Adobe Photoshop CC – Advanced Training Course
Daniel Scott · Adobe Certified Trainer
A genuinely deep dive into Photoshop's newer AI-assisted tools (Select Subject, Neural Filters, Generative Fill) for users who already know the basics.
This is a course built for the person who already knows their way around Photoshop's toolbar but suspects they are still doing things the slow way. Daniel Scott, an Adobe Certified Instructor with close to two decades in the software, spends over 14 hours proving that suspicion right, and most of that time is well spent.
Selections and masking as the backbone
The course opens where most advanced users actually get stuck: masking people and objects. Select Subject gets introduced as the fast path, but the real value is in what follows once that one-click selection turns out imperfect. The Select and Mask workflow gets a genuinely useful two-pass treatment: global sliders handle the big edge problems first (smoothing, edge detection, decontaminate colors), then a small brush cleans up the stubborn bits, like flyaway hair against a patterned background or a shoulder the AI selection missed entirely. Channel-based masking and focus-area selection round out the section for cases where none of the smart tools cooperate. This is the strongest stretch of the course, because it treats the AI tools as a starting point rather than a magic button, and shows what to do when they fail, which they demonstrably do on busier images.
Color Range gets its own arc, used for changing skin tones, swapping colors in grass and sky, and building an ink-splash text effect. These are the kind of party-trick techniques that also happen to be genuinely transferable to product and portrait retouching work.
Where the AI tools take over
Later sections lean into Photoshop's newer machine-learning features: Generative Fill for background replacement, and the Neural Filters set, including harmonization (matching a pasted subject's color temperature to its new background), color transfer between two open documents, and the landscape mixer for swapping a scene's season or time of day. These are shown with real before-and-after comparisons rather than just described, and the harmonization demo in particular is a legitimately practical fix for the flat, pasted-in look that composites often have.
The back half broadens into territory that feels more like a grab bag than a single throughline: Artboards for resizable social graphics, advanced retouching and skin work, video editing and parallax animation inside Photoshop, cinemagraphs, 3D, and mockup techniques. Each of these is taught competently and with a real class project attached, but the course is really several mini-courses stitched together under one Advanced label rather than one continuous skill progression.
Verdict
The tradeoff is exactly what the title promises: breadth over depth. A dedicated user could spend an entire course on Artboards alone, or on cinemagraphs alone, and this one gives each perhaps 30 to 45 minutes. What it delivers instead is a wide map of everything Photoshop can currently do beyond the basics, taught by someone who clearly knows which shortcuts actually save time and which are gimmicks. Anyone who hasn't touched Photoshop's updates in a year or two will find real workflow gains here, particularly around masking and the Neural Filters. Anyone already fluent in Select and Mask and Generative Fill may find entire sections redundant, and true beginners will be lost from the first video, since the fundamentals are explicitly assumed rather than taught.
The standout
The layered Select and Mask walkthrough, where global sliders (smoothing, edge detection, decontaminate colors) are combined with a small manual brush pass to rescue selections the one-click tools botch on flyaway hair or busy backgrounds.
What you will learn
- Fast, professional-grade masking with Select Subject, Select and Mask, and manual channel/focus-area techniques for the edge cases the AI selection tools miss
- How to use Color Range to swap colors, fix skin tones, and build ink-splash text effects
- Generative Fill and Neural Filters (harmonization, color transfer, landscape mixer) for compositing and background replacement
- Building and exporting multi-size Artboards for social and ad graphics with reusable character styles
- Parallax animation and cinemagraph techniques for turning static images into moving social content
- Advanced retouching (healing, cloning, patching) plus mockup and 3D workflows
Best for: Photoshop users who already know the fundamentals and want to replace slow manual habits with faster, current-version techniques.
Skip it if: Beginners who haven't yet learned basic layers, masks, and selections, since the course explicitly skips that groundwork.