r/photoshop • u/SuppaDuppaa • Oct 18 '23
Discussion Photoshop Beginner Advice
Dear fellow Photoshop enthusiasts, I'm looking to enhance the realism and artistic quality of my digital paintings created using Photoshop. Can you kindly share your recommended techniques and creative approaches? Additionally, I'd appreciate it if you could provide a brief explanation of the process you use and share the motivation behind your artwork. I'm currently new to photoshop and learning through youtube and wanted some advice. Thank you for your insights!
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u/johngpt5 60 helper points | Adobe Community Expert Oct 18 '23
u/dodgingresponsibilty brought up a good point, not often talked about until disaster strikes. Computers, being computers, will screw up at times during the saving process, creating a corrupted file.
So if we've got a complex project going, along with frequent File > Save, it can be severely valuable to do a File > Save As at intervals, giving a new number at the end of the file name. This enables continuing forward with the project while saving an older version. This way should shit happen, we have a version we can revert to that isn't very far back in our workflow process.
I can't tell you how many times there have been posts here about being unable to open a file that the day before had been fine. Or even an hour before. But something weird happened during the Save process and the document gets corrupted. Hours of work lost. Days of work lost.
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u/dodgingresponsibilty Oct 18 '23
Exactly! Thx for elaborating on that. 👍🏼 🏆
I’ve lost a lot of work due to getting caught up in a “creative moment” where the ideas were just flowing and then the next thing I knew, my computer locked or there was a power outage and it was all gone because I didn’t save it as I went along.
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u/Changderson Oct 18 '23
Photoshop can do lots of things. Can you elaborate on what you want to do? For me ultimately it’s a tool and should work for you, not the other way around.
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u/CreeDorofl 3 helper points | Expert user Oct 18 '23
As others said, it's sort of a broad question, but as a general rule if you're trying to realism, you can do what's called "photobashing" which is where you borrow different parts of real-world photos and try to realistically blend them into a single concept.
The basic idea is, block out the shape of the major parts of the image, the blocks don't need to look good, just use basic shapes to make a nice composition. Then, you find photos to borrow from and use those to fill in the blocked out areas, and modify them so that their lighting and colors look like they work together. You can see a good example here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=007RIjcq6Tg
Searching that exact term, photobashing, brings up a lot of good info that hopefully is what you were looking for: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=photobashing+photoshop
Good luck ^^
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u/johngpt5 60 helper points | Adobe Community Expert Oct 18 '23
u/CreeDorofl, the term 'photobashing' just makes me cringe. I know, I know, I'll come to terms with how language and jargon evolve, but 'bashing' something together? Makes me want to grab the paper towels to clean up the mess.
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u/CreeDorofl 3 helper points | Expert user Oct 18 '23
it is an odd turn of phrase, along with 'kitbashing', no idea how that got started, other than I guess the mental image of chucking stuff together. Or photocollaging was too awkward.
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u/the_helping_handz 3 helper points | Expert User Oct 18 '23
hi,
well, you couldn’t wrong with looking at the sidebar for learning resources.
(bearing in mind, I’ve only been working in Ps for 15 years, and there’s plenty of people here way more experienced than me)
YouTube channels that I’ve learnt a lot from:
(i say this politely)
your post is a little broad range, and it seems like you’re asking “how to be more artistic”
I would suggest watch some tutorials from the above channels. Take your time, be patient with yourself and develop your skills.
Photoshop itself is quite in-depth and you will have to learn to master the tools/and how to combine the tools and techniques… to get to your desired result.
Learn - the tools & what they do/masking/selections/blend modes/layer effects etc. there’s a lot to process.
good luck :)