For Photoshop Beginners: 5 Good Photoshop Habits You Must Form Right from the Start

Photoshop is an amazing tool that can do almost everything you can think of with an image – but it is also very tricky to learn from scratch if you’re beginner. Therefore, it’s vitally important to form a few good habits right from the start and as a result, you will find yourself better positioned for any future Photoshop work you may encounter.

In this post, I will show you 5 Good Photoshop Habits You Must Form Right from the Start. Personally I think it will be quite beneficial for you to try and adopt those good practices, especially if you consider using Photoshop as a working tool and be professional with it.

The version of Photoshop I use here is CS4, but the points mentioned here should apply well for older version, too.

Habit 1: Get Your Workspace Setup Right, and Memorise Keyboard Shortcuts

Have a comfortable workspace setup for your Photoshop can make your life much easier in terms of the various task you’re trying to achieve in Photoshop. Have the right arrangement window position, layer palette layer, brush panel setup can get you a long way.

In the case of CS4, you will find a list of pre-defined workspace in window > workspace:

You can also drag and drop windows to your desired position:

and save them as your own favourite workspace setup for future use:

Give your workspace a name:

Another feature is Keyboard shortcuts – you can define them here:

this will bring up a list of shortcuts and you can make changes there:

You can also summarise them by pressing the “Summarize” button:

This will ouput a .htm file – I suggest you print this out and hang them somewhere easy to see:

I don’t have to mention the benefit of using shortcuts – after all, they are “shortcuts” to the art of Photoshop.

Habit 2: Don’t be lazy, Name Your Layers

OK, everybody is lazy in some way. But no matter how lazy you’re, name those layers you created in Photoshop! It has two major benefits:

• You will remeber what you did to your design, 15 days ago. Because the layers are named and structured.
• It will help others to understand your design better, and avoid abusive comments (especially if you work in a collaborative environment)

For instance, the screenshot below doesn’t make any sense:

We can give the layer some meanful names:

The named layer will help you remember what you did in the past, and help others understand your layer structure better.

Habit 3: Use Layer Blending Options Wisely

Layer Blending Option are used quite frequently by designers. It is quite a powerful feature where you can apply lots of effects to one layer:

Obviously, as a beginner, you tend to add on as many blending options as possible to make your design “POP”:

Sometimes, it is better keep things simple:

and the result may be better:

So use those blending options wisely :)

Habit 4: Learn Pen Tool, and Master it

Yes, Pen Tool is probably one of the trickiest tool in Photoshop to learn. I’m sure some people may choose to ignore it and use other tools instead.

I’m not sure how many people here have used Pen Tool (the icon with a little pen) in Photoshop before, but personally I think it is quite a useful tool when it comes to outlining and creating custom shapes.

In the beginning the Pen Tool can be a bit awkward to use, but once you practice and get used to it it will become a very handy tool for you, especially when you are trying to outline objects with complex lighting and backgrounds.

Here are some tutorials I found on the web covering the use of Pen Tool in Photoshop:

How to Use the Pen Tool in Photoshop: A Tutorial on Outlining Objects

Pen Tool Tutorial – Creating Selections With Photoshop’s Pen Tool

Photoshop Pen Tool (Video Tutorial)

You may find once you master the Pen Tool, you can use it to create a lot of elegant effects and make precise selection for your objects. Definitely worth the trouble.

Habit 5: Use Layer Mask More Often

That’s begin this part with a scenario:

You have an image (a flying bird in this case), and you decide to erase some parts of the bird so it looks like something else. But after a few hundred steps later, you found you probably overdid the image a bit:

Naturally, you seek help from the history window, try to reverse a few actions:

But often you find the list isn’t long enough to record your messiness, even if you go to the very top:

And you may have to start over again from the original image:

Worse still, you have a bunch of unnamed layers and objects mixing together, and you don’t even know where to begin:

So, to avoid the above frustrations, add a layer mask to the layer you want to modify – in case, you’re erasing some parts off the bird:

And you realise you made a mistake and erased the wrong part, or change your mind, you can simply right-click the mask and delete it:

And you can have your bird back just like that:

Put it simply: layer mask gives you extra protection against accidental mess-ups and save your time by not having to go back to the very beginning.

That’s it for this post! I hope this would help beginner learn something useful and try and form those habits before it’s too late. After all, you will be the one who benefits from it, eventually.

Till next time, have a great day!