The best Photoshop courses online in 2024: learn with free and paid courses (2024)

Exploring the best online Photoshop courses provides a golden opportunity to learn Adobe Photoshop, arguably the best photo editor on the market, from the convenience of your own home, office, or anywhere with an internet connection.

Renowned for its comprehensive suite of tools that extend beyond basic photo editing to encompass the best graphic design software capabilities and digital art tools, Photoshop stands as a cornerstone tool for photographers, artists, content creators, and filmmakers alike.

Given its rich array of industry-standard features, advanced functionalities, and sophisticated interface, newcomers might find Photoshop somewhat daunting. This is where the best online Photoshop courses come into play, offering structured learning paths that demystify the software's vast offerings. These courses, available both as paid and free options, provide valuable insights and techniques for mastering not only Photoshop but also introduce techniques you can use in many of the best Adobe Photoshop alternatives as well.

We've rigorously tested and compared these courses, focusing on their accessibility, instructional quality, and value for money, ensuring you find a learning method that suits your style and goals perfectly. So whether you're embarking on your photo editing journey or seeking to enhance your skill set with new techniques, our roundup of the best online Photoshop courses will help you find the instruction you're looking for.

The best online Photoshop courses in 2024

Below you'll find full write-ups for each of the best online Photoshop courses on our list. We've tested each one extensively, so you can be sure that our recommendations can be trusted.

The best online Photoshop course overall

So you work with images and have heard good things about Photoshop, but don’t know how to get started? Adobe Photoshop Tutorials offers video and text-based learning from the makers of the software - and it's easily one of the best free Photoshop courses online for beginners.

Using a mix of screencasts and text, the tutorials start by familiarizing you with the app’s interface and tools layout. You are then introduced to commonly used functions and features such as working with layers, and making selections.

The lessons round up by putting the new skills to practice to retouch images, and some other tasks. Along with the instructions, each lesson also has downloadable assets to help you duplicate the instructions on your own computer.

When you are done with the basics, move on to the tutorials on the website to get a deeper understanding. There’s a beginner course on photo editing, another on making selections, and another on layer masking, and several more.

The best online Photoshop course for photogs

If you are a photographer interested in Photoshop, Udemy's Photoshop and Photography Digital Art Compositing Course gives you the best of both worlds. Led by a photographer and a Photoshop expert, the course will take you on four different photoshoots where you’ll learn about the different aspects of setting up and capturing the shots including coaching the models and an introduction to using props.

Post-production work for each of the shots happens in Photoshop. You’ll learn about the different Photoshop tools at your disposal and when to use them by working on the images from the different photoshoots to create the levitation effect employing different techniques.

The 3.5 hour course has some 38 lectures and includes all the images from the shoots and the PSD layered image files from Photoshop to help you follow along. There are also helpful handouts, such as a small guide on photography fundamentals and a PDF of common Photoshop shortcuts.

One of the best things about the course is that it makes very few assumptions and will be useful to you even if you are new to photography or Photoshop. The current price on offer is around $18.

Read our full Udemy review

The best advanced online Photoshop course

Once you have mastered the basics and can trot about the interface pretty confidently, it’s time to get more efficient. The Adobe Photoshop CC – Advanced Training Course from Skillshare will help you take your Photoshop skills to the next level. In over 13 hours of video lectures, the Adobe Certified Instructor helps you discover a better, faster and more efficient way of working with Photoshop.

As you can make out from its name, the online Photoshop course expects you to have a working knowledge of the program. The course has over 100 lessons in which it covers virtually all aspects of the software.

In addition to all sorts of image adjustments and enhancements, the lessons on working with skin and mastering teeth and eye corrections are really useful. You’ll learn to work with all kinds of fonts and recreate trending visual styles. In addition to images, you’ll also learn how to edit video and create Parallax animations and Cinemographs.

The best thing about the course is that it uses real-world projects and you get class projects at regular intervals. During the course, the instructor will help you master artboards and develop a habit of creating a workflow for your Photoshop projects. The course is built in Photoshop CC 2018 so don’t expect all of it to work in older versions.

Read our full SkillShare review

The best online Photoshop course for web designers

While Photoshop is pretty popular among photographers, many consider it an overkill for web design. That’s mostly because people fail to discover all of Photoshop’s web-based features that you can use to streamline your workflow and save time. If you wish to use Photoshop to improve your web design skills, the LinkedIn Learning's Photoshop for Web Design course is a good place to start.

Don’t judge the course content based on its runtime of only about 2.5 hours. In that short time, the instructor covers a lot of ground. You’ll learn how to use libraries to manage project assets, and even use artboards to create multiple versions of a design simultaneously. The instructor uses real-world examples and usage patterns, which is a real plus.

The course starts by looking at how to optimize the workspace for web use and also looks at responsive design and shares techniques to help you overcome layout challenges and for other aspects of web design as well. During the course, you’ll create mood-boards, and wireframes and the instructor expects you to have working knowledge of Photoshop and some familiarity with web design. Besides Photoshop, she’ll also use some Fontea plugins, and the unsmart Magic Script.

The course is currently priced at around $40.

Read our full LinkedIn Learning review

The best bundled online Photoshop course

Besides Photoshop another favorite tool for image editing is Adobe Lightroom. If your job involves tweaking images, take a moment to check StackSocial's Ultimate Adobe Photo Editing Bundle. The bundle includes 8 courses with a combined runtime of over 41 hours. Of the 8, two courses are based on Lightroom (including a beginners course) and one helps you master both Lightroom and Photoshop in a week.

There are five courses that focus exclusively on Photoshop and you can expect some repetitions in the content. That said between them you’ll gain everything there is to know about the tools at your disposal.

A majority of the courses lean towards new users though after introducing some of the commonly used tools the courses all tend to focus on different aspects, from image editing to retouching images to working with text and creating flyers, and more. There’s also a course that teaches the techniques used in beauty advertisem*nts.

The best online Photoshop courses: How to choose

When deciding which online Photoshop course is best for you, first consider what skill level you are currently at. If you've not used Photoshop much before then it would definitely be recommended to start with the beginner courses. These will break you into the basic tools you'll use for more advanced projects. However, if you already have a great deal of experience with Photoshop then feel free to try your hand with the more advanced courses.

Also consider how you'll be applying your image editing skills. You'll find many of the best Photoshop courses online are centered around specific vocations, such as photography or using the best web design software. These typically build on base knowledge with real-world applications.Others will also offer up tips and techniques for similar tools, such as Adobe Lightroom and the best Lightroom alternatives.

Factor in how much time you have to spare - course lengths and total lesson hours vary on each platform, so be realistic about what you want to achieve in a given time-frame. Likewise, look at your budget. The very best Photoshop courses (free and paid) are an investment, but costs will vary from site to site.

The best online Photoshop courses: How we test

To test for the best Photoshop courses online we searched for a range of popular options as well as took recommendations from Photoshop users. Then we followed the tutorials to get an idea of how easy they were to follow, how easy it was to learn new skills and toolsets, and additionally what sort of level they were aimed at, such as beginner, medium, or advanced level users.