Ask HN: Whats the best way to learn Adobe Photoshop? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Whats the best way to learn Adobe Photoshop?

2 pointsamerf110 comments

If one was to use it to create prototypes of product designs in 2D

Follow the guide along with infographics in your solution. including some various paths, you may consider. https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-way-to-learn-Adobe-Ph...

If you're going to be creating prototypes, that's above intermediate, so you're looking at a significant investment of time in any case. But Lynda.com videos are helpful, but also look at Jesus Ramierez's videos, Phlearn, or the videos available in Creative Cloud for PS. Photoshop is very powerful and can be used for all sorts of things including video editing. There are so many features that it's easy to get confused if you're trying to just do photo editing, or just do product designs, for example. But I'd recommend diving in and figuring out how to do what your goal is really well and not worrying about the other capabilities until needed or time allows. Of course what it will eventually boil down to is just spending time working in the program. Lots of time.

There are lots of beginner tutorials on Photoshop on YouTube. You'll also find many courses on subscription sites like lynda.com or skillshare.com.

However, if you are planning to use Photoshop for user interface design, I recommend using a vector tool like Sketch (Mac only) or Affinity Designer (Mac and Windows). Laying out interface elements is much easier in these apps than in Photoshop. Both Sketch and Affinity Designer have features that target UI design.

Although Photoshop has some vector tools, it's strength is in photo editing and digital painting, plus it has a sprawling, clunky interface that is harder to learn than the aforementioned vector tools.

Adobe has its own Vector tool in Illustrator.

The reason I didn't recommend Illustrator is that, like Phostoshop, it is powerful and rich in features but also has a clunky and clumsy interface. It is not as optimised or streamlined for UI design as newer apps such as Sketch or Affinity Designer (IMO).

Illustrator is subscription-based too, unlike Sketch and Affinity Designer. For example, purchasing Sketch gets you one year of updates, but if you don't upgrade or renew after a year you can keep using the version of the app you downloaded. This is different from Adobe's subscription model where the moment you stop paying your monthly or yearly subscription fee, the app stops working.

If your job is a professional visual designer, then Sketch and Affinity aren’t going to cut it, which are more suited to wire frames than production vector assets (and vice versa, illustrator sucks at wire framing). If you are just a pure interaction designer, then you might be able to get by without an Adobe CS subscription at all.

If you are wire framing, then being vector really has nothing especially to do with it, it’s just that this is the default for block and drop style apps. In that way, PowerPoint is vector also, but no one talks about refining Bézier curves with it.

I disagree. For wireframing, vector tools are essential because of the ease with which you can move and scale elements.

Sketch and Affinity Designer are perfectly capable of exporting production vector assets - Sketch can even export CSS attributes. Sketch in particular has a thriving eco-system of plugins.

An online search quickly reveals a plethora of Sketch templates with pre-made UI elements for all operating systems and platforms: not wireframes, but high fidelity mock-up designs.

Sketch is not a serious vector production tool, at least not in the same league as Illustrator. It is proficient at wire framing, hence the name “sketch.” There isn’t much difference from a wire frame and a mock up in that context.

My partner learned Photoshop (and AutoCAD and SketchUp) using Lynda video courses and was very impressed. I’m not a huge fan of learning by video personally but on that sort of situation I think it makes sense!

Thanks a lot guys, I will get started with Lynda seems like a good place to start

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