Been trying to teach myself to draw the last couple months to help me make an indie game I’ve been working on. Thing is when I watch videos online I see techniques like using seperate layers as an outline and then they can color/fill without real worry. Then since they have it on a seperate layer they can fine tune stuff much easier. The whole process of learning to make games has really given me a new appreciation for adaptable workflows.
Is there a book/website people know of to help use photoshop more efficiently? I’m sure a large part is just recognizing when a specific trick will save you time which is experience, but you really need to understand the tool to be able to use it properly.
If I’m understanding your post correctly, I’d personally recommend the magazines Computer Arts and Advanced Photoshop. They provide discussions, tips and lots of tutorials. The tutorials especially are great because you can see how the artist worked their way to produce the final piece and you can almost always guarantee to learn new neat tricks from them / new ways to do stuff which you didn’t think of before. And from there, you adapt it to your own workflow.
From my experience, it’s a lot more efficient/easier to learn from tutorials as opposed to reading some encyclopedia with everything since the tutorials are specific to what I’m interested in improving.