5 ways to learn Photoshop from scratch

If you are keen to learn photoshop, you can find resources everywhere, from your local bookstore to blogs from the other side of the planet. Whether you just want to understand the basics and be able to resize a photo, or become a photoshop ninja, I can point you to lots of resources, most of which I have used myself. Choose the ones that fit best for you, depending on how much time you have and how much money you want to spend.

1. Learn by doing

The best way to learn how to use a software like Photoshop is to actually start using it right now. Buy a copy of the software, install it and dig into it right away. If you feel overwhelmed and don't know where to start, just open an image with photoshop and play around with the tools that you see. Just use them randomly for a while and browse through the menus, to get a feeling of what happens in the software. Now of course that won't help you much, so the next thing to do is to read the official manual from Adobe by clicking on the Help button. You will be redirected to the online help, in which topics are sorted by category. You can simply start reading and try to apply what you learn as you go.

2. Find resources online

This is where you will find the most resources. There are literally thousands of websites teaching how to use photoshop in one way or another. I will list some of my favorite websites:

Tutorials:

As I mentioned before, the best way to learn is by doing. That's why tutorials are so popular for photoshop. It is much easier to learn how to use photoshop by following a tutorial on one particular topic, step by step, than reading a whole book and then forgetting the first chapter before you even start. Here are some good websites for tutorials:

PSD Tutsplus

By far the best resource for photoshop tutorials. The site has been online for years, and they publish new tutorials every single day. There is also a premium membership for advanced tutorials and special downloads.
Layers Magazine

The website is full of tutorials and articles about the Adobe products. This is the link to the photoshop tutorials.

Smashing Magazine

is another website offering wonderful tutorials.


Photoshop Lady

bookmarks tutorials from the web.

SpoonGraphics

is one of my favorite website, with lots of tutorials and regular roundups for design inspiration.

If you've ever been stuck trying to send a large file by email and getting frustrated that the email would not leave your inbox, or that the recipient's inbox was full and would not allow a 15MB email, then I might have a solution for you.

Dropbox is a web-based storage solution that lets you store and share your files easily. It automatically synchronises a defined "dropbox" folder on your computer so that you can retrieve the files in this folder from anywhere on the web. But the beauty of this solution is that you can install the Dropbox application on your machine, be it a mac or PC and also on your iPhone and iPad, which means that you can find your files instantly on any device.

I would recommend anyone to use Dropbox for personnal or professional use, it's just a life saver and a very productive tool. You can open a free account that will let you store up to 2GB, so no excuse there.

But for now let's go back to our initial problem:

How to send large files with dropbox

When you open an account with dropbox, it automatically creates some folders for you, including the "Public" folder. That's where you want to place the file that needs to be sent. Basically this folder is not password protected, so other people can view its content, but they need to know the exact URL of each file to find it.

Working online:

Navigate to the Public folder.

Select the file you want to share and right-click on it.

Click on "Copy public link".

Copy the URL of the file.

Working on your machine:

Navigate to the Public folder of your Dropbox folder.

Select the file you want to share and right-click on it. In the menu, select Dropbox > Copy public link.

All you need to do now is to send this URL by email to the person you want to share the file with. They won't need any login credentials to access it.

This method works for sending large files but also for sending large folders, all you need to do is compress the folder and send the Zip file.

Of course there are other ways to send large files, by ftp or with services like www.yousendit.com, but Dropbox is one of my favorite since I use it anyway on a daily basis. What's your favorite file sharing method ?