skill or technique that can be used in your own projects. But you will need to adjust it to suit your specific needs.

I like working with large images by experimenting with wallpaper design because the large size opens up all kinds of opportunities and you can take it on any other designs you like.

3. Start with the basic principles

There is a lot to learn with Photoshop and many things are needed to master before you want to become a designer. Like anything else, your Photoshop knowledge is very important to have the final results. If you are the beginner, instead of trying to follow complicated guidelines, spend a time to get learn the basics.

4. Join groups or communities

After you’ve learned something and you’ve done some of your own experiments, it can be helpful to share on groups or forums and get constructive criticism from other designers.

5. Write blog about Photoshop or design

If you are trying to improve your ability with Photoshop, blogging on this topic will help you focus on the activity and it will force you to keep learning. Working on the content for your blog will be a great educational experience. Not all blogs are created by an expert.

Once your skills have grown to a certain point you may also want to consider the opportunities to write for other design blogs. Many bloggers will pay for your postings, and there are blogs that are open to writing free articles in exchange for a link. While writing for your blog will allow you to develop skills, writing to others will push you to do better.

6. Follow the online Galleries

The online gallery showing the special work of different artists is an excellent source of inspiration for the designer. This will be useful when you are looking to test out some of your projects and create impressive products. The gallery is great because you can quickly browse through a large number of different designs.

There are many different galleries for all different types. If your work in Photoshop related to web design, you may want to subscribe to a few web design. Some of the top web design galleries include Best Web Gallery, CSS Mania, CSS Drive, and CSS Elite. If you focus on different types of designs, you may want to look at the Gallery that specializes in specific aspects. Some examples are Design Flavor, UCreative, FAVEUP, Logo Pond and Design Snips.

7. Find a specialist to learn

No matter what field you are in, learning from one expert is extremely beneficial. If you want to be a prominent designer, why not find someone you admire and pay attention to their career? Fortunately, it’s easy to find professionals online and get in touch with their work. You just need read their blog and follow the interviews with them.

8. Read the design magazines
   

Besides the inspirational aspects, articles in design magazines will often be different from content you will often find on blogs. If you want to have a different educational experience, look for a few design magazines and see what appeals to you. Of course, every magazine will have the different focal point, so look around to find something that fits your taste.

9. Reproduce other people’s products

One of the proven ways to learn is to try to “redo” the work of other designers.

10. Participate in design contests
    

Once you are quite comfortable with Photoshop, you may want to challenge yourself and have some fun memories.

While your goal is to step into a contest that is able to win for something, you will still benefit just by joining. It will give you the opportunity to receive comments of others.