I find that one good exercise to do is after you've used butter shop for a month or so you'll find that there are some men you commands that you absolutely never use and you have absolutely no idea what you're supposed to use them for or they sound ridiculous like I'd never use that stupid command or something and you can hide menu commands and I find it's great you can hide menu commands I'd like to know how many people have used the command of print one copy right now everybody watching out there could raise their hands you would hear an entire sound like you here in a stadium going of hands going up like they know print one copy was there uh but it clutters up the menu so when you come down here and try to choose print you might miss it hit print one copy instead. So if you would like to modify which menu items are available, you could do so by going to the edit menu and scrolling way down to the bottom and you will find a choice called menus and there are two different kinds of men...

us there's application menus, which means the menu at the top of your screen or there's panel menus, which means the little side menus that can appear on the on the uh the little panels that aaron photoshopped like the layers pal so what's his application. And here you could expand the name of one of these menus and you were going to find little eyeballs. We can come in here and say let's, say I never use close all. I never used clothes and go to bridge. I never used check in. I never use extract accents. I never used this one, and I can come in here in whatever. Once I rarely use, I can turn off package there's, there's also from but let's, just at least get rid of print one copy. In doing so, we can make our menus much shorter and much easier to navigate. So that right now look at how far down this goes. Remember, it goes down as faras the hand tool in my tools panel. Hey, and after I go through here in turn off some of the features that I rarely or ever use, then I'll click. Okay? And I go back to the fireman yankee tell it's a bit shorter. It used to call the way down to where the bottom of the hand tool is. So clean up some of your menus of the things he absolutely never use. If you use photo shop for a while but you might think, what if I read a magazine article that tells me to use a menu command? But what if I you know, I should learn how to use all those things? First off, you shouldn't learn how to use them all. You're going to be a photo shop expert instead of a photographer or something else that's my job if you want my job, go for it, but otherwise, uh, I don't think it's a where the thing, but if you've hidden menu commands there's a way to get him back first off when you do, if you go to any menu where you've hidden menu commands the always be this choice of the bottom show all menu items you choose it, it expands the menu back to a term a length on ly for the time you're using the menu right now and when you let go and click again, it goes back to short so you can always get to those men you commands, you know, show all menus or if you happen to remember which I doubt you will, because I rarely remember if you hold on the command key, when you click on the menu to begin with, it would always be long uh, but the main thing is hide commands that you find are either technically confusing for you and you never use or whatever and if you ever actually need to use them just go to the very bottom of the menu it always say show all menu commands you can still get to it all right let's talk about navigating around your document briefly because I'm going to do a lot of things automatically without thinking of just abuse photo shop for well over twenty years and so you just get used to doing things and so certain things I don't describe and so I want to get those things described now so that I don't start using them which I already have been doing um so first off to zoom in and out on your document you got many choices you have a zoom tool under the view menu of zoom ins you out didn't screen those kinds of things I used a keyboard shortcut for zooming in and out I'm just habitually used to it and that's under the view menu there's a choice of zoom in and zoom out and they have the menu commands of our keyboard commands of command plus and command minus that's control plus and control minus and windows it looks like this when I type it zoom in and zoom out I'll use those absolutely all the time to fit my image within this screen so I could see the whole thing it's command zero command zero means fit and window and I do that absolutely all the time, so I'm done retouching a little isolated area want to get back to my whole image command zero I doubt will ever mention that during the next two days because it's so programmed to me I don't even realize that typed it s o command minus to zoom out command plus to zoom in command zero which is right next to the plus and minus, by the way uh to fit in window if you don't know those already get a post it note, write him down, stick it to the side of your screen leave it there for a week. Yes, he glanced to it added, every day you'll get used to it in a week and those are beyond essential a few of the things that are absolutely essential to scroll around your document um, first off, if you happen to have something like a track pad like what's built into a laptop, just use two fingers on most of them and you can scroll around. I'm just two fingers on this thing. Otherwise if you don't have that you press the space bar on the space bar temporarily gives you the hand tool hand tools what use for doing the same thing scrolling around so if you remember command minus zoom out command plus to zoom in space bar to move around or if you have a track pad like this just two fingers and you don't hold anything now there are other methods for doing all that stuff and if you prefer one of those other methods go for it I'm just so used to those that all used them without thinking another thing that I'll do that I'll do without thinking is all closed the document I'm currently working on just cause we're done with the project and I don't need it anymore usually you clip the little red dot that's up here in the corner it's the same as the x that would be in windows up there or you can go to the file menu and there's a choice called close and when I do it automatically and just the document disappears I've typed this keyboard charcot command w which means close this window so control w windows I'm not saying that needs to be one of your essentials but just so you know if an image just disappears without me mention anything I just type command zero are not commands our command w if I had made any kind of change to that image when I type command w to close it, he would ask me if I want to save things if you press the first letter of any one of these buttons it's the same is clicking the button so if you ever see me close something in this shows up but for so fast you couldn't even tell what it was I just clipped one of those buttons by typing the first letter of it so when I want to close the document and not save it which was usually my activity when I'm teaching because I want it to be in the original state when I teach next I'm just pressing the letter d and it's the same as hitting the button so if I ever open an image I do something to it and then you see me close it I did not save it I just did command w d I'm not telling you that just so not encouraging you to do that I'm just saying I'm going to do that over three days I can't help it and now you know what I'm doing whereas otherwise you just get confusing away wait a minute, what do you do? Because I don't like when people do that where I'm going like I'm distracted by the fact that you did something I don't understand and therefore I can't absorb what you tried to teach uh if that makes any sense okay then a couple other some keep doing them a couple other things when you're zooming around your document there's ah a few items you should know about one is if you use the zoom tool they've changed the behavior of the zoom tool uh while and I want to see if we can figure out what we could do. So first off in old versions of photo shop, you could click on your image in drag. And if you clicked and drag, then you could define a box and it would only zoom up on what's inside that box. Then they changed that so that if you clicked and you dragged, it would just do this thing it's like what the heck where you could no longer to find that that box so much it would feel like this say too it's like it's like hyper make you I'm gonna throw up I'm gonna throw up, you know, kind of thing kind of hyper zoom. Yeah. Now to get back to the old behavior it's, just one icon up here. You see this little guy, you want to know what it does hover over it. And it should tell you that click to move left or right to scale using the zoom tool it's think it's called scrubby zoom but that's what causes it to act the new way? Where if you click and drag your like this mega fast zoom where it can be hard to control just because it's so quick ah, and if you click on that icon you will turn that off so that now you could click and drag like this to say, I only want to view this portion and when you let go, that's, what you're zoomed up on, see what else? Remember when I was in camera and I mentioned that you could double click on the zoom tool and when you did it talked, took you to one hundred percent view same thing is true here. When you double click on the hand tool, it takes you to fit in window view. Same thing is true here. And so those are two things that I do overly commonly, you know, so I don't just zoom up two hundred, zoom out all the way continued to know about if you happened to ah, not already be using them. All right, so that's, the general interface overview of tools and left options for those tools in the top and the layers panel, whatever is highlighted, there is what you're working on that's, where the action's happening, the changes actually being done to that portion of it.

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Ben Willmore

As a photographer, Ben Willmore has shot in all 50 states and explored over 80 countries. He has been pushing Photoshop and Lightroom Classic to their limits since the beginning.

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topics covered in this class

Adobe Photoshop Beginner Photo Editing

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a Creativelive Student

Ben, thanks again for this course. I have taken and purchased quite a few of your courses to date. I keep thinking I will only watch to make sure I am on the right track and you always bring more to the table than the last course. Your teaching methods are the best, sorry to all the other instructors from Creative Live, but you are very easy to understand and you speak in layman's terms so we all can understand. I am following your instructions and working along with your files and it is the best! It is hard to keep up with you even when I watch you on one computer and work with the same files on another computer, to do what you are doing...impossible but I gain so much by trying. You provide so much info on each topic, it is amazing. Thanks to Karen for the PDFs, she does a fantastic job and also, for her templates/layout documents. Thanks again and to anyone who thinks this is too much money for all the videos, the exercise files and the instruction PDF, I am sorry to say but you are mistaken.

John Taylor

Like all of the Creative Live courses, excellent training. Ben does a great job of explaining the entry part of Photoshop. A lot of things cleared up in my head and i like his easy pace into this complex program. Thanks Ben.

Cecily

I had several "lightbulb" moments with this class, after many years of photography and when you think you know it all, you don't :) Ben Willmore is an excellent tutor, with his many years of experience teaching PS, he obviously knows the types of things a lot of us struggle to understand. I learnt a lot about Bridge, and have since implemented these things into my everyday workflow, so much easier to sort out what I want to keep etc.. Thanks so much Ben and Creative Live. Thanks also to Ben's wife for her amazing work creating the Guide etc. Even though being in Australia, I pay more for the courses (the conversion rate, the aussie dollar is low at the moment) it's very worth it to me. I have paid more for courses here, and learnt next to nothing. Thanks again.

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Interface Overview

Interface Overview

Lesson Info

15. Interface Overview

Lessons

Adobe Bridge Basics

Sorting Images in Adobe Bridge

Processing Images in Adobe Camera Raw Part 1

Processing Images in Adobe Camera Raw Part 2

Image Processing Q&A

Contrast and Color

Adjustment Brush and Auto Mask

Adobe Camera Raw Optimized Images

Lens Profile Corrections

HDR Pro Part 1

HDR Pro Part 2

Panoramas Part 1

Panoramas Part 2

Intro to Photoshop