There’s a specific kind of embarrassment that comes with looking back at your earliest Photoshop work. Mine was a meme I made in MS Paint at age twelve, which I thought was genuinely hilarious, and which I will not be describing further. The point is: everyone starts somewhere ridiculous. And when I came across Watch the full tutorial on YouTube - this video from Matt Kloskowski reflecting on his very first time using Photoshop - I didn’t expect it to be particularly useful. It’s not a tutorial in the traditional sense. Matt says so himself, right at the top.
But here’s the thing. Sometimes the most useful thing a working professional can share isn’t a technique. It’s the context around how they learned, why they started, and what their first project actually looked like. Because if you’re new to Photoshop, or you’ve been grinding at it for a few years and still feel like you’re faking it, hearing that one of the most respected names in the Photoshop education world started by pirating the software, working from a dingy one-bedroom apartment, and erasing logo backgrounds pixel by pixel - that’s genuinely useful information. It reframes what “starting out” is supposed to look like.
This video was published around Photoshop’s 30th birthday in February 2020, and Matt uses it as a chance to tell his origin story. What follows is a breakdown of that story, with the key lessons pulled out for anyone who’s in the early stages of building a Photoshop practice - or who just needs a reminder that the gap between where you are and where you want to be is something everybody has crossed.
Step 1: Find a Real Problem That Needs Solving
Matt explaining he wanted something to leave with clients
Matt didn’t open Photoshop because he wanted to learn design. He opened it because he needed brochures. He was selling and renting construction equipment in Tampa, driving around job sites in a hunter green Jeep Cherokee, and he had nothing tangible to leave with potential customers. The company’s advertising department was focused on the big-ticket equipment. His rental division was an afterthought.
So he made his own materials. That’s the lesson buried in this first beat of the story: the best reason to learn a tool is because you need it for something specific. Not because you want to “learn design someday.” If you’re sitting down with Photoshop and you don’t have a project in mind, go find one. Make a flyer for a friend’s band. Fix a photo for your parents. Build something for a real audience. The pressure of an actual need is what makes skills stick.
Step 2: Get the Raw Assets Together Before You Start
Matt describing getting a CD of graphics from the marketing department
Before Matt could build anything, he needed source material. He grabbed a CD from the marketing department loaded with the company’s existing graphics and logos. In 2024 terms, this is your asset gathering phase - downloading brand files, sourcing images, collecting whatever visual building blocks the project requires before you open a new canvas.
This step sounds obvious but beginners routinely skip it, opening Photoshop first and then scrambling to find assets mid-project. Getting everything together upfront means you’re designing, not hunting. Know what you have before you start placing things.
Step 3: Don’t Let Not Knowing Stop You From Starting
Matt describing laying out brochures at home with no design training
Matt had a marketing degree, which he cheerfully admits he chose because someone told him it was the easiest business major. He had no design training. He had no idea what he was doing in Photoshop. He made the brochures anyway, got them printed at Kinko’s, folded them into trifolds, and handed them to customers.
The work was almost certainly rough. He knows it. He says it. But it existed, it served a purpose, and it was a starting point. The version of you who waits until you feel ready will wait forever. Open the file. Make the thing. It doesn’t have to be good - it has to exist.
Step 4: Learn the Hard Way First (So the Easy Way Makes Sense Later)
Matt describing erasing logo background pixel by pixel
Here’s the part of the story that every Photoshop veteran will recognize. Matt needed to remove the black background from a company logo so he could place it over his own layout. His solution: erase it manually, one pixel at a time.
Any Photoshop user reading this is already wincing. There are a dozen better ways to do this now - Magic Wand, Select and Mask, Channels, Color Range. But Matt didn’t know any of that. And honestly? Going through the painful version of a task first is how you really understand why the better methods matter. When I eventually learned about layer masks after spending three days clipping things manually, I almost cried with relief. You appreciate the shortcut more when you’ve taken the long road.
If you’re new and you find yourself doing something tedious and repetitive in Photoshop, don’t just push through and accept it. That feeling is a signal - there’s almost certainly a faster way, and it’s worth pausing to look it up.
Step 5: Let Necessity Drive Your Skill Progression
Matt describing taking brochures to Kinko’s for printing
The finished brochures went to Kinko’s. They got printed. Customers saw them. That feedback loop - make something, put it in front of real people, see how it lands - is the fastest way to improve. Matt wasn’t taking Photoshop courses. He was solving a sales problem and getting better at the tool as a side effect.
Every time the output had a problem (logo looked weird, layout was off, image quality was poor), that became the next thing to learn. Skill-building through real projects, even imperfect ones, beats isolated tutorial-watching every time.
What I’d Add From My Own Experience
The pixel-by-pixel background removal story hit close to home. My version involved a client logo with a white background that I kept trying to erase with a hard brush, creating this horrible jagged fringe around the whole thing. I delivered it. The client said nothing but I still think about it sometimes at 2am.
What I wish someone had told me earlier is this: when something feels like a grind in Photoshop, that’s almost always a technique problem, not a patience problem. The tool has almost certainly solved the thing you’re fighting with. The earlier you build the habit of asking “is there a better way to do this,” the faster you’ll grow. Search it. Ask in a forum. That one question can save you hours.
Matt’s story is ultimately about one thing: starting before you’re ready, with the tools you have access to, for a reason that actually matters to you. Thirty years of Photoshop’s history is full of people who began exactly that way.
Watch the full tutorial on YouTube and hear Matt tell it in his own words - it’s under ten minutes and worth every one of them.
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