Video: The Top 15 Features of Photoshop Every Photographer Should Know

Photographer Jeff Cable has come a long way from his first few gigs shooting Bar and Bat Mitzvahs in San Francisco. Mostly sports-related, his résumé now includes images from the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, a stint as the official Team USA Hockey photographer during the 2010 games in Vancouver and the Team USA Water Polo photographer during the 2012 games in London.

In this B&H Event Space seminar, however, he’s not going to just scroll through a bunch of pictures and talk about how he composed or shot them. Instead, he’s sharing some thoughts on post-processing: specifically, the 15 features in Photoshop that he believes every photographer should know.

The idea for this seminar, which he almost titled “The 2000 Features of Photoshop You Don’t Need to Know,” came when Cable realized that, for all his editing, he tended to use about 15 features 90-percent of the time. He shows you each of the edits and tools he tends to do in turn, and how he applies them in Photoshop. He also discusses Adobe Camera Raw, as well as some helpful tools for maximizing speed like using a Wacom tablet or installing an SSD.

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The seminar is nearly 2 hours long, so we won’t endeavor to go into detail on every specific feature Cable discusses. To see how he edits the majority of his images to great effect using a very limited number of tools, you’ll want to take the time out of your schedule to watch the seminar yourself. Then, once you’ve done that, you can get the other side of the story (i.e. how he composes his shots) by visiting Cable’s blog here.

He’s the first to admit that not everyone will agree with him, and other photographers may use other features very often. But if you’re only now getting going with Photoshop and you’re having a hard time parsing through the plethora of potential uses, a couple of hours of tutelage by Jeff Cable may help hone you into a more efficient image editor.

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