Bestselling T-shirt Design Masterclass With Adobe Photoshop | Merch By Amazon, Teespring
Masuk Sarker Batista · Bestselling Instructor, 75000+ Students
A rapid-fire set of click-along Photoshop templates that builds screen-mechanics muscle memory but skips design theory and commercial safety.
What the course actually covers
The course is built as a string of short, self-contained projects rather than a structured curriculum. After a brief setup section (installing Photoshop CC, downloading a resource pack), it moves through roughly ten t-shirt builds: a typography-and-shape design with text bent along a custom path, a full-color image-based design using the Filter Gallery's Cutout effect, a two-word "Love" design built from oversized letterforms and a downloaded label graphic, a slogan shirt assembled from flat shapes and icon PNGs, a hand-drawn sketch portrait, a gradient-mapped silhouette piece, a distressed vintage design using a grunge brush set, a typographic photo portrait, a circular "eye" logo composition, and a wolf graphic paired with circular text. Each one follows the same rhythm: open a new 4500x5400px document at 300 DPI, place or draw an element, adjust color or shape, export as a transparent PNG.
That repetition is both the course's strength and its ceiling. Watching the same document-setup and export steps nine or ten times cements the workflow into muscle memory, which matters for anyone who has never touched layers or the Move tool. But the course rarely stops to explain why a choice works, such as what makes a composition sell or how a buyer scans a shirt design in a search results grid. It shows the click sequence, not the reasoning behind it.
Strengths and shortcomings
The individual Photoshop techniques are genuinely useful and well demonstrated: text on a path, custom vector shapes with color overlays, Quick Selection combined with a layer mask to pull a subject from a background, a Gradient Map used to fake a two-tone silhouette, and a grunge brush layered in Multiply-style blending for texture. The final two lessons, on generating design ideas through Google and Pinterest image search and on building product mockups with a third-party tool, add a small but practical business layer that most tutorial-style courses skip entirely.
The gap is everything upstream of Photoshop. Several projects lean on assets pulled from a Google image search or downloaded from third-party PNG and stock-photo sites, with only a passing mention that commercial use may require attribution or a paid license. For a course explicitly aimed at people selling on Merch by Amazon and Teespring, that is a meaningful omission: platforms in this space are strict about copyright and trademark infringement, and a beginner following along could easily upload artwork built from assets they don't actually have the right to sell. The course also never addresses color theory, layout hierarchy, or how to judge whether a design will actually catch a buyer's eye, despite promising to teach eye-catching design from the ground up.
Labeled "Intermediate," it plays more like a beginner tool-familiarization course wrapped in ten mini-projects. Anyone who already understands layers, masks, and shape tools will find little new here, while a true novice gets a fast, low-friction introduction to the software but should look elsewhere for the design judgment and licensing awareness that turn a Photoshop exercise into a sellable product.
The standout
The typographic portrait lesson, which reshapes a photo (demonstrated on an image of Steve Jobs) into readable text using Quick Selection and a layer mask, is the one technique distinctive enough to reuse across unrelated designs.
What you will learn
- How to set up a print-ready 4500x5400px, 300 DPI Photoshop document and export a transparent PNG for Merch by Amazon or Teespring
- Typography techniques: warped and resized text, text following a custom path, and character/paragraph spacing fixes
- Building vector shapes such as banners and stars, recoloring them, and colorizing imported line art with the Colorize and Hue/Saturation tools
- Applying the Filter Gallery's Cutout effect and Gradient Map adjustment to turn a plain photo into a stylized graphic
- Creating a distressed, grunge-brush vintage look and a photo silhouette cutout for retro-style shirts
- Turning a portrait photo into typographic art using Quick Selection, layer masks, and brush erasing
Best for: A complete Photoshop beginner who wants to copy a handful of specific t-shirt layouts and start uploading designs within a few hours.
Skip it if: Anyone who already knows basic Photoshop tools, wants original illustration or brand-building skills, or needs guidance on trademark and licensing risk before selling on Merch by Amazon.