Love learning Photoshop? You’ll be happy to know our popular series of Photoshop tutorials continues today. “An Idiot’s Guide to Photoshop, Part 4: Advanced Features and Fun Photo Effects”, from author By Azamat “Bohed” E. of TrueKolor.net.

To master Photoshop, you need to practice. The more tutorials and guides you go through, the more methods and tools you will have at your disposal. But reading isn’t enough. To really learn, you need to open Photoshop and follow the steps outlined. Do that with this manual and you’ll pick up some new skills.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to make use of some amazing features that came with CS5, such as Content-Aware and Puppet Warp, along with some tools that came before CS5. Also, we will show you how to create a basic animation in Photoshop and how to use it to create a morphing effect.

Some tools are overlooked by users, even Photoshop veterans, but that doesn’t mean those tools can’t make your life easier and enhance your workflow. We’ll go through some of them as well.

Note that in most cases we will skip basic explanations, assuming that you are familiar with basic tools and techniques. Be sure to go over Parts 1, 2, and 3 before reading this guide, if you haven’t already. Find them here:

• An Idiot’s Guide To Photoshop, Part 1
• An Idiot’s Guide To Photoshop, Part 2
• An Idiot’s Guide To Photoshop, Part 3: Pro Tips

Part 4 of this amazing free guide outlines:

• Using the Content-Aware feature to reshape pictures or remove unwanted items from photos
• Change someone’s posture with Puppet Warp
• Using 3D in Photoshop: 3D text, 3D Christmas balls and downloading extra 3D content
• Using the Background Eraser tool
• Morphing a face with Photoshop, and creating an animated GIF
• Tips to speed up Photoshop CS5

Guide Published: June 2012