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Design & media courses
Beginner friendlyThis Photoshop course online teaches you to retouch, design and composite in Adobe's image editor. You start with the layers, masks and selections everything else depends on, then put them to work retouching portraits that still look like the person, designing a brand from logo to guidelines, wrapping your artwork onto real products and building scenes that never existed, until Photoshop makes what you picture.
Course overview
This course takes you from the toolbar to composites where the light, the focus and the colour all agree. Ten modules and about 50 hours: the first is the toolbox, learned once and properly, and the rest put it to work on photo editing, branding, illustration, mockups, effects, compositing, advanced retouching, 3D and three bonus projects.
By the end you can cut out hair, retouch skin without losing the pores, design a brand identity a client could use, build mockups that update from one edit, and tell when a technique has gone too far. Whether you design for a living, shoot photographs or make your own marketing, you finish with work worth showing.
Free course guide
Every module and what it covers, the price, how you're assessed and where the course can take you.
10-page PDF, free
Curriculum
10 modules and 166 lessons, with around 50 hours of video. Work through them in order, at your own pace.
Key benefits
Everything you need to learn the skill, prove it and put it to work.
All 4 for £199 instead of £376
Getting started
There is no application, no waiting for a start date and no sales call in the way.
Pay once. Instant access, yours for life.
Career outcomes
Design is hired on what you can show more than on the paperwork. The certificate opens the conversation, and a brand identity, a set of mockups and a composite of your own win it.
Source: National Careers Service (gov.uk), September 2026.
An example of the certificate for the Certificate in Adobe Photoshop.
If you mostly edit whole shoots rather than single images, take Adobe Lightroom instead: it organises and adjusts hundreds of photos far faster. If you need logos and icons that scale to any size, start with Adobe Illustrator. And if you only make social posts, Graphic Design Using Canva will get you there sooner.
A course advisor will talk it through with you free, and will say so if a different course fits your goal better.
Good to know
Ten modules, 166 lessons and about 50 hours of video. Every lesson carries a written summary, notes and a key-takeaways panel, most carry an interactive step, and there are ten checkpoints of eight questions and a final assessment of twenty questions at 80 per cent, which is what issues the certificate. One module is photo editing, and the rest is graphic design and branding, illustration, mockups, textures and effects, compositing, advanced retouching, 3D, and three bonus projects: a mockup, a glow effect and a double exposure.
Yes. Module 9 teaches the language of 3D (meshes, materials, lighting, cameras and rendering) that carries into any 3D app. Photoshop now hands 3D work to Adobe's dedicated 3D apps, so those lessons are ones to watch, and the chrome, metallic and glossy effects alongside them use everyday Photoshop filters you can follow step by step.
Photoshop is a paid Adobe subscription with a free trial, and the trial is enough to start the course. If the cost is a blocker, Graphic Design Using Canva teaches design in a tool with a free plan, though it won't do Photoshop's retouching and compositing.
Lightroom for organising and editing whole shoots quickly and consistently. Photoshop for deep work on single images: retouching, cutouts, composites and design.
Yes, your own or free-licence ones, and the lessons point you to free sources. For the retouching, mockup and composite work, your own photographs make the better exercise.
Less than its reputation suggests, and in this course module 1 is the steep part. Once layers, masks and selections make sense, almost everything after is a variation on them, so take the first module slowly.
Yes. Pass the twenty-question final assessment at 80 per cent and you get an OBA certificate of completion that an employer can verify online. It isn't an Adobe certification exam. The brand identity, mockups and composites you finish along the way are the other half of the proof.
Download the free info pack first. It walks you through every module, what you'll build and what you need before you start, so you can enrol knowing exactly what you're getting. If you'd like to talk it through, get in touch and we'll help you choose.
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Free info pack
Every module, the price, how you're assessed and where it can take you. Yours free, and it opens straight away.
Takes 30 seconds
