Sunday, April 24, 2011

How to Use Free Photoshop Video Tutorials


Free Photoshop video tutorials are a great way to learn how to use the Photoshop program. They say that if you listen you forget, if you see you remember and if you do you understand. Well, by listening and watching video tutorials about Photoshop, and following along in your own program, you are doing all three together.

By watching an expert operate the Photoshop program you have the best chance of learning, and also remembering and understanding what you have learnt than by any other learning method.

And Photoshop Tutorials video are nothing else but movies of the expert operating the Photoshop program. You are effectively 'looking over the shoulder' of the expert and watching every click of his mouse.

You can read instructions, manuals, books by other authors, and Internet websites about Photoshop. But to learn quickly and clearly nothing beats learning from Photoshop video tutorials.

With Photoshop video tutorials, you can see how buttons, collages or even paintings and indeed complete websites - yes websites - are created. Instead of laboriously reading through books describing what needs to be selected, activated and clicked, you can simply imitate the mouse movement and clicks performed in the video knowing that you are actually doing exactly the right thing.

The learning curve is easier to climb and the results are easier to compare.

Not only that, you can watch how it is done from the very beginning to the very end and sometimes you can even have explained why it is done in that particular way.

Sean Dodge wrote on his blog and article called "5 Important Criteria that Make a Great Photoshop Tutorial". But Sean is writing about screenshot-and-text step-by-step tutorials, not video tutorials. In fact, I haven't yet found an article discussing the format of Photoshop video tutorials.

Did you ever make a Photoshop mock-up of a website design before getting down and dirty with the code? Then consider the the SiteGrinder program.

Basically, the SiteGrinder program turns Photoshop into an easy-to-use and fully functional web design tool. With SiteGrinder, designers will now have the freedom to totally let their creativity loose and then, without skipping a beat, transfer their designs to the web.

SiteGrinder lets you design web pages with dynamic text, e.g. served from a database and 'poured' into a web page containing code. Examples are weblogs and Content Management Systems content. It is hard to believe that a Photoshop plug-in should be capable of doing so, but it can be done and quite easily.

There is a collection of free video tutorials showing the proper use of various SiteGrinder techniques to build web pages from Photoshop documents.

There is no way that the same information could be imparted so effectively except through the medium of video tutorials.

A PSDTUTS tutorial from Fabio shows how your can recreate a realistic-looking watercolor effect with Photoshop brushes. Fabio demonstrates how the hair can be re-made with the popular watercolor brushes from Bittbox. This tutorial is static screenshots and written text. I think it would be much more interesting and beneficial if it had been a Photoshop video tutorial instead.

Another Photoshop tutorial from Fabio shows how to "Create a Spectacular Flaming Meteor Effect on Text". But again, it is a screenshot and text tutorial not a Photoshop video tutorial.

With Photoshop Video Tutorials you can learn how to get more consistent color with the videos on color management as it relates to Photoshop. Resources include detailed information on color calibration, using ICC profiles, and how to get consistent color results from Photoshop.

This means that you can prerecord actions or processes in Photoshop that you can then save and turn into a button that you can then simply click and Photoshop will do the whole action for you. It's mainly used as a timesaving device and saves the hassle of doing menial work like basic Photography fixing or cleaning your scans so you don't have to do it over and over again because you can just click a button you created.

The procedure to do this is explained in the Photoshop video tutorials.

If you execute a huge zoom you can make Photoshop pause a moment while it figures out what to draw. Photoshop CS4 has none of this: zooming in from 3% to 1600% is so fast and smooth it's like you're falling into the image.

The File Browser was introduced as a major update to Photoshop 7 and was later improved in Photoshop CS. When a directory is viewed for the first time, the File Browser or Bridge will build a cache of the image previews.

Plugins can be opened from within Photoshop and act like mini-editors that modify the image.

As to storing your Photoshop images, RAID 0 is very useful for temporary data such as page files and Photoshop scratch disk placement. It is not recommended for files you need to keep.

There are many websites about various aspects of Photoshop, but to find them all and to learn what is on each one can be very time consuming. Luckily there is one website that has done a lot of the searching for you. That particular website hosts hundreds of Photoshop video tutorials and they are all free to watch.

The tutorials have been pre-selected for their relevance and quality by the website owner and arranged in logical groups depending upon the subject covered so that it is easy for the user to quickly find the best Photoshop video tutorial that answers his questions.

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