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Guest Jen Creating Custom Products Part 1

Before we get started do you guys know where kodak got it's business time from the founder actually just like the letter k ah lot and he and his mom sat in their kitchen and decided that they were going to put letters together until they found a word that started with k and ended with kay. So so that's what you learned today for this segment? Thank you so much for tuning in. No, so I want to welcome my friend jen killing gay she has been a very, very dear friend of mine for many years she's been a mentor to me and an awesome friend. Her work is ridiculous she's very, very talented photographer you could check out her work at momento images dot com it's insane it's very high end, very fashion e it's who I hired to photograph my personal wedding and she's not just a great photographer but she's amazing at designing stuff and her use of photo shop through processing and lengths about it's. Incredible. And when I started to do this creative live workshop I had the opportunity to share with...

you guys some of the things that we do to drive up our sales and one of them is greg cards wall hangs things like that those are opportunities to drive our sales up higher and I could've shown you all this stuff but quite frankly, jen can do it a lot better than me, so I wanted to bite are come on out jan coming out coming out so jen is gonna walk you through a bunch of stuff with graduation cards, and we're going to show you some of the wall hangs that she's designed and it's gonna make it really, really easy for you guys to stand out in your marketplace with custom stuff that isn't going to take you all day to do so and and the other company that I have other than my photography shells owns jen's fabulous stuff dot com check it out. All of these templates that she's going to go through today are going to be featured. If you purchase the course, those are all included in there. All right? I'm gonna hang out awesome! I'm so happy that matthew has brought me here today, and what I'm going to do for you is we're going to go through quick, efficient design tips for designing graduation announcements. Uh, I've taken a few of matthew's images and made some simple graduation cards, and I'm going to show you some things in photoshopped that will make that process a little bit easier for the last three days you've been talking about efficiency in your business, and I feel like making sure that your products are efficient and your design is efficient I mean this khun take up just as much time as anything else that you do in your business so it's really important to me that anything that I'm dio I'm doing in my business and my studio in design is very, very quick very very efficient and photo shop has a lot of little little hidden things to help you do that so um first off I'm going to show you ah, a couple of the designs that we that I've done with matthew's images for grad cards here and I'm going to be re creating this cute little green card for you and I'm going to do it from scratch we're going to take the images and we're gonna build this card from scratch we're going to be using text we're going to talk a little bit about why you use different text together we're going to be making this cute little collage, making that really, really simple, quick and easy we're going to be using brush is a little bit so we can show you how to manipulate brushes and how to turn those and things like that and then I'm actually gonna turn this card into a template and show you how you would do that if you're designing in your studio and you design something from scratch whether it's a card or an album or a wall collage or anything that you d'oh. You can then take that design and make it a template so that you have that available to you the next time you have somebody who comes in whose wearing the same clothing, or has the same theme you can then go to your backlog of designs and pick something that you already have. I do this a lot in my own business for greeting cards for christmas cards and things like that in christmas card season. I will actually create this year's design set I used to go through, and my portrait business is a little bit more boutique style. And I used to think it was really, really important to have everything be accustomed design and I was killing myself. There was one year that I did sixty eight custom christmas card designs for sixty eight different families and it was make this design. Send it to the client, wait for their approval, get it back with changes. Send it out to him again. Reproof it and it didn't make sense for your business. So the next year what I did is I took and I made. Ten different designs and from each of those designs, I did a flat card, a folded card on a small card so that my clients would have options. And I said that this was this year's design siri's and so when my clients came in, they could pick from the design siri's or they could shockingly pay me a design fee to do something custom, so I was able to have something set up so it's really important once you do a design be able to make that into a template so that you can have that as something that you sell to your clients on a consistent basis. The funny thing about that process, wass actually, what happened was my client's came back and said, this was so much easier, like you're kidding me, it was easier for both of us, but they actually didn't care whether or not it was custom and the ones that it meant something to actually paid me a custom design fee toe have that bebe custom, but they didn't care, so so we could question absolutely all the time. So with your custom designed he's like, how much are you charging for that? You know, it was something really simple we just decided to charge a fifty dollar, custom designed tio, which was enough to cover my time to do something from scratch. And what's magical about that is it? It was enough of a deterrent that most people chose from the pre designed cards eso is something really simple that we instituted so tip so you went from sixty eight cards one year? Yeah, tow what the next year, cousin okay, that was way easier in my christmas rush. Eso we've adopted that for everything. We have a design siri's for all the different genres that we shoot. Okay, so we have a design siri's for grad cards one for save the dates, one for christmas cards, baby announcements anything that we shoot, we'd make this year's design siri's and I change it up every year and if you're not a good designer it's very, very simple to go onto a template sites such has my sight or any of the other templates sites that are out there and choose ten different designs this year and that's what you're going to feature and it's really easy to change that up every year so that you have things that are new a different or to pick a core line of this is what my studio represents and have that as your as your normal design theory for the year or you could do customers well, so follow up to matthew's question if a client paid you that fifty dollars design fee, would you reuse that template later for another client um yes, but probably not in the same year. And it really would depend on how custom it wass, but, yeah, I would make it make a template out ever everything. Everything I have ever designed for my business, I have made a template. Um, it just makes life easier, and it also makes it a little bit more streamlined. If you do decide to have employees, uh, templates make their life easier because they may not be designers. I went to school for graphic design on that's what my background was in before I became a photographer. So it's, easy for me to do design. But if you have anybody who's, an employee templates make their lives really easy, and I'm going to show you how to actually use the template and how easy that is to just use, you know, the clipping toe. Place it into the little black box. And how simple that isthe so great let's get started. All right, so I'm gonna go ahead and recreate this fun little green card here, and I have already just pulled up a five by seven file. Now, normally, what I will do when I start any sort of design is I will actually start with the designed templates from whoever my printer is, so if your printing custom cards through a lab or if you're using a print company or an online source, most of those places will have a pre designed template. It's really good to start there because they will have all of the cut marks, all of the bleeds all of the sizing correct. So instead of guessing it's easier, teo, just go ahead and start with the design template so I've just pretended that we're starting with a design temple, and I'm just starting with a five by seven file, and we're just going to make something really quick and easy, so I'm not actually using anybody's template, but what you will need to understand is you want to pull in a few rulers to make sure that when you send this off to print that it won't print off the page, so always make sure that I pull a few rulers in usually about a quarter of an inch and just dragging in from the rulers on the side just to make sure that no important information is going to be within those safe lines. Like I said, if you're using a template from any of the companies, they should have those those safe lines in place, so we just have a blank page here, I'm gonna go grab a few images, maybe. There we go had to remember which ones I was using I'm actually gonna go back and look at which ones I have here there we go okay, so this one I believe those are the files and may pull in an extra one I did a couple different designs we gotta see which files I used here okay, so we're gonna use this fun little grass shot as our main image we're just going to start dragging things on I'm not even going to worry about re sizing yet I'm going to show you some tricks with free transform a little bit later so I'm just gonna grab all of those files and drag them on tio my car design and then just go ahead and close out the other main files as I'm pulling them here I had I gotta go look one more time to make sure which ones I used I am good I think I have one extra but we'll see okay so we have all of their files on our background or background is just white for a time being we'll change it up to be something else a little bit later and I'm going to size all of these images just by using free transform so I'm using pc today I no speak slowly to me but you know so I'm going to go control t to free transform and I'm just going to do the first transform of this small file first, and you can either you know, go in and grab the corner and move things around, but you can see that that will distort. So if you control z, that goes back, if you hold shift, you can move that from the corner without distorting it. I prefer to come up to the tool bar up here and click on this little link, because then that will link the width and horizontal, and I don't have to hold shift so I can just grab from the corner or I can scroll over the w of the wit, and that will automatically take it down a cz well, or I can put in a number if I know I wanted to be fifty per cent, I can put in fifty and it's going to transform it to fifty percent. Um, we're going to make them pretty small. I didn't know that w trick you didn't didn't. Oh, I ee take notes on how many lessons radio so that city is taking that that's a good thought. I didn't know most most of the tools, like, if you click okay, we'll hit it, okay, so that goes in most of the tools if you click on the word of the tool and scroll like anything that that has. Like capacity or anything that you can change the number of usually you could just hover over the world word click on it like I can change the opacity just by clicking over the word opacity and it brings it up and down crazy no. Okay, my work here is done. Matthew learned e o okay. Say, for instance, that you have number a number of different files and you know that you want the transform tio be the same on all of the files. What you can also d'oh is if I now click on the next file underneath I can go, um control shifty and it will do the same transform that I just did. So if you transform one and you know you want the same ratios a quick control shift, he is going to do whatever transformation that you just did so that's a helpful little hint tio we're going to do that a couple of different times um what you can also do is you, khun grab more than one layer at a time by going over here to your layers palate holding shift and clicking on different layers here in the palate and then you can go control t click your little link here bring your w down and it will do it khun transform more than one layer at a time so that's helpful to okay I'm going to bring the background image down just to fit vertically within our file here so I'm gonna click that little link button again, track it down and just pull it over here and then I'm actually going to go over here tio my my file my layers and I'm just going to click on the eyeball so that it goes away I'm not really trying to look at that one right now. Um I I know I have one image too many. Which one did I not use here? Okay, I got it. Uh well on this one god. Okay, um when I am looking at doing a collage, which is what we're going to do with these these four small images here I'm looking for a couple of different things um in design, as americans we read designed just like we would read a book in a z formation so it's left to right top to bottom, so when I'm looking at the different images that I'm going to be using in design, I want to make sure that my eyes going to follow things correctly. So a lot of times I will always face I contact and body language into the center of a design so that my eye travels around the image, so I'm very conscious of where I'm laying the images within a design so that it doesn't feel awkward just like when a pose is off there's a lot of reasons why that happens the same thing can be said for design when you're looking at it they could just be like ah that feels weird and I don't know why a lot of times it's because our eye follows the information in our eye also follows body language and I contact within our subject so be aware of those things when you're laying things out of where things should be placed so for that reason I'm actually going toe reverse these two because here she's leaning into the image and here shoot her body is facing into the image so I always want that point of interest to come back into center it's just one of those little things that I'm really you know are attentive about and like it creeps me out when I see designs and it's like somebody's looking off the page because I feel like everything that you place has a conversation and I feel like thoughts have a conversation images have a conversation and I wanted to always come back in and not distract so that's why she's facing in on this one and she's facing in on this image as well so we're just going to kind of place thes and I'm not really worrying too much about getting things perfect because I'm actually going tto take a little bit of space off of these too diagonal images and make them a little bit more square, so I'm just kind of kind of center her body here, underneath the image on top, and and I'm going to go ahead and take a marquee tool and just get rid of some of this image space I have to be on the right layer here. Also, make sure that when you're working in photo shop there's, a couple of things that you'll I want to have clicked and one of them is when you're in your move tool, make sure that your auto select is clicked because what that means is you can actually go and select anything within your file and it's going to jump to that layer. If that's not clicked, you actually have to go over to your layers palate, select the layer, go back, you want to make sure that you're saving time as much as possible so that a little auto select is an important one to have on. So I'm just going to square these up a little bit, and I'm not really worried about proportions. Like I said, we're doing all of this in the most efficient way possible today, so I'm not really worried about making sure that the sizes of each image is perfectly proportioned, um, we're going to worry about that in the end, so some of these will need to be tweaked with a little bit more free transform and you may need to I'm not gonna worry about the edge right here I'll show you why in a little bit also if I have that um auto select clicked on here I khun scroll over multiple layers at a time and it will choose them from the layers palette. So for instance, these two layers here together I want teo free transform to be bigger so they're closer in size to the vertical length of these two so I'm going to scroll over and you can see over here on the little layers palette when I do that I'll show you again if I just scroll often scroll over those two layers anything that I scroll over will select and then I can free transform them together just like that okay, great come in a nun sees a little bit closer it's really, really close to where I need things to be. Now what I can also d'oh is I can turn on smart guides and smart guides is imperative if you're ever going to be doing any designs and they are the loveliest tool I absolutely love smart guides such a geek all right, so where you find smart guides is view show smart guides now what smart guides do is they actually clip your image is actually anything they clip objects to each other either two edges or center of other objects so once I move one of these things you'll see these little pinkish purple lines show up and they're snapping that image to exact edges or centers of other images it actually works with other things to like if I had text on here which we're going to get to in a little bit it will snap the image to the center of the edge of text it will snap it to the center or the edge of a brush anything that you have on here recognizes objects and snaps them together and it makes designing and laying things out really really nice and easy so this is where I'm going to get into a little bit of trouble because I'm going tio put these all on one layer I know people are saying well I I will show you why again I'm talking about doing things just very very efficiently in my studio I want to design this thing in fifteen minutes um so what I'm going to do is I'm going to select all of these images in the collage and I'm gonna hit control e to merge them together now what that allows me to do is it allows me to make sure that the lines and the edges it's very easy now tow line those up if you if I didn't want to inch over with the little aargh buttons to make sure that everything was perfect and draw in um you know ruler guides and make sure that everything was coming together this is just a gn easier quicker way to do it we can also always take these apart later if we need to when I'd go to design the template I'm going to take them apart again but for now we're gonna put them all in one layer and I'm just going to take my marquee tool which the shortcut for marquis tools just the letter m and I'm going to just drag a little square here and I'm just gonna arrow to where that looks good and you see that some parts of the image are coming out of the square I'm actually going to hit um all tha s and then I which is just select inverse the other way you could do that is go up tio select in verse hope I handed my selection want wall all right there we go so I can dio select inverse it really is a time saver if you can really set yourself up to always use the shortcuts always always always there are places out there that you can actually go and get a list of the shortcuts for photo job and I suggest that you print the list put it on your computer and not allow yourself to go up to the panels up here because learning those shortcuts or really shave off a bunch time funny you bring that up? That list is included for this class a scythe. Okay, I did I've made a list it's not all the keyboard trust because there's so much there somebody stuff that we would use in our business so a lot of what you're going over is is in there so thank you. Oh, okay, good. So make a list that matthew has provided for you and tape it to your computer so that you don't ever have to go up and use those drop downs. So we have everything selected outside of that box that we created and I'm just going to hit delete and now all of a sudden this is a perfect square and none of those edges air hanging over and it's a quick, efficient way tow tow line everything up around the edges, then what I'm going to do is I'm gonna go ahead and just make a little mark he here on the inside and again I'm just going to hit delete. The only reason that works is because I have everything on one layer it's quick, easy and painless now here's the fun part I get so excited about these little hints okay, I want to make sure that the horizontal line are exactly the same distance as that vertical separation line that I just made right so I don't want to on select what I have going here, I'm gonna go up to select and I'm gonna go transform selection now it gives me, like, a free transform on my marching aunt selection so I can hold shift when you hold shift. That means that it's going to rotate things that at forty five and ninety degree angles, so if I hold shift, I can rotate that selection, click okay? And now suddenly I have a horizontal selection that was exactly the same as my vertical selection, because I am really, really nit picky about making sure that all of the edges and everything that we design are really good and look good together and everything matches up. It drives me crazy when there's like mawr in between vertically than there is for a lonely, so I'm gonna go ahead and just grab that selection and bring it down over here and just edge it over, move it up and hit delete now that space between is just perfect over there, and if I go ahead, don't mind my screen because that's not real life and hit delete so this really uh yes, israel life is for ever. Ok, so now, if I uninsulated tw r d select that's the actual technical term for it, my horizontal and vertical lines are exactly perfect everything's lined up, I didn't take the time to dragon rulers everything's good to go on this little collage so yes now we're going to free transform it to make it smaller oh um if you hit shift and ault when you're dragging in in free transform it will actually transform from the center point if you've ever wondered what that little thing in the center of your free transform is it's it's your center point and it can actually be moved but if you hit ault and shift it'll transform around that center point anywhere that center point is what you like rotate around it's what it's where everything moves from so if you move that center point up tio here now all of a sudden it will rotate around the top so that's what? That little guy is as a side note okay so we're gonna make that pretty small about there is sh looks good perfect now we have a lovely little collection of images up in the upper right hand corner now the other three zone of why I wanted to put all of these images on there own layer is if I decide that I want to do is some sort of um layer effect it would now affect everything all of those images together so say for instance I'm going to turn the background black so that you can see what I'm going to dio just by going control ida in verse and I wanted to dio like a stroke or an outer glow or something on these images, they're all on one layer, so if I come down here to layer effects and let's say, I'm going to do just show you a stroke here, obviously black is not going to show up just do a little white one here and always, if you're going to do a stroke, always do it on the inside of the image instead of on the outside of the image. If you put it on the outside, it makes rounded corners on your stroke. You put it on the inside. Those corners will be square and that's what you want on square images most of the time, rules are made to be broken, but, um, do we know why this filled with white? No, we don't. Ok, well, whatever. Um, uh, awkward eso. Anyway, it put a stroke on all of those different images. Oh, because I changed the opacity of that one image before when I was rolling over. So we won't put a stroke on these images. But you understand what I'm talking about, so it will do it on everything that's on that same layer. So that's, one of the other reasons of why I put everything on one layer when I'm doing a quick, efficient design. So if I'm going to do like a drop shadow or something like that and I wanted to be the same on all of those images, I'm going just going to put those on one one layer together. Okay? So I'm gonna come back here and make my background white again. Um, another little tidbit. The letter d will always default your foreground and background color black back to black and white, um, and the letter x will switch them so you can see down here it's switching from black and white, uh, as white as foreground and black is foreground when I hit the letter x and then to fill without going back over and doing like an alternate. If you want to fill with black or white or foreground background alternate back space will fill with four ground control. Back space will fill with whatever background color that you have selected.