Preface

Mastering Adobe Photoshop 2024 will guide you step by step through the in-demand skills required by the industry. This book will build on your existing Photoshop knowledge, helping you become a more productive image editor and improve the quality of your work. It will teach you about essential resources for graphic designers or marketers looking for transformative career growth.

As a digital content creator, whether you're working on projects for print, screen, or social media, having a solid understanding of Adobe Photoshop is essential. This powerful application can take your designs to new heights, allowing you to create captivating visuals that leave a lasting impression on your audience. So, if you are ready to elevate your skills and expand your capabilities, Mastering Adobe Photoshop 2024 is the book you've been waiting for.

This book takes a step-by-step approach, breaking down each technique into easily understandable terms, making it accessible even to those who are new to advanced editing. The jargon-busting approach ensures that you can grasp the concepts without feeling overwhelmed. Then, through a series of hands-on exercises, you'll have the opportunity to practice your newfound knowledge, learning about each tool's strengths and limitations.

In the book's final section, you'll bring everything together and learn how to produce your digital media projects from start to finish. From project planning and organization to final delivery, this book provides a comprehensive framework to streamline your workflow and achieve remarkable results.

From creating captivating visuals for social media to mastering retouching and compositing, this book equips you with the knowledge and skills needed to excel in digital imagery. Embrace this opportunity to unlock your creative potential and propel your career forward.

Who this book is for

This book is for people with a basic working knowledge of Adobe Photoshop who are determined to enhance their skills to a professional standard with proven industry techniques and workflows. Understanding digital media file types will be an advantage to help you gain the most value from this book.

If you're a designer or marketer looking to build upon a basic working knowledge of Adobe Photoshop, gain invaluable insights into professional editing techniques, and take your career to the next step, this book is for you.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Making Photoshop Work Harder and Smarter, provides you with new ways of working with familiar tools that will build upon and enhance your basic knowledge of Adobe Photoshop.

Chapter 2, Non-Destructive Healing, and Retouching, teaches you how to hide unwanted content from images and apply essential color and tonal edits non-destructively, meaning that your edits can be edited multiple times without losing quality. This will first require quick and accurate selections with a variety of tools.

Chapter 3, Masking and Cutouts, delves into one of the must-have Photoshop skills and showcases powerful tools for concealing and revealing layer content without permanent deletion. These skills enable you to extract intricate details such as hair from backgrounds and create montages.

Chapter 4, Building Brand Mock-Ups and Prototypes, teaches you how to bring ideas and concepts to life by creating realistic mockups. You will learn how to apply graphics to a series of surfaces, such as walls, device screens, t-shirts, and cushions, using smart workflows that allow you to re-edit your assets without losing quality.

Chapter 5, Creating Printed Marketing Collateral, provides an in-depth look at how to prepare new documents for print output for flyers, posters, and business cards, and how to create grid systems and print characteristics such as bleed to expertly manage content such as text layers, branding, and photos.

Chapter 6, From Pixels to Post: Images for Social Media, takes you through a streamlined process for creating social media images. You will learn how to use artboards to manage multiple images in a single document, protect text and logos in smart object layers, and text styles for rapid type formatting. Then, you will see how to export your branded images with ease to multiple file formats and sizes, ready for posting online.

Chapter 7, Creating Animated GIFs and Videos, looks at how to create and edit video and animated GIFs in Photoshop. We will be using familiar tools to import video clips, add transitions and audio to a simple yet powerful timeline, and export animated GIFs or render video to common file formats ready for posting online or on platforms such as YouTube.

Chapter 8, Bringing Typography to Life with Effects and Styling, takes you through a series of typographic effects to make your text stand out. We will use editable layer effects to create paper folds, slices, dripping paint, graffiti art, and embossed paper, all while keeping your text layers editable. You will learn how to change characters, words, font families, and font size without compromising your final designs.

Chapter 9, Creating Textures, Patterns, and Backdrops, provides you with a set of invaluable skills to create your own backdrops, from realistic textures to geometric gradients, pop art, and science fiction space scenes. All will be created from scratch without any source images so you can build visually captivating backdrops anytime.

Chapter 10, Creating and Applying Brushes, introduces you to the immense power and flexibility of Photoshop brushes. You will learn how to create your own brush tip shapes, from a flock of birds and snowflakes to sampled paint strokes and facial hair for retouching.

Chapter 11, Blending and Collaging Images, combines many of the professional-grade techniques in this book to successfully create image montages, seamless panoramas, collage self-portraits, double-exposure effects, and beautifully lit scenes using high dynamic range images that blend the lighting data of multiple shots.

Chapter 12, Creating Surrealist Artwork, challenges you and your new skills with two breath-taking art projects. You will draw upon the techniques covered throughout this book to produce visually captivating surreal artwork.

To get the most out of this book

Software/hardware covered in the book

Operating system requirements

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Bridge

Adobe Express

Windows, macOS, or Linux

To get the best quality of images, please refer to the free copy of ebook version of this book.

Download the example code files

You can download the example code files for this book from GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Mastering-Adobe-Photoshop-2024. If there's an update to the code, it will be updated in the GitHub repository.

We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

Code in text: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "Left-click on the Shadows layer group and repeat the same technique to import Paint-02.jpg from the 11-Collage folder."

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For instance, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in bold. Here is an example: "Go to File Save and close the document."

Tips or important notes

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Get in touch

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