Lessons

Lesson Info

Creating Custom Products Part 2

We're going to go back and show our cute little green girl over here she is cute like a good job with these you kind of don't get lucky okay, so I'm going to go ahead and just shave some of this image off here because I want to have like a green background behind her and then I'm going to choose to put in a fun little green color block behind these images and we're going to fill that with like a texture brush um and do some fun things with that so I'm gonna go ahead and just take my marquis to again the shortcut is just the letter m I'm going to create a new file here I'm sorry a new layer not a new file gonna confuse people if I don't watch what I'm saying here uh and I'm going to go ahead and just like make a marquis it's about like that and I'm gonna go through here and choose a random color of green just with my eye dropper tool um it was right there let's choose this if I don't like the exact color I can always pull this up the color picker and, uh change that up. I wanted to be a...

little bit brighter here there's actually really cool site if you're really into design um friends of julian costs from adobe and I call her up one day and I said I really want a site where it will create custom swatches depending on what images I have in my design and she said, oh you mean like adobe duck that color dot com I'm like really you have of course you do because you're way smarter than me so adobe dot color dot com it's k u l o r ninety percent sure will actually give you color custom custom color swatches you can upload an image and it will pick swatches according to what is in that image. So if you have a family session that has, like multiple different colors it'll make a custom swatch for you and then you can use that to pick the colors for your custom card which is a really helpful little thing. So yeah, adobe um so I have the color picked and I have my little marquis tool and I have my layer over here and I'm gonna go all backspace because we just learned that that fills in with color oh, no, jen, you put it on top of your collage, but wait, I can fix that. Um if you hit control and your bracket keys it will move your layers in the layer palate up and down so it's a little nice little shortcut rather than going over to your layer palate and moving things up and down you can just go control left bracket and it will move it down in the palate all the way or you can go back up with control right bracket to move that up and down so again, those shortcuts are really good find little time savers um then what I'm going to do is I'm gonna make a few little line designs in this color block and I'm just going to do that very simply with a marquee tool here um so I'm just gonna bring this in yes they're all being very, very quiet right now I think that's a good thing means you're here have I have your rapt attention right here the internet world right writing things that way you're in the way that you can um okay, so I've taken a little marquis tool and I'm just going to make a little line in this green color block just by hitting delete okay? And again I'm going to do it on the other side over here just by dragging that same marquis tool because I want to make sure that my lines of the same or it'll drive me crazy leader and again I'm just going to hit dilate okay and let's make one that's this size to that's close enough and go around there ish ok, so I have all these fun little lines and I do have a purpose for making these and I'm gonna show you in just a minute bring her back over here so that looks a little closer good perfect. Okay, if you don't want to see if you know that everything in your card is placed according to where the cut lines are you no longer want to see those little blue ruler marks you can just go control h and I'll get rid of them and then you can see your whole layout if you know everything is already within the safe zone you can just get rid of that makes me happy. Um okay, now we have this fun little collage of images and oh no it's not centered in our little block of color that's going to drive me crazy so you can use uh I'm blanking on what they're called but I'll get there in a second. Hang on one second. Um these little alignment tools there it isthe thes little alignment tools when you're in your move tool if you have more than one things selected you can align them together with alignment tools. This thing took me forever to find and I would I would make rulers and I would like nit pick over moving things with the arrow tools back and forth you don't need to do that. So say for instance um I wanted to align this collage to the center of this green image if I choose my collage and I have the grass image selected as well and I go up here to this alignment to all that has the two boxes in the middle of the line it will now align those together okay, so I don't want to do that because that's hideous um but what I do want to do is I want teo a line this collage within this green box now this screen box actually sends the edge so I wanted to online in between these two little white thin lines so you don't necessarily just have to align things um two other objects you can also align to a selection so if I use my marquee tool here and I align in between and make a selection in between these two yellow lines are these two little white lines and I have my collage selected and I'm on my move to all I can hit this little um, alignment tool and center it and it's going to center within that selection so if I hit it did you know I just looked at the audio they're like really scythe will align it uh in the center this direction or you can also use the second one over which is the two boxes on a horizontal line to align it to the center so very, very simple like that that also comes and really, really actually wanted to be higher it comes in really, really handy when you're attempting to make patterns okay, so let's say for instance I'm just going to show you on a new file um because I don't want to mess up what we got going on here but let's say for instance I wanted to make polka dots okay because I'm doing a baby announcement and things need to be polka dotted because sometimes that's just how life is and that's what you need to do so right I'm gonna go ahead and find my elliptical marquis which is basically a circle and if I hold shift and holt I can make a selection that actually is a circle going out from the center that's a exact circle and I'm gonna put it on its own new layer and I'm just gonna make it black for now okay, so I have this fun little black circle and I want to make a million little polka dots right? Well have some fun tips of course to help you do that if you still have auto select on on your move to him and you hold down the all key when you select it, you'll get these this little um, white arrow that shows up under your black arrow and what that basically means is when you select on here it's going to take whatever you've selected and make a duplicate of it and put it on its own layer okay great, so I'm just going to do that the whole bunch times so anything I click on it's going to go ahead and just make another one and put it on somewhere so I have all these crazy little circles made over here in my layers palette, right? So I'm going to set the first circle and I'm going to set the last circle and I'm going to go ahead and I'm gonna a marquee over all of these to select every circle layer that I've that I've made you could see all of the layers over here are now selected then with alignment tools I'm going to hit to center them on the horizontal okay? And then if you go over here to this little guy it's going to take them and equal distantly space them ok, right she's like, oh cool then what I can do is I can go control eat emerge that and then I can again hold ault and drag that down and now all of those have merged and I've made a duplicate of all of those merge dots and then I can just gotta have something selected before I do that merge those over to around here ish adam and merge that and then I'm going to go ahead and hold that move too on hold all together and it's going to drop it down and all of a sudden I have all those and emerge those and I'm going to keep building on this until I have a whole bunch of little polka dots right and again I did like ah whole design of polka dots in like two point two seconds again it's all about being super efficient getting things done that you really need to get done very quickly um then what I can do with these is I can use my erase or tool in a funky brush you guys know that you can also use your brush is that you have loaded which we're going to go over brushes in a minute but you can use those in their race or tool as well. So I have this like destructive grungy brush and I'm just going toe a race and create these like funky little cute little grunge polka dots which are kind of fun and then we could turn on pink and we could make babies put go on them and all sorts of witness um okay, so there's polka dots I was a random sidetrack but that's ok, ok coming backto high school seniors I wanted to show you how to step on repeat. All right, so, um we have aligned that collage into the center of our color block and we are going teo add brushes onto this um now what I'm going to dio is I'm going to make a new layer here and I'm gonna go and I'm gonna find a brush but I want the brush to be a little bit darker green than what we have on the background here um short tet to go get a brush is the letter b shocking? I know brushes b and we're just going to find a little brushing my palate I have a slight small addiction to photoshopped brushes it's it's almost clinical seriously every way to any footage of brushes they can be found on a lot of different resource is we have some on our site there all over the internet er if you just google royalty free photoshopped brushes you confined them for free you can buy them from different people you can make them their yourself it's super super easy to make a brush um totally gonna sidetrack and show people how to make a brush right now because I said that uh so because I can um if you have a file that is anything and it's within twenty five hundred pixels on old versions of photo shop for five thousand pixels, I think on the newest versions of photo shop on dh well, just for instance just put a brush on the page anything that you have on the page all you have to do is go up tio edit define brush preset you have now made a brush and that is going to show up as the last brush in your brush palette very, very easy to dio it's like the easiest thing in the planet. So you can name it, click. Okay, you have a new brush that simple. No, I don't want to save you. Okay. Um, so make things efficient in your life. If you know that you always watermark your facebook images or if you always put a logo on your wallets or make your logo into a brush, simply put it on a file and just have white on black and just go edit defined brush preset and all of a sudden you have a logo as a brush and all you gotta do is go to that brush. Put it in. It makes things a lot easier than trying. Tio, go open the file that has your logo and bring it into photo shop and place it in the right corner making brush also, when you're using brushes, it's really, really nice to be able to see what they are. Um so I have my brushes set as large thumbnails, and my computer hates me, and I have too many brushes so it's lagging uh, to go so if you want to set your brushes to view as large slim nails, you just go to this little drop down menu and go to your preset manager, which is great your precept actually no hang on sorry you go we'll drop down menu here and you say large thumbnail that's how you see your brushes and what they actually are default I think is to show it as a list and so it just shows you like a little a tiny part of it or what it looks like when you when you use it but you want to see what the actual brush is so view it is a large thumb now and then you can go to preset manager here and what the precept manager will allow you to do is it will allow you teo group your brushes together so I put all my grunge brushes together I put all my like flowery brushes together I put all my logo brushes together so that when I go into my brush palette I always know where things are andi it will allow you to do them in groups so I could just hold shift and I couldn't select six brushes together and then go in and either rename that save it as a set. So if I don't want to have if I have a slow computer and I don't want to have all my brushes in there all the time you khun save different sets of your brushes and just load them as you need them so the preset manager will actually help to to really organize your life in your brushes so I don't really need to see any of that, so ok, so back on track of actually designing the card welcome to my life a d d squirrel, okay, so we're going to make his darker green brushes on this lighter green background on, and I've just chosen a regular brush that I think I made out of the design on the inset of a jacket, I took a picture of it defined brush, pre set new brush, and we're just gonna overlay that overtop of everything here, and I don't really care about where it's going at this juncture because you'll see why in just one second, so basically what I want to dio is I want that brush and I'll darken it a little bit just so you guys can see it a little bit more here. I want that too in lay on lee into the green section of what I have on that color block it was a couple different ways that you could do that you could go control shift wait, there you go sorry wrong, wrong ones khun all control g and inlaid into that color block, but then if you change the opacity of that color block thehe pass ity of your brush is going to change as well, and I don't want it to be connected, so I'm actually gonna go back because I don't want to do it is a clipping mask I want to erase everything that would not show up on that block okay, so this is where it gets tricky what I'm going to do is I'm gonna hold control and I'm going to click inside the green color block here when you click on the thumb now of your layer it will select anything that has pixels on that layer okay? So because I have deleted some of those little lines they don'thave pixels so it's not going to select that it's only going to select the color that's on that layer and the pixels that are on that layer, but as you can see, I made that selection, but I'm still here make this bigger so you can see I'm still here on the layer that has my brushes, right? So I'm gonna go ahead and select in verse and now I've selected everything that doesn't have pixels on that little green layer. Is everybody still following me? Ok? And I'm just going to click delete so now it has deleted all the brush stuff that wasn't on that little green background layer and I'm keeping it on its own layer so I can now play with the opacity of these brushes and play with the opacity of that color block and I could do it separately so that they're not intertwined together some incense okay, so I'm gonna bring the capacity of these brushes down because I wanted to be pretty subtle and just be something pretty behind makes sense great still with me you're all still really quiet am I moving too fast? Okay. It's a joyful quiet okay educating quiet's good e exactly lunch coma on jen just say no people online err like going crazy okay, good good going crazy for you. Okay, um I try to make this lake as simple as humanly possible and as efficient as humanly possible because it doesn't need to be that dramatic when you're doing design it doesn't need to be like, non destructive and you know it's not the retouching or you want to have multiple layers and you gotta go back and yeah, we make it simple. Okay? I'm also going to make a little block of white behind this collage because I just want teo again I'm not gonna worry about where it is right now because I'm going to use those alignment tools I'm going to do it's only or here I'm gonna go back to black and white just with the letter d and then x to reverse them because I wanted to be white and then all backspace will give me this little white box now again, I want to make sure everything is aligned so I'm going to go ahead and make a marquis here make sure that that centered and now I'm going to click the collage and the box and I have a mark he'd selection and I'm gonna go back to my alignment tools and hit center and now all those center together. So the box and the collage have now centered within that selection perfectly, and I don't have to nudge things makes me happy when I don't have to dodge, I don't know, all right, so we're going to go and do a little bit of fonts and add in some cute little saying here, uh, first, I'm gonna take the capacity of this down because I can okay? So hitting the letter t is the shortcut to get to your text t text makes sense most of the time, the letters that are the shortcut for your tool will make sense according to what the tool is, sometimes they don't like the shortcut for the move tool is v and that's because there was already an m marquis, so they chose another letter that's in the word, but sometimes they don't make sense, but if you ever can't figure out what the shortcut is, if you click on the tool um most of the time like the tea, when it has multiple tools behind it, you can see the different teat tools and the the shortcut will be in the tool bar next to the tool so if you forget you can use matthews handy shortcut guide or was offered o r you think ahead and just look at this the toolbar on dh that usually will show up okay, so we have hit the letter t we're now on text um I am really a little bit fanatical about fonts and how they're used because inappropriate fonts drive me crazy e think I need to make that into a t shirt and appropriate fonts I'm the only geek out there that loves spots just like every decision that we make in our images I have this theory that, uh every image every design, everything that we do tell the story and the things that we choose to incorporate in those are the language by which we tell the story so when you're photographing images you know you choose sleights of it one more time though that was good that way you know it's true though it's everything that you is to portray a message to our audience it's to tell a story so everything that we choose as artists is the language by which we tell them story so when you're doing images you choose background, you choose lighting, you choose outfit, you choose expression, you choose body language, you were making all of these decisions that tell the story of that image the same thing can be said for design uh, everything that you do in your design is what's telling that story. So if I'm designing a wedding album and I'm doing the getting ready page most of the time, that is going to be very light it's going to be very area it's going to be very feminine when I choose to design the page that is the the guy's all the groomsmen together, that's going to be a little edgier it's going to be a little darker most of the time, depending on the ambience of a wedding on outdoor wedding is going to be a lighter design than an indoor cathedral wedding, so the design concepts have to go along with your imagery, and they have to go along to tell the story of what's happening that's why I've chosen green on this particular card to be the background. I'm not going to do pink, and I'm not going to do some sort of other color that doesn't match the feel of what you have in these images. This is all outdoor in this session, very green, it's, very bright. This is a trendy color s o it all matches, and it all goes together, you're found, sir, the same scenario I want to make sure that the story that the font is telling is consistent with the design that I'm doing so. That's a whole different class of it so I could go on and on for three days on flaunt usage, but I won't bore you to tears. Um, they're a different fonts. There are modern fonts like century gothic things that are very clean, clean things that don't have syrups, what's sheriffs are there the little feet on the bottom of one of the letters when they don't have sarah's when they don't have those little feet it's, a very clean font, it's, a very modern font, it's things that I will use for high school seniors, babies I used them quite a bit because I like things to be appear very clean, minimalistic modern things that have sarah ifs are going to be somewhere in between, they're a little bit more traditional, but they're not as traditional as something that's a script, a script is very I'm going to say it. A script is emotional for hunt it's, weird, but true when you're using a script, those are things that I usually use that are more emotional there more naming of the client like a lot of times, I'll put the name in the script and I'll use the you're invited is going to be something that's a little bit more modern and and I'd like to change things up when I'm using more than one font I try to keep it a cz minimal is possible in the design world like I said I came from a bit graphic design background so the design world most advertising will only use to fund it's so a lot of times when I see design it drives me crazy because there's like six different fonts and they don't go together and they're all telling different stories and I'm like it's painful for me you know? So I'm very conscious of the font usage that I use so for this particular one um I'm not going to go back and see what we actually used I'm just gonna play it by ear and it was on there and all right do your thing right? Okay, so again I'm just going to dio um I'm actually gonna choose a darker green and go even darker with this I could use white I could use dark green I may change it later we'll see what happens living dangerously okay so we're going to go and pretend that her name is and he was jenna we don't want to use her tomorrow with made up names were created five we don't use real names around here okay? Her name for today is amy lin amy lynn roberts because that's what I've decided she looks like perfect it's my world today apparently I could do with it um so I'm actually going to put her name in a script here and I lied I'm going to change it to wait no, I'm not so indecisive um and I'm just gonna go up here to my little character and right now it's in century gothic, which is one of my favorite fonts because it's so clean and minimalistic and if my life were a font I would let wanted to be century gothic makes no sense, but I know what I mean. I'm just gonna go ahead and choose I'm also have a slight love affair with fonts um let's choose just allegro uh, no let's choose beautiful because it isthe okay, um when I was in century gothic, I had it on all caps, which is thies too little tease here together and I don't want to do that when it is a scripted font, things that drive me crazy all caps when you're in a scripted font drive me crazy, you want to make sure that anything that you're designing is ledge a ble anything that you're designing is not difficult to get your message across there's no reason again we're telling a story we will we don't want it to be hard for the audience to understand what the story is, so I never do um all caps in a script, I'm going to make the font bigger just by scrolling over the t c watch watch there goes perfect. Okay, another thing that drives me crazy is when you have too much space between letters in a scripted font no scripts are made to look a hundred vehement about that no scripts are supposed to be that they're supposed to look as if they're handwritten written and so when you do space between letters on a scripted font it like fights with your brain and it makes it hard to read so the tool here with the v a and the a with the arrows underneath is what gives you the the distance between letters so I got to make sure that I have the letters all selected and then I'm just gonna go ahead and bring that down to zero so I want to make sure that they go together and then once I am out of that text um tool I can actually go ahead and free transform this to where I needed to be a cz well um I'm gonna drag in a ruler to the edge of this oh hey there's my ruler's again to the edge of my little white box around my collage because I want the front end of the letters and the end of the they're the back end of the letters tow line up perfectly with that white um box here so I'm just going to drop those in so that I can free transform my text box to be very close to the edge I'm not going to worry about getting it absolutely perfect which I should have gotten it less perfect than what I just did but that's okay it's hard for me to be lost perfect and I'm totally kidding okay, so if I don't get it close to perfect on that that ruler what I can also do is I can select the letter the line of type and I can use these tools either um the one that's the space between letters which I don't want to use because it's a scripted font or the width of the letter itself so I can actually um highlight that and then go ahead and, um use my arrow keys up or down to change the length of that line and the width of the letters themselves that's going to come in a little bit more when we do the other type in line that up okay, so control huh? Look at that. So what we're going to say on her card is we're going to say that you're invited to her party so I'm gonna do another line of type above that that says, um celebrate with us in honor of and then her name's gonna be it's gonna be very cute again I'm going to select all of that type because I'm gonna change that fund again like I said her name is gonna be scripted the others informational things I want to make sure anything that's informational is very easy to read lead so we're going to change that back to century gothic because I love it um there are also a million different places where you can find a really really great thoughts um just like everything that you're downloading whether it's fonts or brushes or anything make sure that you're checking the user agreements so that it is something that's not just for personal use that's something that you can use in your business because you are reselling it so make sure that you're watching out for that um I gotta be smarter and what I'm working with they're okay and I am gonna go all caps on this as well just by clicking that little double t all caps button the one next to it the big t and the little tea is all caps but with things that are shift caps is a bigger caps wow did that make sense? Well, kind of when you look at it and makes sense it's all caps but one's a bigger captain the lower cap you know what I mean? Um ok then I'm gonna go ahead and just make that font way smaller even more we're going to go down all way to like no let's go to ten, ten points and this is a place zoom in so that we can actually see what we're doing here this is a point in time where I will actually make the letters themselves wider and also the space between letters wider, the more space you give it, the more modern it feels for some reason, so I'm gonna go ahead and bring that up to one hundred percent and that's the width of the actual letter itself. And then here is the space between the letters and I'm gonna line it up now the space between the letters when you arrow up and down on that one, that one goes at larger increments than the width of the letter itself, so I will go between those two tools tow line it up very precisely to the end of the other text below it, and I liked doing different lines of text on different layers just so that it's really, really easy to manipulate those, uh by themselves, I don't want to have to worry about the line underneath it and then the spacing between the lines it drives you crazy. I want to use every line of text in that way I can do each of them individually. Um, I could free transform that or I could just like I said, use that that little tool to see the with a lot of themselves now this is almost to the edge of that line, but I'm such a perfectionist that it's just a tiny little bit off so I'm going to just do the width of the letters just to these last two words instead of the whole line and then it's going to go right up to the line I'm that crazy about making sure that things lined up so any time I'm doing a template it has got to be perfect especially if I'm going to like sell it on the site for other people I will get angry calls of that line didn't line up yes it did okay um so then if I go ahead and go off go control h then I can go and see it without all of the lines and you could see that those lines of tight matchup just perfectly some make sense okay, I've gone through a lot of information very quickly is there any questions before I move onto making a template? I'm definitely a font chunky to to use any kind of font manager at all clear system now you just you just dump him in yeah, but that's actually a good thing to do teo ass I do just dump all my fonts in but if you have a lot of fonts and you want to be able tio see what's actually gonna happen if you choose a different fun if you're on the text tool and you have it and you select these fonts this is one of the benefits of being pc I know there's a way to do it with mac, but I can't remember what that is it's a little bit differently but I can actually go in here to my father and I can just use my air aki and I khun scroll down and see what the different fonts are going to look like so I can go through and like I do this a lot when I'm doing sports posters and things like that where I need something I can't picture what it's going to look like with fine I'll just type in what I need to and then scroll through the different fonts to find what I want so that is one of the reasons why I just keep them all in one place but is there a file manager that I should know about? No, I'm totally gonna look that up and I don't but I'm totally gonna look that up later, okay? Yes okay let's take one from nancy m who's asking if you can clarify how when you're using the marquis tool you're cropping part of the image like to make a square that's a new one to her okay, when I when I used it to crop around okay marquis tool the shortcut is m and basically you just click on and you just draw squares like you can see here, so when I had the collage over here, and I wanted to. The edges weren't lined up perfectly, so I drew a square around the whole collage like that. And then I used my arrow keys to make sure that there was a little bit of files showing around the edges, so that when I selected in verse, so I go select an inverse and I'll zoom in that so you can see it a little bit more now. Everything that I had is this where I selected the inverse of it. So everything outside of what I made that marquis square is selected. And then when I hit delete, you can actually watch here that these little pixels are going to disappear. So I was just making it really, really easy. I could've done that another way, and I'll just show you that as well. Instead of doing, um, a square around that whole collage, what I could do is I could just use the marquis and I could do the top edge like this and then hit delete. And then I could do the bottom edge here and hit delete and do it on all four sides. But it's just easier. To make a square around the whole selection and select inverse and delete something sense yes, I wish that crate of live had a slow mo, but I know I think I rewind but goingto have to purchase the cloud I'm saying even if I have, even if I have the course and I was pressing rewind, I will be hoping for a slow mo button I'm just trying to fit in a lot of inferno is also quickly I'm not complaining, I'm just saying, wow, the theme of this course, you know, okay, you want to keep going or do you want another? We can question we could take that kind of review questions because people didn't know sara lee get it the first time you and I went through a lot and didn't stop for questions so we can answer a few and then all the more using a template, okay, great. Um, rk photography would like you to review one more time. How do you make claire mass to be able to be used more than one time, uh, layer mass or to be saying mass the question is layer mass to be able to use more than once and I don't know, maybe they doing clipping masks um e haven't talked about layer masks yet, um I briefly did something like a clipping masked but give me a second cause we're going to make it a template and I may be able to address that sweet mark okay, perfect no problem one more maybe just one chiefly we've had a couple of people who are designers who have jumped in and have just know are just curious why why would whoever why we would want to use photo shop instead of indesign to do something like this? My assumption is just that it's because well this is oriented mostly towards photographers right now who all have photoshopped is that what it is why I do most of my design in for a shop? I do realize that there are other programs like indesign illustrator that our vector based programs that are better for fonts that your printer's actually like mme or like if you do something you send it to a real printer they're going to be like this is not a vector based thing and you just on its go like make their head swell and your like whatever print the j bag but yeah, it is basically just because wear gearing this this tour photographers and photo shop is what they know so I do most of my design in photo shop on lee for that reason the template that I created for my my template business are based toward photographers because that's the industry in the world that I live in and that's the problem that's, a program that they know we do on our site, actually have some things that are designed in design for people. That that is their method. And that's. Great. But most of what we do is based for photographers. And this is where they're at.