Adobe Photoshop is the world’s unprecedented creative and multimedia software tycoon. And for Adobe, Photoshop is the flagship project that redefined the way images are edited and treated. Over that, it revolutionized the graphic designing vertical, which further inspired millions of artists worldwide.
Over the years, Photoshop developed from a small photo editing tool to an Industry-leading software that dictates the global graphic designing and multimedia industries. With every new version, Adobe introduces in Photoshop, the graphic designing communities wait to check out the next big leap that Photoshop can take them.
No matter how many versions and whatever new feature Adobe may introduce with Photoshop, few tools were tested with time and remained sturdy and highly important in the chronicles of development. They define the importance of Adobe Photoshop and cope with changes in the technological world. Designers love to work on these tools, regardless of the way they put them to use in correcting images or designing a brochure, website, or even a mobile application.
Elite Adobe Photoshop Features
In this section, we will present the main elements of Adobe Photoshop that you should take advantage of.
1. Layers
The advantage of a software-based design was beefed up with the layers palette. It extends the artist the power to gain total control over anything and everything that he is working on in the document.
With the Layers palette, you can draw or design various elements of your document independently in layers and stack them up as per the order of display. With this advantage, control over every single object is catered at the click of a mouse. Mistakes happen, but the effects of the mistake are limited to the part of the canvas.
You can choose to work on a particular part and leave the rest of the canvas as it is. This benefit is lacking in the traditional painting method. Artists are not allowed to relax at any part of the drawing or painting once their concentration is diverted and a stroke of painting goes wrong! They are bound to change the whole canvas.
Apart from the above merits, a layers palette has grown into a dominating feature along with Photoshop in these years. It comes with layer masks, blending modes, opacity, fill, lock, group, and many other options that add more value to the Layer palette.
2. Pen
When we look back on when multimedia software is shipped without a pen tool, we remember the software is nothing more than a bunch of color palettes. It is not much available to do, and the creative ability is uninspiring.
Today, Photoshop cannot be imagined without a Pen tool. Though the pen tool, by nature, works for drawing paths along with the anchor points, the creative scope it provides is limitless. The tool is designed so flexibly that the designer can draw any shape or edit the existing shapes as well as he is using his bare hand. The amount of control we have through placing the anchor points in the right places is taken further with the three types of Anchor points that can allow you to draw and edit paths precisely.
3. Shapes
In raster-based graphic design software like Adobe Photoshop, working on an object without losing its original quality is a boon for the designers. Photoshop’s shape layer does the job for us. The outlook of the shape layers in Photoshop may be limited, but the capabilities of the feature go a step further than what we assume about it. In the traditional marquee selection tools, the selection is limited to the raster process, and in many cases, the output will result in sharp pixilated edges, which are never good-looking. But the shape layers can act as individual objects within the document with the attribute to maintain the finest quality.
A shape layer can be easily edited with the help of a pen tool or a direct selection tool and still retain its original quality. The colors inside the path can be changed anytime, and shape layers can also hold gradients and many other effects within them.
3 Tips for Adobe Photoshop
Here, we will discuss some things that you need to do to become a master at Adobe Photoshop.
1. Always perform destructive edits on new layers
If you are used to working in Lightroom, you have already put in your time performing non-destructive edits. Essentially, the adjustment layers you use in Lightroom do not change the photos themselves. The edits exist as a separate file, so you can always revert to the original image with no harm done. Adobe Photoshop can work that way too, as long as you prepare your file and workspace correctly. When you open an image, it will appear as the Background layer. To keep that image intact and unchanged, make a copy of it by choosing Layer, New, and Layer from Background.
2. Save your Photoshop files correctly for future editing
Even the most experienced retouchers will occasionally flatten the layers of an image and save it in the wrong format from time to time. It can be incredibly frustrating to want to tweak one minor aspect of your project, but only have a flattened jpg to work with. To avoid future headaches, save a PSD file of your most complicated editing projects. PSD files preserve your layers individually so you can return to them at any time for future photo editing and adjustments.
It is key to note that PSD files do take up more space than flattened JPG files, so make sure you have plenty of room on your hard drive. It is easy to upgrade your internal hard drive and even easier to add an external portable drive if you need more storage space.
3. Find what works for you and create a consistent workflow
It is important to remember that there are many different ways to achieve the same results in Adobe Photoshop. There is no single correct path for editing a photo. Video tutorials may tell you different techniques to get the same effect, but the best option is the one you can perform over and over again comfortably.
Bottom Line
Adobe Photoshop is one of the top apps to start becoming great at design. Follow these guidelines and you will be one step ahead of the competition.
