Adobe Photoshop Tutorials - Best Of

• 12 min read
• Graphics, Tutorials, Photoshop
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Sven is the co-founder and former CEO of Smashing Magazine. He writes at his Conterest Blog where he focuses on blogs, content strategy, writing and publishing … More about Sven ↬

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When it comes to graphic design, Adobe Photoshop is usually the first option to consider. However, the software itself is a quite tough nut to crack — and definitely extremely hard to master. For instance, the concepts are not always intuitive and it’s not always clear when to use what tool and how to use it effectively. In fact, in Photoshop it usually takes pretty much time to achieve something you have never done before.

However, you don’t need to muddle through numerous Photoshop features and extensions for every design problem. You can use professional suggestions instead, e.g. professional step-by-step tutorials which provide excellent results and thus can save you a lot of time.

One year ago we’ve presented a hand-picked collection of Photoshop tutorials. Now it’s time for a fresh portion of healthy Photoshop learning material. This article provides professional Adobe Photoshop tutorials which can enrich your design skills and improve the quality of your works. Although the authors of the tutorials rarely provide the information about the used version, we tried to pick only those tutorials that can be used with both CS 3 and older versions of Adobe Photoshop.

Photo- and Picture Editing and Processing

MP3 Player Design In this tutorial you will learn how to design a product in Photoshop. The product is a RCA Lyra X3030 portable media player. Although the chances are, you are thinking “why would I need to make it?”, the reason for this tutorial is to teach people the techniques used for mocking up a product design.

Magic Lighting Effect How to create a nice light and magic effect.

Beautiful Lady Effect Learn how to combine some brushes and color adjustment to make a beautiful lady effect.

Selecting & Extracting Hair - Masking Tutorial - Extraction Tips One of the most challenging montage or masking jobs in the profession of post-production editing is the hair lift. When the model has long flowing hair and the subject needs to change location many post-production artists call in sick.

Add a Dreamy or Misty Effect To Your Photos This quick tutorial will show how to add a really cool dreamy or misty effect to your photos. This tutorial works best with nature related images.

Improving the Quality of Photos Improve the look of your photos by playing with some simple Photoshop techniques.

Fake Model Photography With a very little effort, you can take existing photographs of everyday scenes and make it look like they’re actually of miniature models.

Displacement Water Creating a realistic water surface in Photoshop is quite a challenge because it is the distorted reflection of the surroundings that makes the water look liquid. The displace filter is an excellent tool for making this distortion.

Making Skin Beautiful Not everyone has a beautiful skin. This tutorial will help the photographer put their models in the best light so to speak.

Photoshop tutorial and Post-producted glasses To save your time think to photo retouch especially frosted glasses.

Professional “glamour style” photo retouch This is the first chapter of a main tutorial divided in six parts. In this one you will learn how to photo retouch the skin of a model in a few steps. Better results can be obtained by using a graphic tablet instead of a mouse.

iMouse — creating Apple mouse Simple and elegant. Apple mouse. Is there anyone, who doesn’t want graphic like that? Let’s have a look at creating this mouse in Adobe Photoshop. 3 pages.

Give Your Photos a Retro Comic Book Effect How about a fun effect for your incredibly boring photo albums? Creating a old comic book effect for your photos is easy and the results are visually appealing. More fun is achieved when adding captions to your photos using comic book fonts and design elements.

Space and Planet Tutorial The techniques below will show you how to create an image similar to the final result I have obtained below although the image below took 3 hours to paint with alot of fine detail work, you will still get the idea.

Faking HDR in Adobe Photoshop This HDR tutorial shows quite easy way to fake HDR foto in Photoshop. You don’t need to shoot into RAW or take photos with different exposure - one JPEG is enough. If you can work with masks in Photoshop, you have an advantage. Part of tutorial is HDR action for download.

11 Super Awesome Photoshop Movie Effects 11 most-favorite movie-effect tutorials. From Scarface to Sin City to Pirates of the Carribean to 300, we’ve got 11 great ways to go Hollywood on your photos.

A movie-effect with Photoshop This tutorial explains how to turn your photo into the movie-like image using Adobe Photoshop.

Visual effects in the style of 300 Here’s a little Photoshop guide to mimic the 300 style. The effects could also be applied to video in After Effects with a similar setup.

Reflective Bubbles For my most recent work I wanted to create bubbles that would reflect my subject in a believable yet magical way.

Bringing a Stone Statue to Life Learn how to take a stone statue and alter it to look life-like.

4 Easy Photoshop Techniques to Make Your Pictures Pop “In this tutorial I will be demonstrating some quick, easy methods for adding drama and/or interest to your shots. As far as I know, these methods should work for both Photoshop and Photoshop Elements.”

Devil’s Eye Some eyes are just too pretty, but I bet some of you would change that if you could. I am going to try to explain how to make eyes look more sinister, And remember this is coming from a begginer,so bare with me. Photoshop CS2.

Beautiful lighting FX effect in Photoshop This tutorial will show you how to make a beautiful lighting effect on scatters by using Photoshop. Keep in mind that I only provide the basic guidelines to creating this type of effect. There are tons of possibilities if you spend time to play with the settings and keep your creativity wide open.

Water Drops So simple, and realistic, these water drops (and optional ice drops) are also simple to do anywhere, anytime.

Creating a glass ball In this tutorial you will learn how to create a glass ball in photoshop using some simple tools and techniques. Any version of photoshop can be used.

3D Ice Cube In this tutorial we’ll try to build a realistic 3D ice cube. Usually this kind of stuff is done with the help of some 3D software like Maya or 3DMax, still we’ll try to use Photoshop tools to do the work.

Alienize: Transform a person into an alien In this tutorial is written how to create a very cool looking alien using Adobe Photoshop. Grab a picture of someone and get ready to alienize it.

Water Spirit - Drawing Fire This tutorial will show You how to place a fire on someone’s hands.

Creating a 3D effect with image editing software Here’s how to make a neat effect to make it look like the subject of a photo is popping out of the background. This can be done with GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) or Photoshop.

How to use Photoshop to create Product Box? How many times you wanted to create cool product box for some of your products? Sure, there are many ways, and with new Photoshop you have even more options to create boxes.

Super Fly Box Maker These boxes can be used to advertise almost anything (not just software). This is great if you want to catch a viewers attention, and it also gives your product display a more professional look and feel.

Flaming Hair Tutorial with some simple brushing techniques, and a bit of color tweaking, you can spice up your photo.

Create a Realistic Torn Paper Effect Torn paper is one of the key elements to achieving the distressed / collage look. This tutorial covers a few simple steps in Adobe Photoshop to create a realistic looking torn paper effect taking you on your way to Destroying the Web 2.0 Look.

Creating a Mac-Type Background in Photoshop This tutorial is about making a “mac” style background. You can use these in all sorts of situations, including the obvious – your desktop as well as part of your designs or for corporate work (powerpoint presentations, flash work etc). Naturally you wouldn’t want to use this exact set of steps, but following them will give you a good idea of the technique. Good luck!

Drawings, Paintings, Cartoons

Sexy Girl Comic With Photoshop This tutorial describes a way to create a sexy comic girl from a paper sketch.

Skin Painting Tutorial Learn how to paint a realistically looking skin with Photoshop.

Making of The Blues Singer Leaves Town This picture was done in a hot summer day, in the memory of an old anime series I used to watch as a kid, about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Historically, it’s off from that period, but it’s the feeling of summer, childhood fascination and nature that I wanted to re-create. It’s also a tribute to music. 4 pages.

Fox Fire Tutorial Converting from hand-sketched picture to a digital masterpiece.

Easy Watercolor Painting Effect In this Adobe Photoshop tutorial, we’re going to learn how to easily make a photo look more like a watercolor painting. This photo effect works best on images where maintaining rich colors and strong contrast is more important than keeping any fine details, since you’ll be losing a lot of detail with this effect.

Soft Cell Shading Learn how to paint softlry, as a variation of cell shading, eventually going through a total of seven stages.

Sketch to Paint Digital artist David Cousens reveals how to develop a sci-fi art sketch in Adobe Photoshop using the airbrush and a few nifty tricks.

Portrait Painting Learn how to draw a portrait from a hand-drawn sketch.

Drawing a Cute Boy

Drawing from a reference photo The original photo: I locate it on the bottom layer to use for some initial tracing, primarily to save time and get the perspective correct. Some people prefer not to trace.

Comic art style This is a method that you can use to produce abstract art using Adobe Photoshop. Randomness, detail, colors and contrast plays of course important roles now.

Texteffects

3D typographic effects Photoshop is an astounding post-production tool – and here Nik Ainley of Shiny Binary shows you how to add the wow factor to 3D text using Photoshop’s art tools.

Slow shutter text effect Learn how to create this stunning slow shutter text effect using just Photoshop.

Create a Spectacular Flaming Meteor Effect on Text Take typography one step further by having text falling from the sky in a burning inferno. Yes, this is the text-on-fire tutorial to end all tutorials. It uses a little Illustrator for the text and a lot of Photoshop to burn up the screen!

Smooth Glass Type Here’s a quick way to create some nice looking translucent glass type that’ll work great on any background, made completely with layer styles.

Recreate the ‘Bee Movie’ Text Effect In this quick Photoshop tutorial we’ll be recreating the ‘Bee movie’ text effect, you know, the one you’ve seen all over the place over the last few months?

Plastic Jelly Style In this tutorial we’ll be using layer styles to make a plastic-gel type style that you can easily apply to text and shapes. You can download the PSD file from the link at the bottom of the tutorial to just copy+paste the styles.

Combine 2 text layer styles Learn how to apply a combination of multiple text effects.

Buttons, Logos & Menus

Create A Leopard ‘X’ in Photoshop With the recent release of Mac OS X Leopard, I’ve decided to create a tutorial where you can create your own ‘X’. This tutorial is a great exercise in using the dodge and burn tool as well as working with selections.

Orb Button Effect This set of tutorial will show on how to create a very basic mouse over effect in html/css. Therefore this tutorial will spilt into 2 parts:

Interface Orbs Shiny glass orbs have been popular fixtures for web interfaces and application skins for quite some time. In this tutorial, we will be going over a technique for making a standard interface orb.

Creating Logos on Glass Surfaces In this mini tutorial you will learn how to create a convincing logo that is embossed in the surface of a beer glass.

Photoshop Button Maker In this simple tutorial we’re going to create a clever little way of making little buttons using a couple of layers and one interchangeable image layer. As always you can download the sample PSD at the bottom of the tutorial to follow along and copy layer styles out of.

Design Watercolor Effect Menu This is a two-part tutorial on how to create an artistic and un-typical CSS list menu as seen on Web Designer Wall.

100% Satisfaction Guaranteed Seal/Badge Photoshop Tutorial In this quick Photoshop tutorial I’m going to show you how to design a sweet-lookin’ a golden badge, pretty much like this one I’ve designed below. For this tutorial I’ve used the example ‘100% satisfaction guaranteed seal/badge.

A Little Window…

Glossy-Style Carbon Fibre Navigation Set This is a kind of glossy, carbon fiber navigation set.

How to Design Mini Icons Numbers of people have asked me how to design my popular Mini Pixel Icon pack. In fact, they are relatively easy. All you need is just some basic Photoshop skills.

Designing a Safety Icon

Eye-Popping Banner Ad Tutorial Nobody clicks on them, but they still exist. This tutorials shows how you can create iPod nano Ads with Photoshop.

Adobe Photoshop Techniques

Color adjustment tutorial This tutorial shows how to get more mood into your pictures via Adjustment Layers and some other effects.

Vector Polishing Techniques This tutorial includes 9 Photoshop techniques that will show you how to add more depth, color, contrast, and texture into your vector art.

Advanced Black and White Conversion In this tutorial, we will convert an RGB image to Black and White using Photoshop CS3’s new improved Black and White features.

Actions Tutorial Toning With Duotones, Tritones And Quadtones

101 Hidden Tips & Secrets An overview of professional suggestions, tips and tricks for Adobe Photoshop users.

Using Actions to Automate Tasks While Adobe Photoshop has a host of automation tools, one of the most versatile and powerful of them is called an action. In fact, some of the other automation commands, such as batches and droplets, derive their functionality from actions.

Further Resources

You can find even more Adobe Photoshop tutorials in the articles and resouces we’ve listed below.

• PSDTuts Probably the most smashing collection of Adobe Photoshop tutorials available on the Web.
• Tutorialfeed.comAn aggregator of tutorials.
• 51 Text Effect Tutorials Every Designer Should See
• Photoshop Buttons Tutorials
• 2 Minute Photoshop Tricks
• Top 5 Photoshop Tutorials
• The Best 80 Photoshop Text Effects on the Web A thorough guide to the impressive 80 text effects available on the Web.
• Top Best 55 Photoshop Tutorials For Professional Photographers