Photoshop Tutorials

Yes. Everything in the free section of this page is a complete, full-length tutorial — not a preview. That includes the entire 30 Days of Photoshop series and 30 Days of Lightroom. PRO is a paid membership for people who want the deeper courses and the downloadable practice files.

Start with Day 1 of 30 Days of Photoshop. It walks through the interface from scratch and assumes no prior experience. Do one lesson a day in order — each one builds on the last, and by Day 30 you will have built a full composite.

Yes. Every free tutorial comes with the sample images used in the lesson, and most include the layered PSD so you can open the finished file and see exactly how it was built. Look for the download links in the sidebar of any tutorial page.

You will need a free PHLEARN account to download them, which takes about a minute and costs nothing. Editing the same file we edit on screen is far and away the fastest way to make a technique stick.

The 2025 edition of our tutorials is taught in the current release of Adobe Photoshop, and the newest lessons cover tools such as Generative Fill that only exist in recent versions. Most core techniques — layers, masks, selections, curves — work in any version from the last several years.

Photoshop is Adobe software, sold as a subscription, and we are not Adobe, so we cannot sell it to you or discount it. Adobe offers it a few ways: the Photography plan, which bundles Photoshop with Lightroom and Lightroom Classic and comes in a 20GB and a 1TB storage tier; a single-app Photoshop plan; and the full Creative Cloud Pro plan. The Photography plan is normally the cheapest route if you are a photographer.

Adobe also runs a seven-day free trial of the full application, which includes Photoshop on the web and converts to a paid membership at the end unless you cancel first. Prices move around and vary by country, so check current pricing on Adobe’s own site rather than trusting a number on a tutorial page.

Everything on this page is about learning the software. Our free tutorials stay free whichever Adobe plan you end up on.

Generative credits are the tokens Adobe spends when you use a Firefly-powered feature such as Generative Fill, Generative Expand or the Generative Workspace. They renew every month on your Adobe billing date and they do not roll over, so an unused balance resets rather than stacking up.

How many you get depends on your Adobe plan. Adobe currently allocates 25 a month on a standard Creative Cloud plan, 1,000 on the Photography plan with 1TB of storage, and 4,000 premium credits plus unlimited standard generations on Creative Cloud Pro. When you run out you can either wait for the monthly reset or buy more from Adobe.

You do not need any credits to watch our tutorials or to download the sample files. You only spend them when you run an AI step yourself, and most of what we teach here is layers, masking and retouching that costs nothing to practice.

Photoshop now lets you pick which model runs a generation, and they are not priced the same. A standard Firefly image generation is typically 1 credit when it is included in your plan. Premium and partner models cost considerably more. Adobe documents premium image generation at roughly 10 to 20 credits per output, and video generation at 20 to 100 credits per second depending on resolution.

That is why a month of credits can vanish in an afternoon. Before you generate, check the credit cost shown next to the model you have selected, and keep the standard Firefly model for routine cleanup work like removing a distraction or extending a background. Save the expensive models for the shot where the result actually has to be perfect.

You can be productive in about a month. Thirty days of focused practice will get you comfortable with layers, selections, masking and basic retouching. Mastery of a specialty like high-end retouching or compositing takes longer, which is what the advanced series are for.

Yes, and arguably more than before. AI has taken over a lot of the tedious work: selections that used to take twenty minutes, removing a distraction, extending a frame that was cropped too tight. What it has not done is decide what a good edit looks like.

Generative Fill will happily give you a result that is subtly wrong: the light comes from the opposite side, the skin texture goes plastic, the perspective does not match. Spotting that and fixing it is ordinary Photoshop work, which means masking, layers, blending and color. Those skills also outlast the tools, since the panel you learn today gets redesigned every couple of years but knowing why an edit reads as fake does not expire.

The people getting the most out of AI right now are the ones who already knew how to retouch.

Free tutorials teach a technique end to end. PRO courses are longer, go deeper into decision-making and workflow, and include the sample images, brushes, actions and LUTs used in the lesson so you can follow along on the same files. Compare them here.

PRO is $12.99 per month, or $99.99 per year — which works out to about $8.33 a month. Both plans include every course, all the practice files, and the full library of actions, presets, and LUTs. You can cancel anytime, and everything free on this page stays free whether you subscribe or not.

No. Every tutorial on this site can be completed with a mouse or trackpad. A pen tablet makes masking and dodge-and-burn work faster and more precise, but it is a convenience, not a requirement.

Yes. Our Lightroom tutorials cover the cataloging and raw-processing half of the workflow, and 10 Days of AI in Photoshop & Lightroom covers the newest AI tools across both applications.