Photoshop Playing Card Deck Will Teach You Photo-Editing Tricks

You can spend an entire career using a tool like Photoshop and still not master all of its features, so it’s especially daunting for those just starting out. These designer playing cards won’t walk you through every step like a YouTube tutorial, but they feature tips, tricks, and explainers for common digital photo-editing tasks and principles.

The deck was created by Eric Bohring, who’s actually done this before. Last year, he created a set of custom playing cards featuring useful tips and tutorials about photography. This time around, the deck is designed to come in handy as photographers transition from the studio to their workstations and begin to process their images in applications like Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom.

The cards don’t function as step-by-step tutorials for common post-processing tasks, but instead explain the fundamentals of tools and concepts like color spaces, EXIF data, curve adjustments, or even the concept of layers, which are an important thing to first master before moving on to other features of a complex application like Photoshop. For those who were lucky enough to have high school science teachers that let them bring in cheat sheets for exams, this is the same idea—except you don’t have to crib the notes yourself.

Bohring is once again using a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to help put his new cards into production. At the time of writing the campaign has already raised more than $70,000, which is well past its paltry funding goal of about $1,200. The red and blue versions of the decks can be reserved during the campaign with a contribution of $14.50, while a green deck will set you back $18.20.

Shipping is expected sometime in July, and while there’s always a good reason to be hesitant about backing crowdfunded products, this isn’t Bohring’s first Kickstarter rodeo. So far he’s shipped more than 12,000 copies of his previous deck design to backers (during a pandemic, no less) and is already familiar with the challenges of making these a reality.