The best Photoshop classes near me

What careers and industries use Photoshop?

There are several reasons that someone would want to learn Photoshop, given how many different fields and industries make use of the application. The most obvious reason that one would want to learn Photoshop is to pursue a career in graphic design, digital communication or a related field. While not the only tool you’ll need to learn, Photoshop is an essential tool for anyone hoping to find work as a graphic designer or digital artist, since raster-based photographs offer the highest quality and resolution of any digital image. 

If you are aiming to build a new professional life with your Photoshop skills, there are plenty of different job offerings available and given the importance of visual communication in advertising and rhetoric, almost every consumer facing industry will employ specialists who know how to use Photoshop. If you are working as a digital artist (and digital artists can work in a wide variety of fields or in various capacities as freelancers), you’ll need to learn how to use Photoshop, regardless of where you are working and what kind of projects you are working on. Similarly, in most contexts, photographers will need to learn how to use Photoshop to complete projects and ensure that their submitted work is up to their client or employer’s standards. In the US, graphic designers are in relatively high demand and can expect to earn a salary of around $70,000 a year, while photographers (who are more likely to work as freelancers or part-time) earn about $47,000 annually.

In addition, Photoshop is an important tool for any amateur or aspiring digital artist to learn how to use if they want to make the best use of technology as an aspect of their work. Photoshop is an accessible and affordable tool that artists can utilize to help them streamline the artistic process, organize, catalog and publish their work and create designs and projects that they would otherwise never have been able to create. Since Photoshop is also a relatively deep tool with a lot of useful creative features, it doesn’t matter how much you plan to learn about the application, you can still make significant use of it regardless of the amount of training you’ve received. This means that professional photographers looking to set up detailed art installations and amateur musicians looking to make posters for their cover band will both benefit from learning how to use Photoshop.

Finally, learning Photoshop can be a valuable tool for anyone working in a field that aims for some degree of rhetorical and visual persuasion. While this obviously encompasses advertising, learning how to use Photoshop can be important in a host of nonprofit, political and activist fields precisely because the tool allows you to better construct images and visual iconography to associate with your movement, cause or campaign. Mass communication is essential to any persuasive campaign and learning how to use Photoshop to create everything from posters to infographics to flyers and mailers. Spending even a few days learning Photoshop in a professional capacity can be the difference maker when it comes to creating professional looking materials to be added to various materials produced for your cause.

Is Photoshop hard to learn?

Since Photoshop has been an industry-standard tool for nearly four decades, developers and designers have had plenty of time to make the application as user-friendly as possible. This has made it so that new users can learn the basics of Photoshop very easily, since the interface and the application are so intuitive and well-designed. If you are just looking to understand the basics of Photoshop and become accustomed to utilizing the program in a hobbyist capacity, it is among the easiest art and design programs you can learn. Even if you think that you may struggle with the application, there are plenty of short, introductory courses available for students looking to pick up a basic understanding of the application and start working on personal design projects.

If you are looking to learn more complex Photoshop skills or how to integrate Photoshop with other design applications, you are likely to need more training in order to become comfortable with the program. While this isn’t necessarily going to be harder, it will require more focus and investment on your part in order to succeed. Advanced Photoshop training also cover a lot of theoretical and practical design training, rather than just systems mastery, so learning how to use Photoshop is also likely to require you to get more training in the uses of the application on real design projects, as opposed to theoretical lessons on how to use the tools offered by the application. How easy or hard this training will be depends on your personal comfort level with design training and your access to support structures and instructors who can provide feedback, advice and critique.

Does it take a long time to learn Photoshop?

Similarly, the length of time it will take to learn Photoshop is going to depend on how invested you are in using the application’s more complex tools and whether you are aiming to use the program as part of a professional design toolkit or you are only looking to use Photoshop for simple design projects. If you are only aiming to learn the basics of the application and begin experimenting with different design techniques, you can learn how to navigate the interface and utilize the basic tools in only a few days of instruction (sometimes even less if you have prior experience working with applications like Photoshop). However, if you are looking to work with Photoshop professionally or hoping to integrate it into a larger design toolkit, you are likely to need to spend significantly more time training. This doesn’t mean you’ll need years of professional development training (like you’d get if you enrolled in a college degree program), but it does mean you are likely to want to enroll in an immersive bootcamp training program or similar dedicated training program.

What will I learn in a Photoshop course?

When learning Photoshop, there are two major kinds of skills that you are going to learn: practical ways to utilize the application and its tools and more theoretical skills related to “how” those tools are used in design, photo manipulation and visual communication.

Photoshop interface and basic tools

As a raster-graphics photo editing tool, Photoshop allows users to make very fine and subtle alterations to a digital image file, giving you an incredible amount of control over the look and feel of the finished image. In a Photoshop course, you are likely to spend most of your time learning how to utilize the essential tools, like the lasso, crop, marquee and fill tools, all of which have specific uses for either removing or adding assets to an image, or tools like the eyedropper and color correct features that let you make pixel by pixel alterations to ensure that your image looks exactly how you want it to look. One of the advantages of learning Photoshop is that you can make incredibly detailed alterations to the images without losing any definition or clarity, which is one of the major reasons that the application has become so popular.

Design theories and principles

In addition to learning how to use the tools offered by Photoshop, you are also likely to learn the design principles that inform the decisions that designers make when they are working on a graphic design project. This includes general concepts like design and color theory, typography, text utilization and other principles of visual communication and specific concerns that are relevant to an individual’s projects and goals (since a magazine advertisement for a fashion brand is going to be different from a political mailer for a local city council election). These lessons tend to be prominent in more career-focused Photoshop and graphic design classes, so the longer the program you enroll in, the more time you are likely to spend learning design theories and principles

Advanced photo manipulation techniques

Career-focused training programs are likely to also include lessons in utilizing the advanced Photoshop tools that make the application so popular with professional designers. For example, students may learn how to create dynamic visual effects utilizing tools like filters, shadows and blend modes to create compelling and evocative designs. You’ll also learn how to use layer tools to alter individual aspects of an image in non-destructive ways, including adding styles and titles, mirroring or changing specific layers and structuring complex designs on top of one another. These advanced techniques will be important to learn for anyone hoping to use the application in a professional capacity as they produce work for mass consumption.

AI design tools

Like many software applications, Adobe has begun integrating various AI and LLM machine learning features into recent releases of Photoshop. Learning how to leverage these tools to streamline the design process and assist in the general day-to-day tasks of a professional Photoshop user is going to be a new skill that is expected of most aspiring designers. Learning how to use these tools is actually fairly complex, since you don’t want to mistakenly create poor or uncanny images by simply entering a prompt and calling it a day. Rather, you want to understand how the assistant tools work and how they can supplement (but not replace) the work of graphic designers and artists who are making use of these tools as they create evocative and effective visual designs

Other graphic design tools

Many classes that aim to teach students how to use Photoshop don’t solely focus on that application. Instead, these professional design courses provide students with generalized training in all of the major applications that digital artists and graphic designers are likely to utilize during their regular workdays. The specific tools will vary from class to class, but you can expect to learn the other significant graphic design applications in the Adobe Creative Cloud (likely to include Illustrator and InDesign) as well as other significant tools that are utilized in specific design contexts (for example, you may learn Photoshop in a web design course where you will also learn how to use tools like Figma). Since these are professionally focused classes, you’ll want to be sure that you look over the different skills being taught in the course to be sure that they complement Photoshop in a way that aligns with your personal goals.

GIF Making

While not the most publicized use of the application, thanks to the lack of mobile support for Flash (and subsequent shuttering of the application), Photoshop has become the go to software program for creating gifs online. While not all classes will focus on this aspect of Photoshop, many will provide users instruction in the use of Photoshop to create simple gifs that they can share with other users as they hope to create virtual content that will get their work in front of people. You can learn these skills relatively quickly if you enroll in a class that is dedicated to teaching the process of gif making, so if you are only looking to learn how to create simple, viral images, you can consider one of these classes.

What skills complement Photoshop?

When you enroll in a Photoshop class, if the course focuses on getting students to become career-ready designers or graphic artists, it is likely the class will cover a wider range of skills than just Photoshop. While the career-focused courses will handle the curriculum structuring for you, students who aren’t enrolling in these classes may want to know what other major applications and skills they’ll want to learn in order to become career ready.

Illustrator

The program most frequently taught alongside Photoshop is Adobe’s other major graphic design application, Illustrator. These two programs complement one another because they are both graphic design applications which serve different functions in the design process. While Photoshop is a pixel-based raster design application, Illustrator is a vector-based application, meaning it utilizes lines, shapes, points and arcs to build assets and images. The advantage to this is that, unlike with pixel based images, vector-based images can be resized to fit on virtually any surface or display without becoming blurry or distorted. This makes them ideal for creating things like logos for branded merchandise or other assets that will be added to Photoshop design projects. The drawback is that because vector-based images lack the level of detail and granularity of pixel-based images, you don’t have as much control over the very fine and subtle details of the image, particularly where various assets or objects in the image intersect. Thus, learning how to utilize both of these tools is essential for anyone hoping to become well-versed in the professional design world, since you’ll need to learn how to use both tools in order to succeed.

InDesign

The other major design application in the Adobe Creative Cloud is InDesign, a layout design tool utilized to build mock-ups of everything from posters and magazine spreads to business cards and books. This application has begun to fall out of favor in recent years, owing to shifts in the publishing market and the prioritization of dedicated online design tools, but InDesign is still a useful tool to learn for anyone who is hoping to do work on print design projects. InDesign lets you create wireframe versions of page layouts and you can populate those layouts with assets created in Photoshop or Illustrator and prepare them for publication right from your desktop. Most graphic design programs will teach you how to utilize InDesign and it is definitely a skill you should consider learning if you hope to work in any field that touches on print publishing (which can include anything from books and magazines to posters and direct mailers).

Figma

Prior to the development of easy-to-use, dedicated web design applications, Photoshop was commonly used to create mock-ups of webpages before the programming process began. This function has since been taken up by applications like Figma, which allow users to create working prototypes of webpages in order to streamline the design process. However, Photoshop is still commonly used to create assets for websites and digital interfaces, meaning that you are likely to encounter classes (as well as professional jobs) that will cover both Figma and Photoshop, alongside other design applications.

Are Photoshop courses worth it?

If you are aiming to undertake any design projects or work in a field related to digital art, taking a Photoshop class is 100% worth the time and energy that you’ll spend learning the application. Photoshop is used in so many different professions and design projects that you will not regret learning how to use the program and because it is so versatile and utilized in so many different places, you’ll be able to easily find a course that fits your needs and gives you the most bang for your buck when it comes to learning Photoshop.

If you are aspiring to a career in graphic design or digital art, you will need to learn Photoshop and a dedicated course (or an immersive certificate program) will pay long-term dividends as it makes sense to learn how to use one of the most common applications in the industry. These courses will provide students with the immersive training they need to become experts in the use of Photoshop and they will leave the course ready to start on a new career in the field of digital design. For these aspiring professionals, taking a Photoshop class is the fastest and most efficient way to prepare to work in the field available.

These classes are also worthwhile for hobbyist or amateur designers working in fields connected to graphic design and print publishing. While they won’t need to enroll in the elaborate and immersive, multi-week bootcamps that professionals will want to take, they can spread out their training in introductory and intermediate courses until they have reached the point where they are comfortable with their level of proficiency. This is going to vary from person to person, but there are enough different Photoshop classes, aimed at enough different students that you are sure to find one to your liking, whether it is an introductory course aimed at letting students learn Photoshop at their own pace or a quick and dirty Photoshop in a day class that provides students with standalone training to get them ready to start experimenting with their own design sensibilities.