Learn Photoshop Online For Free

Photoshop is not easy. It takes a lot of time and effort to master hundreds of menu options, keyboard shortcuts and tricks. There are also specific ways of doing certain things, and you should master all of them before you can call yourself to be a Photoshop Guru.

Following are besst Photoshop resources to learn Photoshop online for free.

1. Youtube is undoubtedly the best resource for Photoshop enthusiasts. You can find a video tutorial for doing almost anything in photoshop here. The reason behind this is that most of the websites who publish Photoshop tutorials, host their tutorials on youtube and then embed it on their tutorial page. They do this to save bandwidth while streaming the video. Now, this is a great news since you may not even have to go through the remaining 13 resources because you can find almost every Photoshop trick on youtube easily.

2. Luxa, popularly known as a social networking site for Photoshop, contains video tutorials, general tutorials, design articles, brushes and much more photoshop related stuff. All the material on Luxa is selected by users’ votes so its bound to be the best.

3. On Photoshop Contest, you’ll not only find some really cool Photoshop tutorials, but you can also submit your modified images to them. These images are then entered into contests (thus this site is called Photoshop Contests) where the members of the site vote and comment on your work. The entry with the most votes wins (as if you didn’t knew this already ;) ). So, at this site, you can learn Photoshop, and at the same time you can earn prizes.

4. PSHero is run by a single person who calls himself, and rightly so, to be a Photoshop Hero. Here you can find some of the most practical tutorials which are really easy to follow. Definitely recommended for a Photoshop beginner.

5. Tutorial9 is not completely based on Photoshop. It contains a lot of other stuff, like freebies for designers, CSS/Html tutorials as well. But its Photoshop tutorials are awesome. Each tutorial contains step by step instructions with an image for each step, so that these tutorials are really easy to follow.

6. PhotoshopTutorials contains tutorials that uses the latest versions of Photoshop (CS3 and CS4), though they claim that their tutorials are backward compatible with the older versions starting with CS. I tried some of their tutorials and its true. This site is updated very frequently and contains some really good Photoshop tutorials.

7. PSDTUTS, a member of Envato network, contains some of the best tutorials for photoshop, on the web. All the tutorials are explained in a friendly and approachable way so that even beginners find them easy to follow.

8. You Suck at Photoshop is the famous video tutorial series by Donnie Hoyle’s. Humorous and informative, this series explains some of the basic concepts of Photoshop. Useful only for beginners.

9. Photoshop Talent, like Luxa, is another social networking site for Photoshop Fans. This is also geared towards contests where you submit your modified images and win prizes on the bases of community votes. You can also maintain your Art Portfolio on this site by creating your personal albums on this site.

10. Managed by Ross Aitken, Psdlearning contains some of the most innovative tutorials on photoshop. Definitely worth a visit.

Aggregators For Photoshop Tutorials

Following sites do not publish their own tutorials, instead they collect and categorize all the Photoshop tutorials from around the web. Since the tutorials are neatly categorized into various categories like, Drawing Effect, Photo Effect, Text Effect, Textures and Patterns, User Interface Design, 3D Effects, Abstract Effects, it becomes very easy to find out the tutorials that suits your interests.

These sites also have user rating systems so that you can find the best tutorials simply by clicking on the, Top Rated Tutorials link or something similar like that, depending upon the website.

And last, but not the least, is Smashing Magazine. Although Smashing Magazine is not an aggregator website, it has already hand-picked some of the classic Photoshop tutorials and published the lists for you. You can’t call yourself to be a Photoshop Ninja until you go through all the tutorials collected by Smashing Magazine.