When I say “Photo Shop, the store,” some of you may not get it. The common name is Photoshop. But here’s a thing: when you try to translate “Photoshop” into Turkish via Google Translate, it returns “photographer.” I just said it that way to be playful. Anyway, on to the main point. Most of the friends following me on YouTube and Facebook are following because of my Photoshop tutorials. How do I know? Roughly 200k of my 850k views come from the Photoshop training set.
A lot of friends reach out through the Facebook fan page and ask me questions. But the questions they ask are actually things they could figure out themselves with a bit of work and research — yet somehow they don’t 😀
So first: to learn Photoshop, watch a foundational Photoshop usage guide from some source. You don’t need to watch anything super detailed. For example the training set in this linkwould be a fine starting point. Honestly, even if you watch the most detailed training set out there, it’s useless if you don’t actually do the operations yourself. Don’t be like “let me watch all 13 episodes back-to-back and then I’ll just do it” — while I’m doing something, you have to do it alongside me on the side.
Second: if you keep going “oh I’d better not touch that, or that,” things will not move. Mess things up, try things out, then research and fix your own problem. If you don’t run into problems and solve them yourself, you’re not moving an inch.
Third: stay away from spoon-feeding. There are a ton of search engines — type in your keyword and let “that forum is mine, this forum is mine” tour them. If your attitude is “let me just find the answer the moment I put my hand on it,” we have a lot of work ahead. Let me tell you the upside of researching: you discover a ton of really useful sites. I’m aware of about 300–400 Photoshop-related sites by now.
Third (again): among the questions I get are “how do I do this, how do I do that.” Folks, you need to learn a tiny bit of English — and look, I don’t mean to listen to it, don’t get me wrong. Just to type keywords on YouTube. Most of what I learned came from speed-art videos made by foreigners. For example, the guy crops a photo but speeds up the video 10x. I’d pause it second by second to figure out what he was doing. In short, friends — the more köfte, the more bread 😉
Quick summary: don’t get used to spoon-feeding, but when you use Photoshop, prefer the shortcuts and don’t make your job longer than it needs to be. Watch hundreds of speed-art videos on Photoshop so you can add new layers to your imagination. Don’t just watch someone else and close the laptop — try, experiment, and step outside of the video to try different things yourself.
If you read this far, hats off to you. But if right now you’re just reading the last paragraph and milking the shortcut, well — bless you, what can I say 😀
Alright, this got pretty long. Won’t bore you any more. Stay well! Peace be with you!
