It does not matter if you are a beginner or experienced photographer. Today you can learn to use Photoshop without studying fat books or spend hours trying to understand very technical tutorials.

Go straight to what a photographer needs in Photoshop to retouch and achieve professional images in the simplest way

For years I have been teaching this art with special emphasis on beginner photographic initiation.

For this reason, and seeing that many photographers needed an effective way to start in the photo retouching, I did not hesitate to collaborate in the creation of this book, Photographic Retouching with Photoshop, an initiative of FotoArte Estudio.

As you know, the photo retouching is present in almost all the images we see daily, in magazines, posters, books, advertisements, pictures, and the list goes on ...

Let me tell you the truth, bluntly:

Nowadays practically all photographers use some form of photo retouching, however minimal it may be. Traditional photography no longer exists as it was before ...

An ordinary photograph can be radically transformed through digital retouching, simply by adjusting the exposure, contrast and color can be achieved amazing changes.

But of course, learning to touch up is not so simple ... or is it?
Photoshop is a photo editing program so powerful and complex that it requires a lot of effort and dedication before you fully master it.

Each of its tools and functions in combination have countless uses, even at such a level that there is virtually no unattainable image processing for the software. Any retouch that you can imagine is feasible with Photoshop.

For this reason it is logical that the management of this great program entails a very high learning curve. Depending on the level you want to achieve, the study method (design careers, courses, workshops, books, etc.) and the time spent by each one, it might be possible to acquire the expertise to retouch professional photographs in 2 or 3 months to who dedicate themselves fully, or from 6 months, even more than a year, for those who can not do it full time.

It is clear that this depends on several factors, but the truth is, and in this everyone agrees, that learning to touch up with Photoshop requires time, dedication and effort.

Most amateur photographers work, have family and often a few hours off. In those cases, they can hardly devote weeks or months to training. Therefore, if this is your case, do not be disappointed, as below I will show you the method of the book to quickly learn to touch up with Photoshop.

Is there a shortcut to learn how to retouch photographs?
Actually there is no shortcut but an intelligent approach by which you can learn to touch up your photos with Photoshop in an almost ridiculous time.

The operation of Photoshop can be learned very easily if you know in advance the reason for which you will use it, that is, if you understand what type of photographic edition you need.

For example, the type of digital treatment carried out by an illustrator or an advertiser is not the same as that of a 3D designer, a multimedia video editor, or, in our case, a photographer!

Therefore, if you are a photographer you do not need to learn functions that are usually used by professionals in other areas, such as advertising creatives, 3D animators, astronomers, webmasters, graphic designers, forensics, architects, producers, to name a few. Knowing this, the range of functions and tools you really must master is significantly reduced.

An intelligent and practical method

Once established what type of photographic manipulation the photographer needs, it is easy to focus on the tools and functions that Photoshop offers for that purpose and dismiss those you will never need.

It is proven that most of the functions, commands and tools of Photoshop are not used by the vast majority of its users. If we stop for a moment and apply the Pareto Principle, we can confirm that 80% of Photoshop users only need and use 20% of their tools and vice versa.

By this I mean that a small group of specialized tools can achieve more than a large number of them and are often the only ones that we will need for our usual activity.

For example, if you use touch-ups typical of a professional photographer, you do not need to learn to draw with artistic brushes, perform rendering, use actions, apply large amount of filters, create textures, use three-dimensional effects, etc ...

This is a principle widely used and applied continuously in various areas of life and increasingly in education to achieve rapid and specific results. With this procedure you can focus and put the magnifying glass on those tools that you really need to learn, so that you can achieve your goals directly in the shortest possible time.