Reasons for Photographers to Learn Photoshop 2021

Adobe Photoshop is a very popular picture editing, image manipulation, and photo retouching software package (for Windows/macOS) used by photographers, designers, graphic artists, web developers, and creative professionals. It is an industry-standard tool that can enhance, create, or edit pictures, artwork, and even illustrations.

There are lots of reasons you should learn Photoshop as a photographer.  

For simple jobs like brochures, creating flyers, or email newsletters, you can use Photoshop to retouch and optimize your pictures quickly. 

1. Touch-Ups

Touched up photos add extra that final level of polish for a professional freelance photographer. To be a good photographer or deliver full quality pictures to your customer, you need to know how to edit an image without making it look artificial or cartoonish.

Offering editing and touch-ups opens up a new potential revenue stream as it is possible in some cases to charge separately for this. Obviously, touch-ups are part of your service when you work for higher-end clients; in that case, you won’t be able to charge an additional fee here as they already pay a high.

2. Editing Photos

It is what Photoshop was originally designed for. It makes it incredibly simple to do things like turning color photos into black and white photos, or sharpening up certain areas of your photos. You can scale, crop, adjust incredibly quickly. If you want to print a photo or make posters or T-shirts, then you’ll need to convert CMYK to RGB, which it can also do at the touch of a button. 

Photoshop also has a great undo feature which remembers the changes you made and allows you to undo up to the last 15 changes that you’ve made. 

3. Protect Your Intellectual Property

You are a good photographer, and your captured (& edited) photos will probably hopefully become very popular. People like to have it and share them with others using any device or social media.

To make sure that no-one can pass off your photos as their own, it can be very useful to add watermarks to your photos. Again, Photoshop makes doing this incredibly quick and simple. 

Now that we’ve hopefully persuaded you that mastering Photoshop makes good sense let’s look at some of the new features and tools included in Photoshop 2020.

4. Improved Auto Selection

The “Select Subject” tool of Photoshop 2020 works using Adobe Sensei (AI). IT analyzes all the objects in the image and tries to predict what you want to choose. 

Practically, the “Select Subject” tool works brilliantly with images that have a highlight, like a car on a landscape background, or a couple on the beach in a room but less well with landscape type photos.

5. Custom Content-Aware Fill

Another big update to Photoshop 2020 was the Content-Aware Fill tool. Content-Aware Fill is the AI-based tool that magically fills in an area that we select with pixels similar to the enclosing area (more in-depth article on Content-Aware Fill).

6. Unlimited Deformation Points

In Photoshop 2019 and previous versions, during deformation, the photo was divided into a 3×3 grid (9 equal parts). This made complex manipulations frustrating and slow. In Photoshop 2020, deformations are accomplished using an unlimited number of adjustable points, and you can drag surfaces or points to make deformation speeding things up hugely. 

7.  Smart Objects to Layers

In previous versions, if you wanted to create layers from a Smart Object, you would open the Smart Object in a new window of Photoshop, and then you need to drag the layers back to the main document. 

In Photoshop 2020, just Right Click on the Smart Object and then choose Convert to Layers. If you have multiple layers in the Smart Object, they will be converted to a Layer Group.

8. The “~” Key as an Eraser

Previously, you could delete an object using only the Eraser tool by pressing or clicking “E.” 

Now, when drawing with a brush, you can press down “~” and start erasing objects. 

Where to learn Photoshop?

There are lots of articles and YouTube videos online to help you learn Photoshop.

Suppose you are serious about learning it properly though nothing beats a formal course. You will be taught the ins and outs of Photoshop. Learning Photoshop not only improves your photography level but also gives you a lot of opportunities in graphics and web design sectors.