Lessons

Lesson Info

Photoshop - Adding Text and Layer Masks to Mock Ups

- [Julia] So you can see I've got some pretty good reflections in this. Let's go ahead and work with this one first. We are going to edit in Photoshop. Open. Open. Open. Open. Open. Open. There we go. Just on the slower side. It's always weird when you're working with a computer that's not yours. All right. So here's my image. I'm going to go ahead and rotate it to the direction that I wanted. Also, we got a little bit of distortion going on. Seeing that? So to fix that, I'm going to press Command + A to select it all. Then I'm going to go Command + T to free transform it. You could also go up to Edit, Free Transform. Then I'm going to right-click and play with these. Skew, probably, will be good for this. Look at that. Straightening out my lines. See what I'm doing? Got to be careful not to screw things up too much. Okay, that's better. Then I'm going to crop into where I want. And then see how my iPad was a little crooked. I don't have a perfectly symmetrical thing. So, again, someth...

ing to watch for when you shoot. So if I wanted to put a document inside this iPad, and it's not totally sharp. We'll use it anyway. What I'm going to do is, first of all, add a shape to the iPad. I'm going to add a sha... I'm not happy with this. Hang on. The fact that that's not in focus is really bugging me. Let's go back to Lightroom. Is that better? I'm going to use this one. Is that okay, guys? I like it better. Why do I like it better? I thought when I shot it, that I would want my shadow on the left side, but I actually liked more negative space on the left side with the shadow. But I actually liked... I might actually flip this image so that it's on the right-hand side compositionally with the light bright area on the negative space side, which right now is the right. Pretty soon, it'll be the left because I'm going to flip. It gives me a little happier of a feeling. Does that make sense? It's not so dark and moody and dreary. So that's why I'm deciding to go this direction. So let's go ahead and flip the image. I'm going to go to Image, Adjustments. No. No, excuse me. Image Rotation, Flip Canvas Horizontal. You see what I mean? So now, I still have a little bit of distortion but I'm not going to worry about it too much. Tables can be odd. The reason this happened is because I was using that wide-angle lens at 42 millimeters. So what I should have done was get on a taller ladder with a 50-millimeter lens so I didn't have as much distortion to deal with. So just keep that in mind. So if I want to add an object into the iPad, what I'll do is go to the Rectangle Tool, zoom in here, and create a shape that is the size of the iPad. Not quite straight so I'm going to flip it just a touch. Free transform it, Command + T. Just to make it a little bit bigger. It's okay if it's slightly bigger than the iPad itself. No one is going to know. So now, if you'll see on my layers palette wherever that may be, there it is, I have this shape here. This rectangle on top of my iPad. So now, if I want to get a document in there, all I have to do is add some JPEG image of the cover of my ebook or whatever into this Photoshop document. So I'm going to go File, Place. You can either do embedded or linked. I usually do embedded. Doesn't really matter for our purposes here. I have this cover. We do a market like You Mean It class every year and we do a brand and marketing audit for our students to do before they come to class. So this is the cover of that electric tutonic document. So I place it in there. I'm going to go ahead and press Yes, that's where I want it. Then what I do to see the layer of the JPEG, the cover of the book here, is on top, I've got my rectangle at the bottom. I need this to go inside this. So what I do is I have a shortcut for it but I won't go to the shortcut. I go up to Edit. Is it Edit? I use the shortcut so much that I forget where it is. Layer. Layer. It's under Layer. Create Clipping Mask. And watch what happens. Boom, its now inside the iPad and all I have to do is resize it. So you can see Photoshop has clipped this layer into the rectangle. So when I press... I'm going to take your question, just a second, Judith. When I press Command + T to free transform again and resize it, you can see the shape of... It's too big, right? I got to shove it down. So to keep the integrity of the dimensions of the ebook, I have to press the Shift key and then drag one of these corners down and that allows me to create this right inside the iPad. So now, I have the ability to use this as product photography for an ebook or some PDF I'm giving away. With content marketing being so huge nowadays and people giving free e-guides and checklists and cheat sheets and all workbooks and all kinds of cool stuff, this allows you to market that product a little nicer. And then, of course, you can crop it down if you want it to be a little bit more. You could even get rid of all of this here to create a cool mock-up for a product that you're trying to sell. So it's basically just taking the document, bringing it in by going File, Place, and then Clipping Mask. That's under Layer, Create Clipping Mask. It says Release now because I've already created one. The other shortcut to doing that is to press the Option key and hover between the two layers over here on the right. That will release the clipping mask or make it happen again. That's the shortcut I always use for it. So that's a nice easy way to make a product or whatever and all of a sudden you've got a cool brand. We can also retouch this a little bit since this is dark over here. We could actually do a curves adjustment and brighten this over here but I don't want to get into a ton of Photoshop stuff because that's not what this is about. But what I would do is on the right side of the image, it's a little bright compared to this on the left. I would brighten up the succulent and the wood table, as well as the tape there. And then do a gradient so it didn't affect the left side of the image. So it just did curves, nice brighter adjustment on the right side. And then we'd have a really cool image to be able to promote a product with. All right? Sound like a plan, Stan? Edit in Photoshop and then go back to Lightroom. Forgive me for being really amateur in Lightroom right now. I just don't use the software so I'm a little bit... Where's my other pretty pictures? There they are. Okay. Let's do it on this one. Yeah? We like it? We like it. First of all, I'm going to crop it in just a little bit to get rid of some of my funky, funky lines going on. I am also... it's bugging me that it's not quite right because I haven't done any raw adjustments to this image. I basically just brought them in from Lightroom as is. So I'm going to go ahead and press Command + M and just give it a quick curves bumps because it's really bugging me that it's not doing what I want. And what I would do is go...since I'm such a Lightroom novice, if I was in Bridge, I would go and do raw adjustments. See how there's a vignette around here? That's lens vignetting. That's my lens doing that because of... my 50 millimeter just always has that... It just does it. And Camera Raw has the ability to fix that with one click. It's called Enable Lens Correction, and it will fix the distortion as well as the vignetting around the edge. But since I'm total Lightroom novice, I'll feel like an idiot if I try to do it in Lightroom. So I'm going to go ahead and just do as is. But the fun thing about working with textures is not only can we add text to this canvas and inlay it into the canvas, but we can also add texture to the overall image to give it that aged cool vintage look. So, first things first, let's go ahead and add some cool text to our image, to our page. So I'm going to... I click the text tool over here on the left and I'm just going to make a text box. This is where I want to type my text. What should we type? Art. How's that? Cool font. I don't know what font this is, but we're going to change it. So I've typed in the word art and then I need to get to my Character. Was it open somewhere? Character. Character is what allows you to change fonts inside of Photoshop. So I'm going to go to Character. It's called Phosphate. So then we can scroll through. Oh, that's fun. Marker Felt. We can go through and pick a font that we think would work with our... This computer too, you know how when you scroll, it scrolls a certain way for you. It's opposite of what I do. So I'm like, "Doesn't work." Little footballs. Okay. Chalk Duster, what do you guys like? That looks cool, right? We'll do that. It's not handwritten but that's okay. And let's make it all caps just because that's easy. Then I'm going to press the V key to move it. V, move. And then, again, Command + T, Transform, to turn it so that it fits on our little slide here. Press Return and that locks it in. Now, I could just leave it like that... Probably I'd pick a different font. It's not my favorite font. But just for demonstrations' sake, we'll do it here. I could just leave it as is, but if I really want it to look like it's in the texture, I need to use what's called a blending mode. Photoshop has all these wonderful blending modes. And Overlay is one of those ones that makes it looks like it's actually ingrained into the canvas, which is really cool. Of course, it blends with the layer beneath it so it's going to take black text and turn it somewhat brown. So to just keep you aware of that. You can look at all these different modes and see what you like better. Multiply is often a really good one as well. You can't see it as well, but it has blended with the texture below. You can use Screen which makes black go away. So unless you're using white. So let's go ahead and switch it to white and I'll show you what Screen does here. Why does Character keep going away? Probably because I keep deleting it. So we'll change the text to white and then put it in Screen mode. You can see it. It's not very good, but you can see it. Overlay would be a good one for this or Soft Light would also work pretty well too. So you see how you can create different effects and it looks like it's actually printed on to the canvas. Makes sense? So let's just leave it like that and then we're going to add a texture over the top of it. Again, the same concept. We're going to File, Place, Embedded. Actually, you know what? I already have it open, don't I? We can either use File and Place, Embedded or what we can do is take the file, which we see right here, and simply, I'm going to go ahead and curve this as well. Brighten it up just a touch. We can take this with the Move tool and simply grab it. Hover over the tab of the mock-up we have and then place it on the top of it. And that'll be just like that. Did that make sense? Do I need to do that again? Sometimes I do things too fast and I need to re-explain. No? We're good? No need to re-explain? So now, as you can see over here on the right, I've got my background layer, I've got my art text layer, and I've got this photo over the entire top of it that's covering everything, right? If I simply start playing with the blending modes, now, I've created cool texture over the top of my image and I can then adjust the opacity of that to be only where I want it or to be the level of opacity that give the look that I'm after. And then if there's a place where... So let's turn it up just a little bit just so you can see a little bit better. If I don't want it on my canvas per se but I want it everywhere else, I just go down here to the Layer Mask button. Layer masking can sometimes be very confusing to people. All I want you to understand is what I'm doing when I press that button, is punching a hole in that layer of floor, grit floor. So what I'm doing is I'm telling Photoshop we can punch a hole in this, so I can see what's below. I always look at it like those...remember your mom used to make those toast sandwiches that had a hole in the middle and the egg would be in the middle. What do they call those? - [Audience] (inaudible). - Wasn't there a name for them? There was a hole in the middle of sandwiches. There was a hole in the middle pieces of toast. My mom used to... - Exit a basket. - Exit a basket. Is that what it's called? Yeah. And so my mom would make this toast and she would cut a hole out in the middle, then she'd put a fried egg right in the middle of the hole. That's exactly what you're doing when you're layer masking. And all you're doing is telling Photoshop, "We are allowed to punch through this to see the plate on the bottom." That's all we're doing. So when we click that button, nothing will happen. It's just telling Photoshop, "Okay, I'm ready to punch a hole." So I'm going to press that button up. We're prepped now. We can paint a hole in there. We can punch the hole for the egg to go in. So then it's important for me to take my Brush tool in either black or white color. Black erases white brings it back. And I can erase... What am I on here? I'm making my brush just softer. So you can see my brush is at 100%. I was freaking out because I'm like, "What's happening?" The reason that was happening is because my brush was really hard and fully opaque. So I'm just making the brush a little bit softer. You can do that by pressing the Control Option key and then scrolling up or down, and that will make your brush softer. If you press the Control Option key and move right or left, so I'm pressing Control Option right now then moving right or left and that's making my brush bigger or smaller so no more pressing that bracket case. Isn't that awesome? It's much faster. Those of you who are Photoshop gurus, just I saved your life about 10 minutes each image. Those of you who don't understand, you will later get it. So I can now make my brush, say, 50% or 40% and start erasing off the canvas here. Do you see that going away? Fading away? So the canvas won't have the distraction of the texture, but the image will. I can erase it off the eraser. See it going away off that little eraser there? Just brushing it away by using a black brush. I could even do it on my pencils if I wanted. I obviously don't have a mouse or Wacom tablet so it's a little harder for me on the trackpad here. But you get my point? So now I have texture on areas of the image where I want it, but not on the canvas itself. And that's simple layer masking. If I wanted to bring it back because I felt like I made a mistake, all I have to do is switch colors over here to white and then I can easily bring that texture back by painting. You see how, over here on the layers palette, the white is bringing it back and you can see the texture coming back on the canvas. I made a mistake. Reverse. That's the beauty of layer masks. They're awesome. So textures are really fun, and I simply shot the floor. There's so many types. I was like, "Look at that metal wall over there. It's awesome. With those squares like that, that brick lay pattern, you could have so much fun using textures like that in your mock-ups. A blast. We could also do a texture on that vertical mock-up we did. The upright one. That would be another great place to do a texture as well. So I'm going to go over one more time to...I'm going to bring in one of those. - [Judith] Yes. When you use the Rectangle Tool, which isn't one that I'm that familiar with, did it automatically create a smart object or a path? - Yes. It creates a shape. It's a vector tool. Sorry for those of you who are beginner. You don't have to worry about the word "vector" right now. The Shape Tool is what it was. The Rectangle Tool creates a vector object. If you want to influence it, you may have to rasterize it. Right-click and rasterize so that it's not a vector anymore. But yeah, it will immediately make a vector shape for you. I want to extend this background a little bit because I know everybody was like, "How do you do that?" Because I could see it in your faces when we were shooting this. So this is the vertical or upright mock-up we were doing. So I'm going to quickly just crop this down a touch. I'm going to crop off the right side because I like that look. But then the left side, do you see how we have all this over here? We need to get rid of it. Watch real close because this is really fun. I'm going to go ahead and extend my canvas just a little bit to get it nice long skinny. So first, I'm going to do that with the Crop Tool. So I'm going to simply go like that. Nice long image. Now, since my background is white, it's automatically placing bright white in there. But do you see how this is way brighter than this right here? I want this background over here. So to get that to happen, I'm going to go up to my selection tool in Photoshop. A selection tool just is what it is, It's a selects an area you want to change. So I'm going to go over this marquee tool which is a square. I want the square version of it. Make sure I have no feather. And then I'm simply going to highlight the area I want to change plus as much over here as I can to bring over. Then I'm going to just, again, free transform. I use the Free Transform tool so much. It's either Edit, Free Transform or Command + T. And you can see these little handles. And this is literally all that's going to happen. I'm going to drag everything that way. Bam. Done. Now, I have a really cool mock-up that I can use for a blog header. I can put all kinds of text. I can put a logo over here to market myself. And this is the J Photo Blog, whatever you want to call it. This is where the world is your oyster and you can have a lot of fun. Again, I haven't done anything to this image to brighten it up or make it pretty at all, which I would probably do. And voila, there we go. Fun little blog header that was easy and simple to create. Literally, 10 seconds. I like that one. I'm going to keep that one. It's nice. And you'll create things that you love and things you're like, "It was okay." It's just the nature of the beast. I have so many projects, guys, that will never see the light of day on my hard drive. Hundreds of projects. I will shoot things then Glen will be like, "Are you ever going to use that?" I don't know. I'm not inspired yet. I shoot stuff, I was inspired at the time and then I'm like, "That's crap. I don't want to show the light of day. It's...no one should see that. That's not my best work." And so just know that not every image you create is going to be beautiful and perfect. Some of them are going to be just junk and you're going to get all mad at yourself. Just go back out and shoot again. That's the whole process of creativity. Creativity is a journey. It is not a destination. And creativity is not one of those things where you're magically bestowed some magical power on you that God gave you and, "Oh my gosh, you're creative and you're not." Creativity is a learned skill and it's something that comes with practice. It just does not instantly right away happen to you like some genius moment. It just is what it is. And it will come over time as you practice more. I have been taking some time off creating art this year because we were doing a lot of classes on education and I really felt my creativity fade because I wasn't using and exercising that part of my mind. And it was actually quite disconcerting. So basically, this month, I started looking at projects and going, "Okay. I need to get creative." And I really felt my mind all of a sudden go, "Yeah. I could do that or I could that." Or, "This would be really cool." And I started to feel that inspiration again. So inspiration comes when you work at it. Not when you just expect it to walk into your life. Inspiration is one of those things that's... Elizabeth Gilbert calls it a friend that you have to have a relationship with. If moments of inspiration come and if you don't take them and grab them and make them your friend, they will go and find somebody else and give your idea to them. So be forgiving of yourself when things don't always go correctly because you'll create lots of bad images in your life and you'll create a few gems that you love that will make your portfolio. And that is the nature of the beast.