Photoshop for Entrepreneurs: Design a Product Mock-Up

1. Photoshop for Entrepreneurs: Design a Product Mock-Up: Hello, everyone, Jeremy Deegan here and today we're going to be creating a product mock up. And what exactly is a product mock up? You may ask a product. Mock up is basically an image that simulates a re a world product. Now this could be anything from book covers to software boxes or even things such as bottles and cans. It's great for branding to help promote your brand across products and for you to see what that branding would look like on multiple products. It also works really great for digital products such as software and e books. Whenever you have, say, a bunch of software being shown on one website and they're all two dimensional flat designs and then you see this great three D looking software cover that one typically stands out. I really like the way these look and you can do ah lot of great things with them. So in this lesson, we're going to learn how we would make thes Now. First will take a look at some examples, and you can see some different types of templates in different types of mock ups that you can create because there are a lot of different ones that you can actually do here, and then we'll go ahead and will create a couple in photo shop so that you can see the process to create your own. Now this is a very easy task, and this is great for entrepreneurs who want to see what their products look like but don't have a lot of time or money to spend on hiring a graphic designer to do this because it is a very simple process. This is also great to make some money if you are a graphic designer, or if you are interested in just making some extra money because you can download these templates. And if you have any type of graphic design skills, you can easily make these mock ups and sell them to people because entrepreneurs are always looking to have these mock ups made for them, and this is a great way to actually run a business is to make these mock ups and sell them on different websites. So let's go ahead and take a look at some examples and the next lesson and we'll get started 2. Examples of Product Mock-ups and Where to Find Templates: Now that you know what a product mock up is, let's take a look at some examples. So here I just pulled up on Google product mock ups and looked in the images section, and you can see a bunch of different types of product markups. So there are software covers. You can see different things such as bottles and cans, and you get a good sense of how useful these things can be. This definitely helps with branding. So in some of these you can see that there is branding across multiple products. So that's great for visualizing what your brand might look like on some products. And they're great for digital products because they just give this really nice feel, and it helps the buyer see what the product would look like if they were to actually hold it in their hands. And like I said, some of these things might be physical products like maybe these this energy G drink bottle is something that you actually sell, or it could be a digital products such as in the book. But the digital products work really, really good, especially when it's software and e books. So I just wanted to show you some examples of these here. Now, if you look at this website here, PSD covers dot com. I did a search and found that you can actually find a bunch of these templates online and this website. You actually have to pay a monthly subscription, but they have some very high end product mock ups for you to download and use. Now these use actions, and we're not going to go over actions in this lesson. But you can find that information very easily. Online actions are very easy, but basically you put your image in, you run in action, and it sticks it on this book automatically for you or any of these other product markups. So, as you can see here, they have some very high quality book covers. But if you go further down the list, you're going to see some other things, such as these bottles or containers or what have you. So here is an example of one site that offers some specifically photo shop product mock up templates, and there are a bunch of these different sites out there for you to check out. So we're going to be using some product market templates that Adobe actually provides. But there are websites that have these also So this might be something that you're interested and checking out after this lesson. Now, I also doing my research. I found this article here. This was back in 2000 and 15 so I don't know how outdated some of these are, but this was an article showing 100 free PSD mock ups, and this was a really quick search and found out that there are these free mock ups that you can download and there's a bunch of these different types of articles out there. So here, this 1st 1 you can see some branding, and this is a very high quality looking company or product. Black and gold stationary market, a mock up and Photoshopped form. So this looks really nice. You could upload your your logos and see what it looks like on different products here. And then we go down this list and they just have a bunch that they've actually put in this article. Business cards, they've got magazine covers, they got book covers, stationary. So these are all different types of product markups that you can do now in this course, we're going to be specifically looking at e book covers, cause those are pretty common and they sell really great. You can actually start the whole business just creating e book covers for entrepreneurs or four people and have a business right there in itself. So these air very high demand product mock ups these images are are in very high demand. So this is a great lesson to learn their very easy toe create. If you download these templates now, you can make these from scratch if you have a little more advanced photo shop experience, or even better, if you have any three D experience because you can create these objects in three D and then put the branding on the three D object. We're not going to go that far into it. Today. We're just gonna look at some basic templates and how you could take your images, download a template and stick that on the template and save it out real quick, easy and a great way for you to get your products looking very high quality. So let's go ahead and get started without and check it out now 3. Using Clipping Masks: before we begin creating our first product mock up. I do want to show you one thing that we are going to be using. And these are pretty useful for product mock ups, and that is a clipping mask. So for this demonstration, I'm going to just click new and create a new project. Now, this is an example. So I really don't care about quality or resolution at this point, cause I just want to show you how it works. You can just follow along if you want to. You can watch this. You don't have to do this. But if it helps understand by doing it yourself, you can definitely do this in photo shop. And it's a lot of fun when she learned how to do it. So I'm gonna select. Okay, Now, I want a transparent background, so I'm just gonna create a new layer, and I'm gonna select the background layer and delete it. And all that does is it just gets rid of that white background and gives me a transparent background. And we know that by these checkerboard boxes in the background, I'm going to select the elliptical marquee tool because I want to create a shape. Now we want to create any type of data. So it doesn't matter if we use ah filled in shape or we use a paintbrush or pencil. That doesn't matter. But you'll see it. It'll make more sense here in a second. So let me create a new shape, and I'm going to fill this in with some information. It could be the foreground color white, black grey. This also does not matter. I'm just gonna like foreground color, which happens to be this red, and I'm going to click outside of that just so the marquee selection goes away. Now I'm going to bring in him, bring in an image. So I'm gonna select file open, and I'm just like the image Jeremy Deacon website. This is just a Nimitz of my website that I captured. We will be using this in a minute, but for this example will just use it again. So I'm going to select on this layer for this image. I'm gonna left click and hold down, and that's gonna allow me to move this around. Now if I go up to the top to the name of our other document entitled one and hover over it . It will open that document. I'm still holding down the mouse button and I'm just going to drop it in the center here, so it places that image on a new layer in the center of my document. Now, I want this to fill out the whole space, so I'm going to go to edit, transform and then scale and just scale this up. It doesn't matter the size again. This is just an example. So I don't really care about the quality here. I'm gonna hit enter to save that. And now we're going to create a clipping mask. So basically, what's going to happen is any information on the layer below our image layer is going to clip that information. So wherever there is a red circle or any type of information, we will see an image and anywhere there is not information and just a transparent background. We will not see an image. So let's see how that looks. I'm going to select layer to I'm going to right click on it and I'm going to select create clipping mask. Now you can see that anywhere there was information. It actually clipped that image and we will use us in the product mock up. But this is a really fun tool to play around with. Now. If I select them, move tool and I select layer two. I can actually move that around in this image and place it where I want. If I select both layers by holding shift and selecting both of them, I can actually move both the layer and the circle underneath and replace that so I could put that up here than I could select layer to again the image and move that around wherever I want. So that is definitely a really useful tool and technique, and we will use those in the upcoming lecture on our first product market. 4. Edit a Product Mock-Up Template: in this lesson, we're going to go ahead and create our first product mock up. So to do that, we need to download a template, and we're going to get our template file from Adobe themselves because Adobe actually offers a lot of stock images and assets for us to use within our projects. So here I have the creative cloud application open, and you will find this program whenever you download any creative cloud products such as photo Shop. So go ahead and find the application. Open it up and click on assets and then click on the search bar and we can type in mock ups here. When I do that, you will see a bunch of different types of mock ups that we can actually use everything from letters, toe envelopes, monitors, packages, iPhones, billboards, CDs, all kinds of different things. So this is a great resource for finding these product markups within Photoshopped themselves. I want to use an iPad mock up for this lesson here, so I'm gonna type that in iPad mock up. You can see a bunch of different ones. If we scroll down, I'm going to be using the iPad cover mock up here, so I left click that you can see the information. It's two megabytes, and it's a PSD file That's very important because we want to be ableto edit. The Photoshopped Filing a PSD file is a photo shop file. If it's a J P G. That is an image file and won't really let us do what we're trying to do here. If it's an AI file, that's an Adobe illustrator file, and you'll also need that program to do the edit. So make sure if you're using any of these mock ups for this course that you are using the PSD files. Go ahead and click the download button, and I've actually already download this one. It took me about five minutes. It may be quicker or slower, depending on your machine, so I won't make you watch that already. Have it downloaded. Let's go ahead and back up. We're gonna grab another one that we're going to use in the next lesson. So let's type in book mock up. We'll go ahead and get this now and we're going to be using the hardcover book mock up here , so I'm gonna left click on that and This is a much larger file. 56 megabytes just took a lot longer to download. I'm gonna hit download, you'll see it's a sinking at the bottom, which basically means it's downloading it and putting it into your adobe library for use. Once you download it and sink it, it will always be there for you to grab so you can download a bunch of these and have, um, ready to go any time you open photo shop. So go ahead and download those now. But I'm going to exit this program and I'm going to come into photo shop. And if we select libraries in the welcome screen and I select my library once it is downloaded and sink, you will see those over here on the right hand side. So I'm going to right click on the iPad, cover, mock up and select edit, and that is going toe open that file up for me so that we can edit and create our first product mock up now in the bottom right hand corner. We have our layers, so I'm going to go ahead and select on the arrow next to the folder so that we can see all the different layers. So we have the background, which is the iPad. And then we have the blue box, which is the actual, um, what we will be using for clipping mask, just like we did in the previous lecture. So let's go ahead and open up our image. I'm gonna go file open and select image Jeremy diggin website and just like before, I want to move this into our current project. So I'm going to go to this layer left, click, hold down and drag. So I have it in my hand here. I'm going to go over the iPad cover mock up dot psd until it opens. And then I'm going to come into the document and release, and they'll drop it in there for me. Now, you want to make sure that this layer is within the ipad mini group, so it's actually underneath that folder, not outside of it. And that it is above the click to edit layer because as you remember before, we want our clipping mask object to be below our actual image. And that's what we have going on here. So I'm going to go to layer one. I'm going to right, click on it and select create clipping mask. And now it has clipped it into that image of that iPad for me. So this is great. This is very easy. I could do this with any of those product markups that you saw earlier. Within the templates, resource is section of the adobe creative Cloud application. Now, this doesn't look right, because, of course, it's not filling up the whole iPad like we wanted to. And the perspective is off because this is a three d object. But we're looking at this image straight on, so we need to correct that. So to do that, I'm gonna make sure that that layer selected I'm going to go toe edit, transform and select distort because distort will actually allow me to grab the handles and move the perspective exactly where I need it to be. So select distort. I'm going to go to the top left, handle left, click, and drag that and move that into the top left corner of this iPad. Mini Little off me Just there. OK, then go to the top. Right? Grab that one. Move it to the top. Right. And it actually snapped it once it found that information, which is really nice bottom, right and bottom left. And I may need a mess around with ease. Just a little bit to get it looked just right here. And you probably want to zoom in and be pretty accurate with this as your editing these to make sure that it looks really good cause you don't want to look too distorted. So, um, you know, when doing these for actual product, I would take my time. I would zoom in and really get these edits looking great. But this is good enough for this tutorial. So I'm going to go ahead and hit, Enter. And as you can see, it has dropped that image into that. IPad. So now it looks like someone is viewing that iPad and I could go ahead and save out this image, upload it to my website, or I could give it to someone to say, Hey, this is what I want my website to look like. And this is how I want to look on this. Ipad. So this is a very simple product mock up that we used just by using a clipping mask and perspective techniques. We actually use the distort tool, but it was to change the perspective of the image, and that is as simple as it gets right there. 5. Using Smart Objects with Product Mock-Up Templates: Now we're going to create another product mock up, but this one is going to be a little more different because it's a little more advance but gives us a lot more functionality. If you haven't already downloaded the book cover design product market from the previous lesson, go ahead and open up the Creative Cloud application. Click on the search icon and then select book Mock Up. And the first result that we get the hardcover book Mock Up is the one that we want so we can click on that. We can see that's 56 megabytes. It's a PSD file so we can edit it, and that's what we want. And go ahead and click the download button. I've already downloaded this because it will take a little bit of time to download, and I don't want to hold you up, but you will see it download in sync when it sinks. It means it's actually sinking to photo shop so you can pull it up within Photoshopped automatically. So I'm gonna go ahead and minimizes. And on the welcome screen of Photoshopped, I'm going to click on libraries and click my library and you will see those files open up on the right hand side. So here it is, hard cover book mock up. I'm going to right click on that and select edit, and when I do, it's going to open that file for me. And these are the book cover designs that were going to be using, and it's really simple. It's really intuitive, and it works really, really well. So as you can see on the right hand side, we actually have a library. Stab with our different assets that we downloaded, and we can always click and drag these into the project here if we want to use any images or templates that we've downloaded. But let's go ahead and just move this up so you can see these layers a little easier. Here we have three different layers are background layer. If I turned that off, you can see it's just that gray background. We have the back book cover and then we have the front book cover. Now I only want Teoh. Just use the one book cover for now so I can hide this one and I can select the top book cover. I'm going to select my move tool and I'm going to drag the in the center. So that looks great as is. All we have to do is change out the image and with smart objects, it's really easy. And I think you're gonna like this a lot. So go back to the layers, click on the arrow next to the photo and it will drop down the layers and we can go through these real fast. Let me slide this over so you can read this year. Okay? The first layer we have is our shadows. So I want to turn that off. You can see that's the shadows of the book. And when I move that you saw the shadows followed along cause they're in all in that group together. Then we have the actual book. When I turn this off, it looks a little weird, but you can see that it's actual book itself, then above that, it says chance color here. This is actually the coloring of the book, the front in the back. If we were to change the color of the spokes a toe like a black book, we would want to change this layer. Um, actually edit it to black also because it's actually coloring the book for us and you can see it's actually coloring it a little gray, not not perfectly white. But if we change the color of the book blue, black, red or anything else, we would want to change the color of this layer to We're not gonna worry about that right now. The layer above that it says Your design Here. Double click the layer thumbnail, and this is where it's actually pulling image from. This is our smart, smart object layer. Before we do that, let's look at the top layer and this is just some affects it or being applied such a sum embossing to make the book look really nice. It looks like it's ah looks funny here cause I'm at 33%. I'm going to zoom in real fast. I'm going to click view Zoom in. That takes me 2 50%. So it looks a lot better. A lot cleaner this way. All right, now we're not seeing all those jagged the lines. All right, so now we want to go to the layer that says your design. Here, double click the layer thumbnail. If you look at the layer thumbnail. It looks like a transparent layer, but then there's a tiny little image in the bottom right here. It's really hard to see. But if I double click that it actually opens up a new document of the image of the book and you can see we have an era here, some missing fonts. I'm going to be creating my own image, so I don't really care about the fonts. Now, if you just wanted to use their template and change out the words, you would need the fonts or you would have to use a different font. But for the time being, I'm gonna click. Don't resolve. I don't care about the fonts. I'm not even going to use this. As a matter of fact, I could delete these layers if I wanted to. Or for now, I'm just going to hide them. I'm gonna create a new layer at the top, and I'm just going to draw on this just so you can see what's going on here. So I'm gonna select paintbrush. Just make it big, and I'm just gonna just draw something here. Now I've hidden all those layers, created a new layer and drew on this and I'm going to save this so I can hit control s or click save under file. It saves this file and when it does, it automatically updates the book for us and applies all defects All the shading, the in, bossing all this things automatically and looks great. So all we have to do is go into the smart layer, design our book cover, save it, and it will automatically apply that texturally m bossing the perspective and everything we need. That is the power of using these mock up templates because you can download, you know, tons of these online and have the ability to easily and put your own images and instantly have some great looking products to sell online. So let's go back to this later. And actually, what I want to do is I'm going to bring in an image of a book cover that I designed earlier just so we can see how that looks. So I'm going to click on the Slayer one and hit delete. We don't need it anymore. Then I'm going to go to file open and in the resource is section. We're going to see image book cover. And this is just a quick, easy book cover image that I created just for this little tutorial here. So I'm gonna hit open, and it's going to drop this as a new image with the ah, the typical background. And I want to drag that into that PSD one dot psb file. That PSB file is our smart object file. So I'm going to go to my image book cover dot jp g click and hold. So we're dragging it. I'm gonna not not go to the but cover mock up PSD but the PSD one up PSP and I'm gonna come in here and drop this in. And as you can see, that this image is a lot bigger than our template. So I'm going to zoom out. I'm gonna hit control minus to zoom out here, make sure that layers selected I'm going to go to edit transform scale. I'm gonna hold this down. And if I hold shift, that will actually locked the constraints for me here. So make sure it keeps it in the right aspect. Ratio on doesn't get all, um, distorted or stretch. So I'm holding shift toe lock that. Let me move it into place a little bit better, actually. Let's Ah, go ahead and apply that. Move it. And then we won't scale it again to get it right where we need it. And Ah, I may have created this. Yeah, this is a different size book cover than what I actually have here. So sometimes this will happen, depending on what you're producing for. So Amazon kindle might be one size one size, and then a physical book might be another size. Um, different platforms, different mediums are gonna have different sized book covers. That's something that you definitely need to be aware of and knowing what size you're designing for. So if you're designing, you know, Kindle e books, you need to go into the Kendall platform and look at their resolution specs to make sure you're designing for the right size. As you can see, I was designing for one size here, and this book cover design is actually a little different. That's okay, though. I just kind of scale that I cropped off the top. Luckily, there was nothing up there, so I don't really care about cropping off that top. There Still got my information and words down here at the bottom. I'm gonna hit. Enter. I'm going to zoom in. It's like I didn't crop it all the way. When we do that one more time, make sure it's filled out here. Okay, all of our edges air filled. It looks really good. So just a simple book cover design that I created. Now I'm going to save it, go to file safe. And when we come over here, you can see our image has been applied. You can also see some of those effects being applied, such as the text oring that is going on within that layer. And this looks great. It looks like it's an actual paperback book. Well, one thing we might want to adjust is you can see that as I talked about earlier, the back of that book is white, and we might want to change your coloring around a little bit to match this and this particular file, we would click on this little camera icon here, double click it. It gives us a color option. I'm going to click on this, and I'm just going to select if I pick a color, let me show you real fast. If I picked Blue, you can see it changing all around the book. So it's actually affecting the whole book in the inside cover. So I'm just going to pick some colors that kind of match, that design that I had going on, which was that light yellow sky there. So I'm going to hit, okay? And as you can see, a color that all the way around, so that looks a lot better. That looks like it's all one image, and it's all flowing together really nicely. So that is how we use a book cover, Ah, product, mock up templates, Any type of product markup template, actually, but this is a very easy way. Whenever you get the chance to use smart objects, I definitely recommend it because they just they look really good and you can manipulate them so easily. Like I said, you can go back into that file and you can create from scratch. You can start new. You can bring in an image he already had, just like I did, and once you save it, it's automatically updated here. So that is how you easily create a product mock up from a template 6. Use Photoshop Create a Product Mock-Up: all right. Now you see how easy it is to create a product mock up. There are thousands of these online, either through the adobe website or through other various websites, and you confined free or paid for templates. Now, if you are using these commercially or for any products, I definitely recommend that you check out the licensing to make sure that you are staying legal within using these for anything that's going to be resold. If you do plan on using these a lot, you might want to sign up for some subscriptions of some of these sites that offer these templates because they're typically a higher quality and they're very easy to use. But now that you know how to create one, I would like you to create your own and upload it to the class. We would love to see what you can come up with. So either use the file in this lesson or find your own template, create an image and upload it, and we'll definitely check it out. Now, if you want to learn more about me, you can find me at jeremy deegan dot com. Thanks for watching this course and can't wait to see you and other lessons