Learn Photoshop® and Avoid the Endless Frustration

My experience with Photoshop is that it is a very impressive program that is capable of doing so much. But most of all, it can be very frustrating to use. I have spent hours trying to accomplish something that seems relatively simple only to have it fall apart for reason unbeknownst to me. I can only attempt to calculate the hours that I have wasted because I never really took the time to fully learn Photoshop. And I haven’t really used the program all that much in my life. I can only imagine the time spent battling this program by people who use it everyday.

I have had people who are pretty proficient with Photoshop at a loss for an explanation as to why I can’t get the result that I want. I think that, aside from being an extremely complex program, much of the problem is that people kind of dive into the program and try to learn as they go. But if people took the time to gather resources and really learn Photoshop before they started using it regularly, they would probably see better results. I realize the importance of actually using the program as the only real way to learn the program, but if you used an interactive tutorial like the one offered by Video Professor, you would probably learn Photoshop more quickly.

I used the program in several of my design classes in college, and we did some step-by-step tutorials where we turned some fruit into a face or something like that, but I never retained much and found myself just asking more questions when I was actually working on my projects. Somehow it just didn’t translate. I have also known people who are good with Photoshop, but still occasionally curse themselves when they find out that a certain process they have done forever can be done in much fewer steps. Photoshop is a fun program to play around in, but when I really need to get something done, I find myself wishing I had taken the time to fully learn Photoshop.

Whenever I was having trouble and had to result to a manual, I spent so much time rereading the instructions and looking back and forth between the book and my computer screen. I felt the process moved really slowly and was still never sure if I did it right until I was absolutely finished. I always felt like I was one click away from destroying everything I had worked on. Needles to say, I didn’t find reading a manual to be the most effective way to learn Photoshop.

I never really wanted to do anything spectacular with Photoshop and surely never wanted to work with it everyday as part of my career. I just liked using it for design projects and hoped that what I made looked sleek. But most of all, I just wanted to learn Photoshop without wanting to punch my monitor the entire time.