How to Use Photoshop: Step-by-Step Tutorials for Beginners (2024)

Someone asked me last month how long it takes to learn Photoshop. I said about two weeks of consistent practice before you feel like you're not fighting the software. But here's the thing: most people quit in the first three days because they try to learn everything at once.

Don't do that.

The toolbar has 60-something tools and you will use maybe eight of them regularly. The Move tool, the Brush, the Crop tool, the Type tool, a couple selection tools, the Zoom. That's pretty much it for most projects. Everything else you learn when you actually need it.

I want to walk through what I'd teach someone if they sat down next to me for an hour. Not a textbook. Not marketing fluff. Just the stuff that actually matters.

When you first open Photoshop, you get the default workspace. It's fine but there's too much on screen. I tell everyone to start with Window > Workspace > Essentials, then close the Color panel, the Swatches panel, and the Properties panel. You don't need them yet. What you need: the toolbar on the left, the Layers panel on the right, and the Options bar across the top. That's your cockpit.

Now open a photo. Any photo. File > Open, Ctrl+O, whatever. First thing: look at the Layers panel. You'll see a single layer called Background with a lock icon. That lock means you can't move it or paint under it. Double-click the layer name, hit Enter, now it's unlocked and behaves like a normal layer.

But the better habit is Ctrl+J to duplicate it right away. Name the duplicate "working" or "edit" or whatever makes sense to you. I name mine "edit" because I'm not creative with layer names when I'm moving fast. The point is: never touch the original. If you destroy the duplicate, just delete it and make another one.

Now let's fix the lighting. Go to the bottom of the Layers panel, click that half-filled circle icon (the adjustment layer button), pick Levels. You'll see a graph. That's your histogram and it tells you exactly how bright or dark your image is. If the mountain of data is squished to the left, your photo is too dark. If it's all bunched in the middle, it's flat. Drag the black slider under the graph to the right until it touches the edge of the data. Drag the white slider left to the other edge. Now your photo has a true black and a true white, which makes everything look better instantly.

While we're in adjustment layers, add a Hue/Saturation layer the same way. Push the saturation slider to maybe +15 or +20. Anything past +25 starts looking like a bad HDR filter. I learned that the hard way editing vacation photos in 2017. My grass was nuclear green.

Cropping. The Crop tool, shortcut C. When you select it, you get handles on all four corners and edges. Drag them. Up in the Options bar you'll see a dropdown with ratios. Pick one. For Instagram I use 1:1 square. For Facebook cover photos, 16:9. For printing, 4:5 or 8.5:11 if you're doing standard paper sizes. Hit Enter to commit or Escape to bail.

The thing nobody tells you about cropping: you can rotate the crop. Move your cursor just outside one of the corner handles until you see a curved arrow, then drag. Super useful for straightening horizons. I use this on roughly every landscape photo I take because I apparently cannot hold a camera level.

Making selections is where people get stuck. There are like ten selection tools and they all work differently. For a beginner with a simple subject against a background, Object Selection tool (W, might be nested under Quick Selection) is the easiest. Just draw a rectangle around your subject and Photoshop tries to figure out the edges. It's not perfect but it's gotten way better with recent updates.

If you need more precision, Quick Selection is your next step. Paint over the subject with it. Hold Alt to subtract areas it accidentally grabbed. For hair or complex edges, click the Select and Mask button in the top bar. The Refine Edge Brush in there paints over edge details and somehow, most of the time, it works surprisingly well.

Layer masks. White shows the layer. Black hides it. That's the whole concept. Click the rectangle-with-circle icon at the bottom of the Layers panel to add a blank white mask. Paint on it with a black brush and those areas disappear. Paint with white and they come back. No pixels are ever deleted. If a client comes back three weeks later and says "actually can you show more of the original background," you just paint white on the mask and it's back. Try doing that after erasing.

I cannot stress how much masks matter. I spent my first year of Photoshop using the eraser tool because nobody explained masks to me. Every edit was permanent. Every mistake meant starting over. Don't be me.

Smart Objects are the second thing I wish I'd known earlier. Right-click any layer and pick Convert to Smart Object. Now when you transform it (Ctrl+T), Photoshop remembers the original size data. You can scale it down, scale it back up, rotate it, whatever, and it never loses quality. Without Smart Objects, each transform degrades the image slightly. After enough resizes, your layer looks like a JPEG from 2003.

Saving. PSD format first, always. File > Save As > Photoshop. This preserves your layers. Then for sharing: File > Export > Export As. Pick JPEG for photos, quality around 80. Pick PNG if you need transparency. Quality 80 on JPEG is the sweet spot where the file is small enough to load fast but sharp enough that nobody can tell the difference from the original. Quality 100 produces files that are stupidly large for no visible benefit.

Photoshop running slow? Couple things to check. Edit > Preferences > Performance, make sure it's using at least 70% of available RAM. If you have 16GB but Photoshop is only using 4GB, that's your problem. Also, if you're working on a 6000x4000 pixel image from a modern camera and you're just posting it on Instagram, resize first. Image > Image Size, set the long edge to 2000 pixels. Your computer will thank you.

The history panel, Window > History, shows every step you've taken. You can click any earlier state and jump back to it. The default is 50 history states. If you're doing something experimental, take a snapshot first (the camera icon at the bottom of the History panel). Then you can jump back to that exact moment no matter how many steps you've taken.

For the actual practice part: pick one photo right now. Fix its exposure with Levels. Crop it to a specific ratio. Remove something from the background with the Spot Healing Brush (shortcut J, just paint over small objects). Save a PSD and a JPEG. That whole flow takes like three minutes once you know the shortcuts and it covers probably 60% of what most people ever do in Photoshop.

Photoshop's been the industry standard for image editing since 1990. It survived this long for a reason. But it's also a piece of software, not a personality trait. You don't need to be a "Photoshop expert" to get useful work done. Most of the designers I know use about 15% of what the program can do and they're making a living with it.