Make Holiday Cards in Photoshop: Seasons of Love!

1. Welcome!: their care. And if you ever thought it would be fun to design your own holiday cards and Photoshopped, you were right. I've been teaching Photoshopped and Design for almost 20 years, and this course is part of a beginner friendly Siri's that I created help walking step by step. Four different holiday thin. This particular course will be creating this design right here. You'll find links for free downloads of all the related to mine elements and fun in the included course, along with a link for a free trial of Photoshopped. In case you don't already happened, way go. You'll learn how to build a new document from scratch, how to work with type and what the layers handle is all about. And when we're finished, you'll have a completed design that you can be proud of and a set of files that are ready to send to your favorite lab for printing. And if you don't have a favorite lab, all even walk you through the upload and ordering process at one of my favorite. So gather up your favorite photos, put on some holiday tunes or grab a cup of hot chocolate and let Dio 2. Getting Started: So as I showed you just a moment ago. This is what will be creating. It's a five by seven flat card with both of front and a back design. Everything you need is included, so take a moment right now to download the course files, click on all the links and download those files and install the fonts. If you need help installing fonts, you'll also find a link with instructions. How to do that in the course. PdF. You'll find the course files by clicking the Your Project link just below this video and then to the right hand side, you'll see the download link in the next video, we'll get started with photo shop, and mistakes are part of the fun. So when you make one, don't panic. If you need to undo something you've done, just press command or control Z. That's all there is to it. So let's get started 3. Document Setup: All right. So our first step is going to be to create our new document, come up to the file menu and shoes new. We're gonna be working in inches. So right over here, if your unit doesn't say inches, make sure you click and change that two inches are with is going to be 7.252 inches. Of course. And our height is going to be 5.252 now. Ultimately, when this piece is produced, it will be cut down to a nice even five by seven. But because the way the production process works, we actually need to build the documents slightly larger than what it will be once it's finished. And we'll look in a moment how that works for the resolution, we're gonna type in a value of 250 pixels per inch. We'll leave this an RGB and a white background, um, is actually not what we're going to choose here. So I'm going to click this drop down, and we're gonna ultimately go with a black backdrop. So we might as well just set up our document that way. So instead of white will click this drop down arrow and select black and then click create . So like I mentioned, this document is going to be trimmed down just a smidge once it's produced, and one of the things that's really important is to know where that trim is going to be taking place. So we're going to set up a couple of different guides and margins so that we can keep an eye on things and make sure our design fits within them. To do that, we're gonna come to the View menu, click View and choose new guide layout, and we want to make sure we do not have any checks next two columns or rows. But we do want to check down here next to margin, so we'll create our inner margin first, So that's going to be 1/4 inch, so we'll type in 20.25 space i n. Then I'll just tab to the next space. We want the margins on the top, left bottom and rightto all be the same. So just keep typing 0.25 inches all the way across, and you can see here behind the window that the guides are appearing in the document as they've been told. So when we're happy with that, we'll go ahead and click. Ok, All right. So these are our quarter inch margins. Now, the trim guides are going to be actually at the eighth of an inch mark. So we're gonna repeat this process coming up to view new guide layout, and this time we're gonna type in 0.1 to 5 space I and excellent and then click. OK, and now we're set. So the inner guide is our margin. We just want to make sure we keep things like text, not right up to this edge. It's just going to be too close. We want to have a little bit of an eye buffer inside this margin. And the second guide, the outermost guideline, is where the document will actually be cut. So we want to make sure that all of our images or graphics or anything that we place in here, that we want to go to the edge of the document. We want to make sure it goes all the way to the the edge here, so beyond the trim guide, and that will prevent any weird like white edges from showing up in our finished piece. So now that our document is set up, join me in the next video where we will go ahead and place your photo. 4. Add Your Photo: All right. So here we are ready to add your image, come to the file menu, choose file open click to select it and then click open. So the image I have here happens to be black and white already, and I like the way that that works in this piece, but you can use a color image. If your image is color, let me show you how you would deal with that. So I'll just open a colorful image here just to show you quick. You can do a quick and dirty D saturation by pressing commander control shift and you for unsaturated that's going to just de saturate the image. Then if you want to make any adjustments to the tonal range, the exposure, you can just press commander Control L. That's gonna bring up the levels dialogue where we can see and interact with our hissed a gram. So we have three sliders, shadows, mid tones and highlights. And in this case, I think I just wanted dark in this image just a smidge. So I would grab this middle slider and drag it to the right, and you can see that the whole image a just ever so gently so you could experiment. Whatever your particular image needs. You can play with these sliders to lighten or darken each of the shadows, mid tones or highlights. And then you would just click. OK, so But this is the image I'm going to be working with in this particular example. So once you've got your image converted to black and white or or not, we are ready to select it. So we're gonna press command or control A to select it with marching ants Here. It's just like in Microsoft word with me when you select all and then we'll copy it with command or control. See next to switch back to our design piece. I'm gonna come up here above the image area and you'll notice that I've got these tabs open . There's one tab for each open image. So to get back to our document, which is currently untitled, I just click right on that tab. And now we're ready to paste so press command or control V to paste in your photo. Now your photo will probably come in way too large. Hopefully, that's the case. If by some way you have pasted in your image and it all fits or even is too small to cover the whole document. Then I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but that means that that image doesn't have enough pixels. Teoh serve our purpose, so you'd have to choose something else. So it's a good thing when your images so big like this that you can't even see it to fix that, we're gonna press command or control T. This brings up the free transform command and you can't really even see what's happening. If you look up here in the top left corner, you can see there is a little control node. But all the other control nodes are out of sight because our image is so large, it's not even fitting on the screen. So to solve that re need to scooch back a little bit. So we're gonna press command or control and the number zero, and you can see now exactly what we're dealing with. So here's Arjun enormous image that's taking over the whole screen again. This is the part of the image that actually is overlaying our document. So to scale down the image, I'm gonna hold the shift key and drag inwards from the corner. And now I can position this as desired. So I'm gonna go with something, maybe like that to zoom in and see better what I'm doing. All hold down, Commander Control and the plus key. And if you hit it repeatedly, it'll just keep zooming you in bit by bit till you get where you want to go. All right? When you are happy with the way you've got everything set, then you can go ahead and press enter or return on your keyboard to set and commit the transformation. We are humming right along, and in the next video, we're gonna add our snowflake design. 5. Let it Snow!: Now comes what I think is the fun part where we get to actually paint snowflakes into our design. So what we're gonna be doing is using our brush tool. So on your keyboard, you compress the letter B to grab the brush tool. And let's talk about up here in the options bar what we have. So we have this little down arrow right here, and if we click on that, we can see the default brushes that come with photo shop, and yours may be displaying differently than mine. You can change the way that this palette appears by clicking the gear menu up here and you'll notice you can change it to view the brush, tip or brush, stroke or brush name. So that's really up to you. So these are really cool brushes, but, uh, none of them are snowflakes. So we're gonna load some brushes. And I shared the link with you in the assets for this course, so hopefully you follow the link, downloaded it to your computer, and now I'm gonna show you how to load it into photo shop. So we're gonna click the gear icon right here, and then we're going to click either import brushes or load brushes depending on your version of photo shop. And then you just want to navigate to the file that you downloaded. So in this case, it's called Dede Snowflake Brush collection and some numbers, and it's a dot a B R file. So adobe brush. So we'll just click to highlight that and select open. And what Photoshopped does is it adds that down here to the bottom of our brush panel. Now, you may or may not see it grouped in a nice little folder like this, but you should see the brushes. So in my screen I need to actually click this downward arrow, this little carrot arrow to open this folder so I can see the snowflakes. And indeed, here they are. So before we start painting with these, we are gonna customize them a little bit so that they work to our advantage. We're gonna have them behave almost like a stamp so we can actually stamp them into our design. And we're going to also introduce some variation and randomness to them. So we get a really nice effect, and you can use all of these brushes you can use one of them. You can use whatever you want. I'm going to just demonstrate with one or two brushes. Maybe. And then, you know you can take your time and do as many as you want. The steps are going to be essentially the same. So to start, I'm just gonna select this one here. If you just click once, it'll highlight it. If you want to select it and then close this window, you can just double click. You can see it's huge, so I don't need it quite this big. We're gonna make the size of the brush smaller. And you can do that very easily with your keyboard by locating the two bracket keys that are next to the letter. P like popcorn. Or, I suppose, for the holidays. Appoint setting a plant. Anyway, find the letter P and the two brackets next to it. The left bracket key is going to make your brush smaller so you can just press it over and over told society want the right bracket key will make it bigger. So I'm going to just start with my brush set about like this. If I look up here in the options bar, I can see that my brush is measuring 300 pixels. Why? So that's it doesn't really matter precisely what you have, but just for a point of reference, that's what I'm going to be starting with. But before I paint, we need to randomize the brush a little bit. So we're gonna open something called our brush setting. Now you may have this panel open on your screen already, but if you can't find it, there's a surefire way to locate it up here in the options bar, this icon right here of a folder with a little brush. If you give that a click that will open your brush settings panel and your brushes panel. So what we're looking for is brush settings. Now there's a lot of things here you can really customize brushes like way beyond what you could ever teach you in this in this sort project. But what we're going to be doing is just changing a few things. So, first of all, on the left here, these are like the different categories of settings that we can change, so we're going to start with brush tip shape. So with brush tip shape selective. Come down over here and you'll notice there's a slider for spacing. When you click and drag with your brush tool, you're essentially making lots of little dots or, in this case, snowflakes. So if you draw a line, you're making millions of little snowflakes, and they're all so closely spaced that they produce what looks like a line or what we might call a stroke. So if we wanted to say, be able to just paint in this document and sort of throw snowflakes all around, we need to space out those dots a little bit so you can grab the spacing slider and just space it out to whatever you think. Looks good. I'm gonna just go with about 187% I guess, for right now. And to be honest, this is a lot of just trial and error. So you know, I have experimented and spa sort of discovered what settings tend to work, but I swear it's different every time and its different with every brush and different with every photo, and you just have to get comfortable with some trial and error here. So once we choose some settings and we start painting. You may or may not like it, and you may want to go back and tweak a little bit, so be mentally prepared for that. All right, so we have some spacing adjusted here. Next, we're going to click the shape dynamics option. So you want to make sure there's a check mark next to that. And here we have something called size Geter. When size dinner is set to zero, that means every instance of the snowflake appearing is going to be always the same size. But what's cool is if we want to introduce some randomness, we can take the size, jitter, slider and weaken. Drag it all the way to the right, and then Photoshopped will vary the size up to 100%. You can control how that happens. The control could be off. Or if you have a pressure sensitive tablet, you could link the control to pen pressure or to your pen tilt. Or, if you're using a stylist, well, there's a lot of things you can do here. I'm gonna go ahead and just leave that off down here. We have angle, jitter, angle. Jitter controls the rotation of each instance of the snowflake. So with an angle jitter set to zero, that means that every snowflake will be oriented in the exact same direction, which, of course, is not a very natural looking effect. So we're gonna take this angle, jitter, slider and drag that all the way to the right. And in the preview down here, you'll notice that the snowflakes are all spinning, so they're in different directions, which is perfect. That's just what we want. So that's it. We have adjusted the spacing. Then we came into shape dynamics, and we adjusted the size jitter and the angle jitter. And I think that's all we really need to do in this case. So now we can close the brush settings window or panel by clicking up here to just dismiss it. Next, we're going to create a blank layer that's gonna hold all of our snow. Fate are snowflakes. We definitely don't want to paint directly on our photo because then we're gonna have a really hard time making changes. If we decide we want to move a snowflake or erase a section, it's just much better to do this on a blank layer. So at the bottom of the layers panel, find the little button that looks like this. I call it the sticky note pad, cause it looks like an endless supply of sticky notes. Click on that and that will add a blank layer to the top of our layers panel. And we can rename it if we want by double clicking. And we could type snow and press enter to set that. Finally, before we start painting where you need to choose the color for our snowflakes, they could be anything you want. If you open your swatches panel by choosing window swatches, there is a number of presets that you could choose from. I'm just going to go with traditional white snowflakes. So I'm gonna just hover my cursor over here next to the white and then I'll click and Photoshopped will put back color way over here in the bottom of my layers panel at the bottom of my toolbar. So that's how I know that I have successfully loaded up that color and again I'll just click right here to close that and we're ready to paint. Are you excited? This is This is the fun part So just put your brush wherever and give it a click and you don't really know what you're going to get. So I'm just clicking. And as I do this, you'll notice the brushes changing size and the angle is changing. So I'm just moving around and putting some snow on this image. Now I'm going to be filling this in with additional brushes, so I wanna leave some space so we can mix in some other brushes. So I feel like this is going to be pretty good for this brush. So let's grab another brush and will repeat this process. Let's return back to their brushes panel. Now, if we switch brushes, we will lose the custom settings that we have made here. So before we switch brushes, if we think we might want to return to this brush and use it with the exact settings that we currently have, then we should really save this first. So to do that, I'm gonna come up to the top of this panel and click this new little is the same as the sticky no pad button. In this case, it's a brush preset, so I'm gonna click that and then we can name this brush and we'll just call it Flurry. Flurries one, I guess. So when I click OK, you'll see that it will appear somewhere in your panel. Conveniently, in this version of photo shop, I have a nice little icon here that lets me know This is my brush, and I've customized some settings. All right, so let's do another one. Now I want I want to find a snowflake that's visually quite different than this one. So I think I'm going to try this one so I'll click to select it. Or you could just double click to select it and close that window again. Huge. So I'm going to use my left bracket key to drag that down. It will go for the same 300 pixels. Now let's open up our brush settings again so we can tweak this. I'll come up here, click this little icon. I'll click brush tip shape. Well, space this out. The spacing doesn't matter too much if we're going to click and use it like a stamp. But you can also click and drag with it, and it will just sort of toss snowflakes around. So that's kind of nice to, so we'll just the spacing. We'll click to turn on shape dynamics and again take the size jitter to 100% and the angle jitter to 100%. I'll click to display it, dismiss that panel, and now I'm just gonna put some more snowflakes. These ones are are different looking, so that adds a lot of interest. You can see that we're slowly starting to build up essentially what's sort of like a little frame here for our our photo. All right, let's go back and get another one. Maybe I'll get something that's round and very different, so I'll double click this and again. Use my left cursor left bracket key. Excuse me to dial this down back to that 300 pixel range and bring up our brush settings again. Brush tip shape. We can adjust spacing again. It's not really going to matter unless you're clicking and dragging with your brush, but if you want to, you'll be ready for it. Then we're going to click to turn on shape dynamics and again, the size Geter and the end the angle jitter. And I just realized I forgot to save the last brush. So whoops. Thankfully, it's easy to build it back. But if you want to keep yours, don't forget to save it. All right, now we're ready for this one. Oh, yeah, That's a nice contrast ing shape. So I want it a little thicker and heavier up here. You can have some little flurries, maybe down in here. So let's make sure we save this brush. We'll go back to the brush panel and before we switch, if you want to keep going with more brushes before you switch, if you want to save it, make sure you click this button right here. We can give it a name. Fleury's too. All right now, this is looking pretty busy visually. So to soften this up a little bit, we can reduce the opacity of this layer to just kind of fade it and make it less the focal point. So it's not detracting from our image to do that in the layers panel. You can come up and find the opacity setting and just click the little drop down arrow and drag the slider and drag it down. We're going to go with 60% today. Whatever you feel like suits you and your image, and you can always adjust this later so you know it's not set in stone. Now, if you decide, like, oh, I don't really like the snowflake being here, or I went overboard in a certain area, you can always switch to your eraser by pressing the letter e on your keyboard for eraser. And the eraser works just like the brush so you could you could erase in snowflake shapes if you really wanted to. But in most cases, you probably just want to stick with the default eraser. But then you could just come and, like, fight side. I don't like this snowflake. You can make your eraser brush bigger or smaller, using those same bracket keys, and you could just erase it. And, of course, if you go too far, you can always press command or control the to undo the last step or command Ault or Options E to back up multiple steps. So now that we have our snow design, we are ready to add your message 6. Add Text: Let's add some type two this shall we to begin, Let's press t for the type tool and then up in the options for the type tool. Let's click right here to open the color picker box and let's pick a nice holiday red color . So the way that you do that is within this box, you can click to select a tone of a particular Hugh. If you want to change hues, maybe you want green type or blue type. You can drag the slider up and down the rainbow till you find a hue that suits your fancy and then click in this area to select the actual shade. And you'll know what you've selected by looking right here. But I'm gonna go with Red Something about here ish. If you want this exact same color that I have here, you can just type the numbers in this box next to the little hashtag. This is called the hex code. You could top in the numbers or the letter C and the numbers 3 to 5 to five, and then you would get this exact same color. And then when you're happy with your color choice, click Okay, Let's choose our font up here in the options bar is where we tell photo shop. What font We want the type tool to use. So mine is currently set to PNE. But I would like to choose something else. So I'm gonna click in here and I'm going to start typing Justin Road and you will find the link to download this font in the assets for this course. I'll put my cursor somewhere here, and I'll just click to give it a start. And I'm gonna type the phrase seasons of love and they think I'll go with all lower case. So seasons of love in all lower case. And then I will press command or control enter to set the type. I want to make it bigger than this. So I'm just gonna quickly press commander controlled TV to bring up free transform, just like we saw earlier when we placed our photo And I'm gonna hold shift and drag from a corner and I'm gonna make it something like yea ish big and I'm as I drag I'm looking for the smart guide to turn on So you see that magenta colored line that shows up that's letting me know I've got this in the center, so I'll just place it about some place like that. We want to make sure that we're keeping an eye on these margins and that we have a nice buffer between the the edge of the margin here and the edge of what will be the edge of the document. That outer trim guide. So when you're happy with that, you can press enter to confirm the transformation. So let's add another type player so we can sign our card and let everyone know who it's from. Now here's the tricky part. You need to move your mouse far enough away, and I'm actually having a hard time finding a spot far enough away. So if you click to close to your existing type, you're not going to get a new type player. You're just gonna put your cursor in this type player, so actually, what I'm going to do is come way up here and we'll move it down in a minute. What we're looking for is that our cursor looks like this with what I call wings. If if I hover down here, you'll notice that my cursor looks like a just the spine of a book, and when I see the spine of a book, it's gonna let me click to insert my cursor into existing type. But I want a new type player, so I'm looking for an open book cursor. So a book that's got wings when you see a book that's got wings, you can click to make a new type layer. This time I'm gonna type the parson's. Once we've got the type out, we can press, command or control enter to set the type. And if we want to fill this with white, for example, one way to quickly and easily do that is to just restore our foreground and background swatches to their defaults by pressing the letter D on the keyboard. So if we take a peek down here in the foreground and background swatches by pressing D, we've put black in the foreground, swatch and white in the background. Swatch. Well, now we can use a keyboard shortcut to just paint this whole type liar with white, and we can do that by pressing command or control delete. So because this type was on a layer all by itself, and the layer was active. We could just do that handy dandy keyboard shortcut to fill the whole contents of that layer with white. Next, we're gonna change the font. So up here in the type bar, I'll click to insert my cursor, and I'm going to choose a typeface called Maceo Slab. There's also a link to this. In the resource is are the assets for this course, and I'm gonna leave it in all lower case. I just kind of like that. Look to move it down in place. I will press V to get the move tool, Drag it down here, and I'm going to scale it down. So I'll press Commander Control T and shift drag from a corner. And when I'm happy with it, all press enter to commit the transformation. Now, when we look at this is very hard to read, and we are going to fix that by adding a Grady int to this design. So in our layers panel, let's click to add a new blank layer. So the bottom click the sticky note pad button and then let's rename this layer Grady int. So we'll double click and type Grady int and press enter. Now we want this Grady int beneath the type players. So I'm going to click and hold my mouse and then drag this and release it underneath the seasons of Love Layer. Now we're ready to put a greedy int on here. If you don't have your default colors, go ahead and choose them. Now, by pressing the letter D and then we're gonna grab Argh! Radiant tool. So press G on your keyboard for Grady int and up in the options bar. If we click this drop down, we have a number of different choices for our Grady INTs. So the 1st 2 choices are dynamic, meaning they draw their their colors from whatever we have here in our current foreground and background swatches. So because we have black and white, we will see the 1st 2 options are black and white. The second option is the one we want. It is ingredient which is just a transition from black into transparency. So I'm going to double click that one and then over here we have a number of different styles of Grady ints that we can apply, and we want this first choice here which is linear. We also want to make sure in our options bar that the modus set to normal capacity is 100% and we do not want a check mark next to reverse. All right, so the way that the Great Aunt Tool works is it's going to create a black fill that's going to fade into, in this case, transparency. So we'll position are cursor just below the image in this bottom center area, and I'm gonna click and then hold down the shift key to draw a perfectly straight line on. I'm just going to drag a lineup about maybe, like here, and then I'm gonna let go of my mouse and you see that it put in this black fill that sort of fades off into the distance. Now, maybe it's too strong for your liking. I think it's a little more than what we need so we could reduce the opacity over here as needed. So maybe we just faded a little bit. It's really just intended to help the type pop a little bit more. So that's one thing you can do is fade the opacity. So I've got this now down to 55 ish percent. Another thing that you could do is grab your move tool by pressing V or clicking hunted over here. If you have your cursor stuck in the opacity window than the keyboard, shortcuts won't work. You'll have to click out of there. There we go. Then you compressive you for the move tool, and you can actually take this greedy int hoops. Make sure your great aunt layers selected. You can actually drag it down if you want, so maybe you want to just move it down a little bit. You could also press Commander Control T, and you could stretch it or scrunch it or any number of things. So you've got a lot of options to really make this work how you want. So I think this is looking pretty fly, and I think you could save it and you could send it out just like this, and it would be beautiful and people would love it because your beautiful kids or friends or pets or family or self is in the picture. But if you want to join me in the next lecture, the next video, I'm going to show you how to add glitter to this so we can really send some holiday sparkle 7. Glitter It: all right, We are about to glitter if i this design and it's super simple and it might just blow your mind So we're gonna add glitter to the seasons of love layer. So in the layers panel you want to make sure you click to target seasons of love. Then from the bottom of the layers panel, find the effects icon and click and select pattern overlay. Now, yours is probably showing you something different here. This is a pattern I created for a different project. But we are going to load the pattern that you've downloaded with the assets. For this course, you can click the down arrow right here and then find this gear icon and click that and then you're going to choose load pattern, navigate to wherever you saved it, and it's called glitter it dot p 80 for pattern. So click that and then click open and then scroll to the bottom of this list and you will see it right here. So double click to select it. Now it looks pretty hot lately. I not well done right now and that's okay. We're gonna fix that. So what? We want to take the scale and dial that down quite a bit, like maybe to 25 ish percent. If you don't like the gold color of the glitter, you can change the blend mode instead of normal. You could change it toe luminosity, and then it would just take on whatever color of the type that you have used. But in this case, I really dig the gold. So I'm gonna choose normal blend mode so I can keep this gold because I just I really dig it. What can I say? Then I'm gonna go ahead and click, OK, to add one more hint of realism. We want to add a super duper minute drop shadow to this because if there was really actually bits of glitter on this document, it would have some very, very subtle shadows. So let's just do that for a good fun. So back to the little effects icon down here, I'm gonna click that and shoes drop shadow. The blend mode is likely set to multiply can leave it there. We'll drop the a pass ity down to like, 55 ish or so, and we're going to set the distance to one pixel and the size 25 So it's really nothing, but I just feel better having it. All right, go ahead and click. OK, so if we want to see exactly what that really looks like and what difference it really made , we can zoom in by holding down the Commander Control key and the space bar. And that's gonna temporarily turn our cursor into the zoom tool that we can just click and drag to swoop right in. And we can toggle that drop shadow on and off by just clicking this little visibility button. It looks like an eyeball. Just click that on and off, and it's very subtle, but you can see right in here, particularly, concede the drop shadow coming and going. So now you can see the difference that it has made another thing while I'm here. I just want to point out this glitter pattern is not seamless, okay? It's not a seamless tile and because it's a large pattern so you can use it for large files . But because we reduced it to such a small size here, it it does repeat in order to fill the space, and I can see that there's a seam happening right here. Now we have two ways to deal with this. We could add a blank layer and just clone over this, which would be pretty simple. But another thing that we can dio that is really pretty handy is to adjust where this pattern is falling on top of the layer. So to get back into our effects settings weaken, Just double click right here on pattern overlay. So I'm gonna do that. And then if I just hover my cursor into the window, I can just click and drag toe, actually move that seem into a less noticeable area. And when I'm happy with it, I can click. OK, now, if we decide for example, we want to tweak the drop shadow settings, we could just double click that. So maybe I want to reduce the opacity even further down to maybe 25 Let's say and then I can just click. OK, so these are infinitely edit herbal. And I'd say that so far, this is looking pretty good to join me in the next video, where we're gonna add another layer of realism by turning our paintbrush into a glitter brush. So you definitely don't want to miss that 8. A Little Bit More: if you thought turning our type into glitter was cool, wait until you turn your brush into glitter. That's right. We're gonna be brushing some glitter onto our type because if I zoom in here, I'm gonna press command or control space bar and then swoop in. If this were really glitter on our type, it would not have this perfect edge. I mean, that just doesn't It doesn't happen, right? It wouldn't have a crisp edge on it. So what we're gonna dio is customize one of the brushes to basically paint glitter over this edge to just change the the line of it so that it looks a lot more realistic, more like actual messy glitter. And not like this was cut out of a picture of glitter. Okay, so to do that, we will press be for the brush tool, and I'm just going to click that drop down. So we see our snowflakes here that we worked with earlier, and I'm gonna scroll all the way up to the top, and I'm just looking for a hard round, simple just brush. So the second choice here is, I think a good one. I'm just gonna double click to select that, and I need to tweak these settings quite a bit. So I'm gonna open the settings panel for the brushes and I'll click brush tip shape over here in the Left menu because we're going to start with that. We're going to take the spacing and drag that out to maybe 70 75 ish percent. Then we'll click shape dynamics, and I'm gonna take the size deter to 50%. And if you have a tablet, you can set this to pen pressure, and that just lets you control that a little bit with the pen itself. But if not, that's OK. You can leave it off to know no matter, it will still work. Next, we're going to come down to something we haven't talked about yet. This is called scattering, so I'm gonna click to target the controls for scatter and scattering is going to take the dots along the path that we draw, and it's going to do just like it says it's going to scatter it. So just as if these dots were leaves laying in your yard after ah good fall day and the winds gonna come and just kind of blow it around a little bit so we can take the scatter and I can drag it to the right and you see who the further I drag it, the further earthy dots scatter away from the line. So I'm gonna drag this scatter to about 1 60 this is all trial and error. So, you know, you just have to finesse it and tweak it and play with it. Total. You get something that works, I'm going to set the count to one, and the count jitter to zero. So the count just basically means how many little ink blobs or dots are going Teoh be crammed into one space, and the jitter is whether or not that number is allowed to change. So I'm just going to do a count of one in a count jitter of zero. Now we can close this. We need to add the layer that will support this glitter. You'll notice if I hover over this right now with my cursor. It's telling me no photo shops, politely saying you can't paint on this layer, so we're gonna add a blank layer by clicking the new layer button. We want to make sure that that blank layer is on top of our seasons of lovelier and just to set us up for a nice, big wow moment. Let's copy and paste the style and effects that we've applied here two seasons of love. This is responsible for creating our glitter. Let's just copy and paste that appear to layer to. So to do that, I'm going to just right click on the effects. Ah, label right here. I'll just right click and say, Copy, layer style, right click er control, Click And then I'll target my mouse on layer to where we're gonna be painting all of this and I'll click to select that on then. All right, click or control click again. And this time I'll choose Paste layer style. Nothing happens because those styles are are now applied to a blank layer. But that's okay. Um, this is a huge brush, so I'm going to press the left bracket key to make my brush like the size of a glitter. So that's going to be pretty tiny, maybe like five. And now check this out. I'm just gonna paint. I'm just sort of dragging my cursor along this edge and it's painting glitter, even going to make it smaller. And basically my whole goal here is to just cover this edge. So it's not so perfectly cookie cut. So it looks a little more like someone actually put glitter on this. This is kind of, ah bit of a tedious process, but let's turn that layer on and off and show you see the difference. All right, So make your way around. I'm not gonna make you watch me do all of this because that just sounds painful. So just make your way around and just roughing up the edges with your glitter and I'll see you on the other side and there you have it a fully glittery, thick holiday card. 9. Save Your Work & File Prep: okay, It's time to save our work. So we want to come up to the file menu and choose Save. It will prompt us to give it a name, so find a location for it, and then we can call it Seasons of Love. And by default, photo shop should be selecting Photoshopped for you. But if for some reason it doesn't meet, you need to just make sure that it says photo shop right here and then click safe. So that will save the Photoshopped document with all of the layers and everything you need to make changes at any time or to update this for to remix it for some other kind of use. But we don't want to send the PSD file to the lab. So we're going to choose file this time, save as, and we're gonna create a J peg so we can keep the name the same, but under format instead of photo shop, we want to choose J. Peg. Now, don't worry. When it warns us that we can't save layers with J Peg, that's okay. J pegs don't have layers, and the print shop doesn't want them. So go ahead and hit save and in the window that follows, Make sure we choose the highest quality J pegs. So that's gonna have a setting of 12 and go ahead and click. OK, And finally, before we go, let's prepare our file for the next video where we're gonna be creating the back side of the card. So essentially, we're going to just keep much of this as we can, so we don't have to start over completely from scratch, but we're going to delete the layers that we don't need for the backside of the card. So I'm going to click to select Parsons and all shift click all the way down to include Grady in. So I'm deleting the type player that, says Parsons, I'm deleting the layer that has the painted glitter on it, the seasons of love type player as well as the Grady int layer. So with all those selected, I'll click the trash can at the bottom of the layers panel to delete them, and then I'm gonna click and target the photo liras well, and I'll click to delete that we just have the background and snow, and then I'm going to save this by choosing file safe as well. Give it a name on the end of it. I'm just gonna add a Suffolk's that says back and should again choose photo shop. And that's what we need. So we'll click safe. All right. And then the next video, we're going to add some more snow to fill in the design on the back side. 10. Design the Back Side: All right, let's wrap up this design with the backside. Now, I'm looking at this. I'm thinking you know what I think I just want to start over with a fresh snow layer, so I'm actually gonna delete that snow layer and make a new one. So click the trash can to delete it and click the new layer sticky note pad button to make a new layer, and we can double click to rename it snow. And I just want something a little more sparse, I think. Here. So, options, other options include you could add more photos to this backside. You could add additional messaging. You could do whatever you want, but I'm just having a really good time playing around with these snowflake brushes, so I just couldn't really part with it yet. So I just I'm gonna add somewhere snowflakes to the backside. Just a nice, gentle little flurry, if you will. So I'm going to grab my brush tool by pressing B to get the brush tool back. And, um, if you happen to have switched brushes in the meantime, you just want to make sure you scroll down and find the snowflake brushes that we put toe work earlier, you can select one. I'll choose this one that I've already tweaked the settings on and remembered to save. And I'm going to change my color so that I'm painting with white. So if you don't have your default colors, you can get them by pressing D for default. And that'll put black on top over here and white in the background, and then you can flip flop them or exchange them by pressing the X keep. So now I'm ready to just paint a little, little random, just gentle little flurry. It's looking good. Let me change back to the other brush that I tweaked that I remember about. I totally forgot to save the one. That's OK. It's easy to fix it. In fact, I'll just do that quick. I don't even remember which one. It was this guy in a double. Click this and we'll go back to our brush settings ever so quickly. I'll just go into shape dynamics in adjust the size and the angle jitter. There we go. So I just want really, like, subtle. Not a lot of snowflakes, something I feel like I need one more sort of here. All right, And then now I can't stop. All right, let's lower the opacity back down to I think I did, like, 40% or something, something subtle again. And join me in the next lecture where we will add our final messaging to the back. 11. More Type: Alright. So I thought it be fun on the backside of the document if we played off the song from Rent , of course Seasons of Love. So if you're familiar with that show that you're familiar with that song. And I thought we could put a message on the back that says something like, May your new year be measured in love, Right? So to do that, we're going to switch to the type tool by pressing T. And here it's remembering the settings from earlier of Museo Slab Ah, and whatever size. So I'm going to change this color here to White, so I'll click to select that. And in this big old box, I'm going to click in this top left corner and just drag all the way way out here. So what I'm looking for is RGB values of 2 55 that lets me know I've got pure snow. White will go ahead and click, OK, and then I'll position my cursor somewhere over here, and let's type May or New Year be measured in. And then we're actually going to put the word love on a separate layer and you'll see why in a minute So I'm gonna go ahead and commit this so I'll click the check Mark. I'm going to scale it down by pressing Commander Control T and drag it over here. I'm gonna shift drag from a corner inward, so I just kind of want this to be like a cute little message on the back of the card. So it doesn't mean you can put it up here. You could make it big, but I kind of just wanted to be like a subtle little parting message. So I'm going to make it something like this and we confined to in the placement in a minute , and I'll go ahead and commit that. And then I'm just gonna quick duplicate that layer by pressing command or control in the letter J to jump up a copy. So if we take a look here in our layers panel, we see that we have to type players now, and we only see one here because they're directly on top of each other. So if I grab this move tool and then click and drag this up here, we see that they they are, in fact, two separate layers. So I'm gonna change the type on one of them. So all Presti to get my type tool back. I'll click on this type to insert my cursor, and I'm gonna press command or control a to highlight all of it. And then I'll just type the word love and period. And let's go ahead and set this type. So click that check Mark. And then we're going to change this font back to the script font that we used Theo. Excuse me, brush front that we used on the other side. So I'll click back up here in my type options. And let's type Justin Road to get this script front back and then I'm going to scale it up . Commander Control T hold shift, scale it up. So it's maybe a little bit larger, then our regular front here. I'll go ahead and commit that, and then I'm gonna select both layers so we can reposition them together as one unit. So, with the lovelier selected in the layers panel, I'm gonna hold down shift and also click the other type player here. Then I compress V to get the move of of ah, tool and we can position this wherever we deem best, so you could put it like maybe the bottom right corner. Although I kind of feel like because the type is centered on the front side that it should maybe be centered on this site to So I'm gonna put it here and I'm keeping an eye on these guides at the bottom of the document. So let's remember that this bottom guide is where this is going to be trimmed off. So I don't want to get I don't think any closer than what I have right here. And I just realized I forgot to put the period here or something happened to it. Where did it go? So I'm gonna put my cursor in here. There it is, and click with the type tool to put that period in and then switched my move tool and use my arrow keys to nudge that over a little bit. Now let's really finish this off by adding that glitter effect on top of the love type player. So with the love type player selected here in the layers panel, we're going to come down to the effects button again and she's pattern overlay and again we'll go with the glitter, and we want to make sure that we're scaled down something around. Zoom in here even probably smaller this time. Whatever you think. Looks good. Well, the go for 10 10 looks pretty. Yeah, maybe eight. Our height. And when you are happy with that, go ahead and click. OK, Now, if you want to repeat what we did on the front side where we added that blank layer and we got our brush tool and we painted over the edges here to really add a lot of realism, you can totally do that. So you would just click to add a new blank layer and we would copy this pattern overlay to that blank. Clear. We could hold down, alter or option and click from pattern overlay and just drag and drop that up here on this new blank layer, weaken double click to rename this detail. Maybe then we're gonna press be to switch to our brush tool. And if you saved your glitter brush than you might still have it otherwise, if you're starting over, you would just select a hard round brush. Come up here to click this icon toe, open your brush settings click to select brush tip shape and we can increase the spacing Teoh Somewhere around 70% shape dynamics. I'm going to change the size jitter to somewhere around 58 60% scattering Teoh somewhere in here 116 or so percent. And I'm gonna close this. My brush is very small. Right now it's only two pixels. Remember, you can use the left or right bracket keys next to the letter P to change your brush size. So I'm gonna zoom ins with by holding down Commander Control Space bar and then dragging with my mouse. And now I'll just paint along these edges. And like I said, I'm using a really small brush to just quickly make this look a little less razor sharp on the edges. And I think it's OK then, if you, you know, paint outside the lines. Litter is a messy thing sometimes, so it's okay if you have you're are not perfect. There we go. I think that looks pretty good. I'm going to forego the drop shadows in this case just because we're dealing with such small scale and we're working on a black background so you wouldn't even see it. As for the brush itself, your settings may very depending on the size of the brush you end up using. So don't be afraid to experiment and join me in the next lecture where we will save our work and get this puppy ready to print. 12. Final Output: all right. And now we are ready to save our work and prepare our files for print. So because we've already set up and saved the beginning of this back file, we just need to update that we can do that by just choosing file safe. So now our PSD version that we began earlier is now updated to reflect the current status of the finished design. Of course, we can't send this layered PSD file to the lap, so we need to make a J peg for that. So we're gonna choose file save as and will make sure we select Jay Pek. We won't worry about thes warnings that we see here because we know that J pegs can't support layers and we don't expect RJ pegged have layers. So we'll go ahead and click safe inthe e j peg options that follow. We want to make sure that we have the highest quality here, which is 12 and we can go ahead and click. OK, so now we have two files for each the front and the back of our document. The front has a layered PST and a flat J peg and the backside now has a layered PSD and a flat JPEG. Now we're ready to send our files to the lab, so just make sure that you don't send them those PSD s. They want your day pegs. Join me in the wrap up lecture to celebrate and give yourself a round of applause for making it this far. 13. Lab Recommendations & How To: Congratulations. You did it. Now you have a finished design and you're ready. Toe, upload your files to your favorite lab. If you don't have a favorite lab, I always recommend em. Picks dot com to get started with them. Just goto m picks dot com and create your free account. Once you're logged in, look for the D. I Y. Cards link under the Cards menu. There, you'll find a variety of different options, including standards like square, vertical and horizontal. Choose the appropriate option. Select the corresponding size and click toe. Upload your finished design file. Congratulations. You did it. Thank you so much for watching. And please be sure to check out my other holiday design courses right here on skill share and hopefully, I'll see you back here again soon.