LESSON 26 · PHOTOSHOP FOR ARTISTS

Photoshop arrives configured for photographers, and that is why it feels hostile the first time you open it to draw. In this lesson you rebuild the interface around a pen instead of a mouse, keep the six panels that matter to a painter, and learn to spin the canvas like a sheet of paper. You will also decide, on purpose, what to ignore.

SOFTWARE

Finish first: L5, L7, L8

• Photoshop installed, signed in and opened at least once
• Artist 12 connected and the XP-Pen driver running
• A scrap document open, any size, so you have something to test on

WATCH

PHLEARN — Selections and edge refinement on the 2026 toolset - the selection half of the Adobe Live video, three years newer.

PiXimperfect — A full first-launch orientation to Photoshop recorded in 2026. Replaces the 2015 Aaron Blaise intro whose workspace no longer matches what he will see.

PiXimperfect — Walks the toolbar tool by tool on the current build - more useful to a beginner than the 2019 tips-and-tricks reel, and everything shown still exists.

THE LESSON

Photoshop was built around 1990 for people scanning photographs, and almost every menu you can see is still aimed at them: colour separations for print, lens correction profiles, HDR merges, batch actions for wedding albums. Open it for the first time to draw a character and it looks like the cockpit of something you are not licensed to fly. Your honest reaction, that there is too much here, is correct.

So take this as the frame for the whole module: you will use maybe eight percent of this program, and that eight percent is genuinely excellent. Brush engine, layers, masks, adjustment layers, transform. The other ninety-two percent is not a hole in your education, it is somebody else's tool sitting in your drawer. This lesson clears it out of the way so the good parts sit one pen-tap from your hand.

Go to Window > Workspace and choose Painting. Photoshop ships with this preset and it is a fair starting point: it pulls the brush panels forward and drops some of the photography clutter. Do not stop there. A workspace is only a saved arrangement of panels, and yours should be arranged for your screen and your drawing hand.

Open what you want from the Window menu: Layers, Brush Settings, Brushes, History, Navigator, Properties. Drag each one by its tab into the dock on the right edge. Panels snap into place when a blue highlight appears. Collapse a whole dock down to icons with the double-arrow at its top corner. Anything you never touch, close it. Empty screen edge is not wasted space, it is canvas.

Handedness matters here. The dock sits on the right by default, so a right-handed artist's own arm covers it constantly. Drag it to whichever edge your arm is not crossing. On a screen tablet that is not a preference, it is the difference between reaching and not reaching.

When the layout looks right, go to Window > Workspace > New Workspace, name it something you will recognise, and tick the boxes for Keyboard Shortcuts and Menus so the whole setup travels under that name. If you wreck the arrangement mid-session, Window > Workspace and then the Reset entry for your workspace puts it back exactly as saved. That safety net is the real reason to bother saving it at all.

Layers is non-negotiable, and you already know why from Lesson 7. Keep it tall. A finished piece runs to twenty or more layers, and scrolling a short panel is a tiny tax you pay a hundred times a session.

Brush Settings and Brushes are two different panels and people confuse them constantly. Brushes holds your saved presets, the list you pick from. Brush Settings holds the dials for whichever brush is loaded right now. Both live under the Window menu. You will open Brush Settings properly in the next lesson.

History is your undo ladder. Every action gets a row, and clicking an older row rolls the document back to that moment. The default depth is fifty states, which sounds generous until a long session eats them in twenty minutes. Open Preferences, go to Performance, and raise History States; a hundred is comfortable on a machine with reasonable memory. History also does what plain undo cannot: you can jump back six steps, look, and jump forward again, as long as you have not painted in between.

Navigator shows a thumbnail of the entire canvas while you are zoomed to three hundred percent on an eyelid. Working zoomed in quietly ruins drawings, because you stop seeing the shape you are actually making. Navigator is the cheapest check against that.

Press R for the Rotate View tool, then drag on the canvas. The whole view spins and the pixels do not move. This is the one feature that makes a screen feel like paper, because on paper you turn the sheet constantly without thinking, so an awkward backhand curve becomes the comfortable pull your elbow already knows. Do the same here. With the Rotate View tool still active, press Esc or click Reset View in the options bar to snap back to upright.

Rotate View needs the graphics processor switched on. If R does nothing at all, open Preferences, go to Performance, and check that Use Graphics Processor is ticked.

For everything else: Ctrl/Cmd+0 fits the image to the window, Ctrl/Cmd+1 shows it at one hundred percent, and holding the spacebar grabs the Hand tool from inside any other tool. The square bracket keys shrink and grow your brush. Those four moves plus rotate are ninety percent of your navigation. Your Artist 12 has eight express keys and two dial wheels, and the dials suit brush size and zoom particularly well. Map them and you stop reaching for a keyboard, which is the entire reason to own a pen display.

Ignore the Filter menu apart from Gaussian Blur and Liquify. Ignore Camera Raw, Content-Aware Fill, and every Auto button in Image > Adjustments, because auto-anything is a photographer's shortcut and it will flatten decisions you made for a reason. Ignore the Type tool until Lesson 30, where you need it for one job. Rough filter for tutorials you find on your own: if it opens with a photograph, it is probably not aimed at you.

None of that is avoiding the hard part. Learning to paint is the hard part. The menus are only menus.

PRACTICE · 30 MIN

1. Open L26-painter-canvas.psd. Take thirty seconds to look at the layer stack before you touch anything.
2. Switch to Window > Workspace > Painting. Notice what moved.
3. Open Layers, Brush Settings, Brushes, History, Navigator and Properties from the Window menu. Close every panel you do not recognise or will not use.
4. Drag the dock to the edge your drawing arm does not cross. Make Layers the tallest panel in the dock.
5. Open Preferences > Performance and raise History States to 100. Confirm the History panel keeps more than fifty rows by scribbling sixty quick strokes and scrolling the panel.
6. Save the arrangement with Window > Workspace > New Workspace. Tick Keyboard Shortcuts and Menus. Give it a name you will recognise.
7. Now break it on purpose: drag three panels somewhere stupid, close two more. Use the Reset entry under Window > Workspace to restore it. If it comes back correctly, the save worked.
8. Press R and rotate the canvas 45 degrees. Draw one long curve. Rotate 90 degrees the other way and draw another. Press Esc to reset the view.
9. In the XP-Pen driver, assign brush size to one dial and zoom to the other. Assign at least four express keys: undo, brush tool, eraser, and Rotate View or its reset.
10. Draw a spiral covering the whole canvas using only the pen and your express keys. If your free hand touches the keyboard once, remap the key you reached for.

Done when: You can open Photoshop, land in your own saved workspace, and draw a full-canvas spiral with rotation and brush-size changes without your other hand leaving the tablet.

Download these and work along with the lesson.

CHECK YOURSELF

Answer out loud first, then open each one to compare.