Photoshop Toolbox
Most web and graphic designers use Photoshop on a daily basis, and due to Photoshop’s popularity there are countless resources online for users. In effort to make your life as a designer a bit easier, here is a guide to some of the best resources.
Best Websites for Photoshop Tutorials:
For anyone looking to improve their skills or learn new tricks with Photoshop, there is a wealth of information available in terms of tutorials. Even for those with considerable experience and talent, there is always something new to learn or some inspiration that can be provided by tutorials from other designers.
Other Photoshop Tutorial Sites:
These websites all regularly highlight the best Photoshop tutorials being published. If you want to see the best of what’s available all in one place, check one of these sites.
Best Collections of Photoshop Tutorials:
Rather than trying to list all of the exceptional individual tutorials out there, here are some of the best collections of tutorials to give you a sampling of what’s available.
Adobe Photoshop Tutorials – Best Of
100 Photoshop Tutorials for Creating Beautiful Art
50 Photoshop Tutorials for Sky and Space Effects
40 Photoshop Tutorials for Lighting and Abstract Effects
45 Photo Editing Tutorials for Photoshop
35 Photoshop Tutorials for Design Your Own Posters
20 Insane Comic Book Style Photoshop Effects
7 Photoshop Tutorials for Creating Album Covers
41 Nicest Photoshop Photo Effects
50+ Excellent Body Enhancement Tutorials
60 of the Best Photoshop Tutorials to Design Your Own Amazing Site
50+ High Quality .PSD Files and Tutorials
Learning Photoshop:
Elite by Design recently put together a great series of posts to help new Photoshop users learn the essentials.
How to Master Photoshop in Just One Week | Part 2 | Part 3
Best Sites for Brushes:
Brushes can make life easier and help to make your work more effective. There are a number of sites that consistently provide high-quality, free Photoshop brushes for download. Here are some of the best.
Flickr Groups:
If you’re looking for design inspiration or for a place to share your work and learn from other designers, there are plenty of Flickr groups that focus on Photoshop and graphic design. Many are managed by specific sites.
Fuel Your Creativity Flickr Group
Keyboard Shortcuts:
Learning to work more efficiently in Photoshop is a goal of many designers. These two resources are ones to have bookmarked.
Photoshop Keyboard Shortcuts from Trevor Morris Photographics
18 Exceptionally Useful Photoshop Shortcuts
Backgrounds:
When working with Photoshop, especially for web design, backgrounds are a common task. These resources will speed up your process and make it easy to create attractive backgrounds for your designs.
Textures:
Textures often go hand in hand with backgrounds. There are a number of websites that give away free textures in the form of stock photography or their own work in Photoshop. Making use of a freely available texture can help you to come up with that look that you’re going for, and it can be much quicker than creating the textured look from scratch.
Places to Display Your Graphic Design Portfolio:
The sites listed here are great places to share your work and network with other designers. Looking at the work posted by others can also be a great source of inspiration.
Custom Shapes:
Working with custom shapes in Photoshop can be very similar to working with brushes in terms of how it can speed up your work. I recently put together a collection of custom shapes at Vandelay Design, so rather than repeating it, here is a link to that post.
45 Sources and Sets of Photoshop Custom Shapes
Adobe Exchange:
The Adobe exchange is a great resource for finding and sharing just about anything related to Photoshop (brushes, custom shapes, etc.).
Other resources available at DesignM.ag:
