Photoshop Course for Illustrators Help!
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Hi Team!
I'm loving being part of SVS! I'm working through the foundational courses and am currently working through Lees Light and Shadow Course. I found that most of my time is taken trying to workout how to use Photoshop and have to re-watch the video and still I cant work out how to do the things as simple as deselect etc (IM A TOTAL NEWB!).
I was hoping you all might know of a great photoshop course for illustrators? I was also hoping that maybe SVS might put out a course on how to use photoshop for illustrators course?
Can anyone help guide me to a great course OR do any of the SVS Teachers know of have plans for a photoshop course on to be made and put inot the classes in the future?
Thank you all so much,
Photoshop Newb
Mike Babich -
@Mike-Babich Hi Mike, I bought Rikard Nucly's course in Photoshop secrets along with his Photoshop Watercolor applications and brushes, and he has a thorough selection of applicable tips to learn the program. I too consider myself a newbie and figured a deep dive is needed to understand some of the basics however it's a really a slow process. Yeah the grind is sometimes hard but it does get easier as you do the steps over and over. Photoshop is very menu heavy, and just taking things in bite size pieces I know this has been effective for me in learning...
Good luck, I hope this helps.
Erin Richardson
instagram.com/erinrichardsondesigns21
www.erinrichardsondesigns.com -
@ArtistErin Thank you so much for your input. I will check out Rikard Nucly Course. I really wish there was a course for photoshop for illustrators on SVS. It would be really good.
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@Mike-Babich I have been learning illustrator from this YouTube channel it has been really helpful and is made for beginners. I don't know about the photoshop one but here is a link to their photoshop video. I bet it is a good easy way to learn it for free considering the other tutorial I have been watching and loving.
This channel is good as well at teaching Illustrator so I would assume the same for photoshop as well
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@Mike-Babich I understand your frustration. There's so much to learn about illustration, and when you first start with Photoshop you can't even work at normal speed because the technical parts can bog you down at first. This was me in 2017. But don't worry, it's all quite learnable!
Two suggestions: One is that Will has two beginning Photoshop courses. This one is for the very beginning, and it was one of the first courses I ever took on the SVSLearn site. This one is slightly more advanced, and I found it helpful as well. When I put Photoshop into the search bar under "all classes," a couple of other courses come up as well.
The other is the site Ctrlpaint.com I learned a ton by following along with the free videos on this site!
Once you get down the basics, you can more easily pick up hints in various demonstrations that are adapted to your own style. Some of the Jump Into the Studio videos that came out during 2020 have great tips, especially one that Pascal Campion did about lighting, and one David Hohn did about masking. Will's "Aliens stole my toilet paper" demo has a lot of helpful hints too.
And finally, here's a lesson from hard won experience, which may or may not be valuable to you: Photoshop's main advantage, besides being easily publishable, is that you can do revisions more quickly on it than you can using traditional methods. But if you're one of those people like me who has a complex, multi-layered, watercolor-based, style, it's easy to get bogged down scrolling through layers and looking for the ones you need to revise--maybe 150 of them!
And watercolor washes are not amenable to patching when you enlarge the area covered.Probably other people deal with this by simplifying their style, and I hope to do that as well, but recently I am learning to put all the most important objects in an illustration in their own layer groups, over an opaque base, so that I can move them around independently on the background. With the opaque base, you can even use a clipping mask to save masking time!
And one last tip: Sometimes Photoshop tech support is inevitable and even helpful, but I eventually discovered that many of my problems could be solved by unplugging and replugging my Cintiq, restarting Photoshop or my computer, not updating my OS until all the various art programs and devices had caught up, Googling the problem, and reinstalling my Wacom driver. Sometimes tech support can really help, but I generally find that they solve my problem within one session less than half the time. So, yes, use Creative Cloud tech support by all means, but make sure you have about three free hours first.
Hope I didn't scare you! All said, it's a very flexible, time-saving program. You'll be really surprised by how much you learn, how fast, and how it generates new ways of working. Have fun!
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@LauraA WOW! What an amazing reply! Thank you for taking the time to help me with this. I didnt know there WERE photoshop help videos on SVSLearn. I'll take a look at all of the places you sugeststed.
Thank you for your input its super helpful.
Mike
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@LauraA OMG! ctrlpaint is SO good! THANK YOU SO MUCH!
Mike
