Affinity (by Canva) Essentials – Vector, Pixel & Layout Made Easy

1. Welcome to this Affinity Course: Not only is Affinity free now, but it's the most incredible all in one graphics package, which is so good for pros and hobbyists alike. In this course, you'll learn how to turn your ideas into powerful visuals for your business, clients, personal brand or hobby, whether you're crafting your first logo or refining a full design system. Here's what we'll create beautiful logos for brands and personal projects. Marketing content like social posts, posters, flyers and banners. Graphics for use in Canva, full multi page brochures and plenty, plenty more. We'll start right at the beginning, and I'll take you through everything step by step in easy bite size videos. Hi. I'm Tim. I live and work on a beautiful barge traveling the canals around London with my wife, Allie and our cat, Fuji. Before becoming a professional designer, I worked as a CSI photographer for Scotland Yard in London. Since then, I've spent over 30 years working with design software and have trained some of the world's top companies like BBC, Disney, the Times newspaper, and many, many more. This course will help you bring your ideas to life through visuals that inform, inspire, and express your unique vision. What are you waiting for? Start right now, and let's get creating together. 2. How to Use the Course: Now, before we get going with the course, there's a few things I want to talk about. First of all, the images that we're going to be using. Now, a lot of the stuff we're going to be creating from scratch, but we will use a few images in some of the projects and tutorials. There are some images in with your course resources, but if you wish to use your own images, that's absolutely fine. Or if you want to go onto the web and find some images, I use a website called unsplash.com, which do royalty free images, or get your images wherever you want them. The second thing is I found the best way to follow this course is if you watch what I'm doing first on the video, and then at the end of the video, stop and try it out yourself. And if you're not sure, go back and watch the video again. If some of the videos are slightly longer, feel free to stop in the middle and try it out and then continue and then try that out, as well. So the whole course will be in bite size portions, and you'll be able to just watch a bit and do it. Don't forget if you have any questions, put them in the questions area, and I will try and get back to you as soon as I possibly can. Let's get started right now. 3. Interface - Intro: Et's look at the interface. Now, for those of you who have been using Affinity already, there's lots of new stuff. They've moved things around. For those of you who have never used Affinity at all, I want to show you where everything is so you won't get lost. So if you need a panel or you need a toolbar, you'll know exactly where to find it. The other thing we're going to do is we're going to be looking at the difference between Bitmap and vector. So if you don't know what the differences are, well, you'll find out. If you do, just skip that video and go on to the next one. Let's get started. I. 4. What Do They All Do?: Oh some of you might not know what Affinity actually does. So let me explain. You see, Affinity is a combination of three apps that are mostly used for graphic design. There is the vector side, which is the Vector Studio, and this is very much like Affinity Designer, or in the Adobe world, it's Adobe Illustrator. Pixel is like Affinity Photo, which is the same as Photoshop, and layout is like publisher or Adobe in design. So if you're creating logos or icons or any sort of interesting graphic could be something like a infographic, then the vector is really the way to go for that. If you work on pictures and maybe you want to take an image and you want to cut somebody out, you want to edit it a bit, you want to change the colors. Then we work in pixels. And finally, if you want to put things together into a poster or a multi page brochure or a book or a huge document, you can take your graphics and your photos and your text and put it together in the out area here. Now, there's a lot of overlap between these three packages, but that's basically how they work. A 5. Interface with Context Tool: When you first open up affinity, you normally see something which looks like this. You've got this home screen in the middle, and then your home screen might look different to mine because I've got a document that I was working on earlier. But we'll have a look at those as we go along, and you can see we've got things like recent and learning and templates, et cetera. But if you want to make yourself a new document, you can click on the plus side over there. If you don't see that, you can still get back to it by going up to the file menu, new. And you can see it's taking me into the little plus area for making a document, and I can click back to go back to the home screen. A very simple, really. Let's click on the little plus over here because I want to make a new document. If I want to open existing document, I can click on the little folder there to open up. I'm just going to choose A four over here, I can go with either landscape or portrait. I'm going to go with Landscape and click on Create document. Now we'll come back to all of this stuff and look through everything later on. So when I go into my document, at the moment, I'm in the vector area. Now, there is a vector area, a pixel, a layout, a canva, and believe it or not, if we click over here, you'll see there's also a slice, a retouching, a color grading, and in fact, you can create your own. These areas are called studios. So the vector studio is very much like what used to be affinity designer. The Pixel studio is like affinity photo and layout is like affinity publisher. Now, when you go to these studios, you'll see that it just shows you the tools for that particular studio. Click on Pixel, they change to the Pixel studio and likewise, with the layout, as well. The other thing that's changing on the right hand side here are the panels. So once again, just very quickly, as I flick between them, you can see how the panels change. It's like going into a different piece of software, almost. I say almost because as you'll see, it's way, way better than that. Now, of course, all of the panels are available in the Window menu in their sets. But what about this one here and the tools? Well, you won't find them in the Window menu. If you go to the View menu, you'll find the Context toolbar is over there. So if I untick Show, you'll see it'll disappear. Once again, I can go back and show it again. You can also dock it. You'll see in there we've got a dock option, and same with the tools over here. If I go to the view menu, once again, tools, we can show hide, we can dock them, and we can show the subtols in there as well. Anyway, have a little bit of a go, make a new document, and just check out these different studios over here. Click over there. You can switch others on and off. So, you know, just go in there, switch them on, switch them off if you don't want one of them, and see how you get on. I'll see you in a second. 6. Panels & Toolbars: Now, let's have a look at the panels and the tool bars. So if I go along here and I'm in the Vector Studio, I can start to pull these around, and it's exactly the same with the other studios as well, and I can make a complete mess of them and I can get rid of them. So if I didn't want the color and the stroke, I can just have the appearance up like that. But if I want to get them back, where are they? Well, if you go to the Window menu over here, we need to go down and we need to find the panels which are related to Vector. So if I go to Window, down to vector, and you can see in there I've got my stroke over here as well, and I can bring the stroke back up again. Now, what about the color? Where is the color in here? So, you'll find that I don't I don't seem to have a color in there. If we go to the general though, this will be the panels which will work across the board for all of these different studios. I can go in there and I can find the color once again. So wherever you are in a studio, you'll find that there are panels which are specific, in this case, to the layout. But there are general panels which are the same throughout. However, even if I'm in layout over here, I could still go to the vector and I could open up something different in here. If I clicked on styles, I can open up the styles, even though it was part of the Vector Studio. So all of your panels are listed in here. I can also go to the panels, and I can say just reset them so I can just reset them back again to their default setting. And I can do that in any of these studios. So once again, over there, panels and just reset panels from that. Now, you'll find that there are some shortcuts and I don't want to inundate you with too many shortcuts, but there's an important one here which allows you to hide and show the studio that you're actually in, so you can just see the document by itself. Now, for me, the thing about this shortcut is that it usually gets triggered when the cat walks across my keyboard, and he does that quite regularly when I'm trying to work. So it's the tab key. The tab on the left hand side will show and hide all of the panels that are in there. So do try those out, get to know where things are. And remember, you've got window. All of these are the different panels. You can go to panels. You can reset them. You can hide the panels. You can show the panels. And at the moment I'm showing them on the right. You can actually change them to be on the left, if you wished, as well. You can make the studio look how you want it to look. 7. Studios & Panels: Let's have a look at these little studios. Now, there's vector, Pixel and Loud, as we've already seen. There's another one here called Canva AI. Now, Canva AI are all the AI functions that you can use in Affinity. However, although Affinity is free, this area here is not. If you've got a paid for Canva account, then you'll be able to use all of these. Otherwise, you won't, I'm afraid. We're going to be delving into these during the course, although it's not fundamentally the main part of this course. So just bear that in mind. If you want to get a paid account, that's absolutely fine. You could just do that once we get to that stage where we start to work with some of those AI functions. Now, in here, we've also got things like slices. Slices is kind of like the old export option that one used to have in the earlier versions of Affinity. There's a retouching area over here, if I click on that, and there's a color grading area as well. And we can also create our own studio. We'll look at how to do that later on in the course. But now you can see I've got all these different studios over here. There's my color grading. And when I choose one of them, what it does is it just gives me a different layout of the panels. So these are all just the different panels in here in different layouts. Now, if I go back over here again, back to the three little dots in there, you can switch them on and off as you need. And I will just switch off the ones that I don't want now to go back to the default setting. When you go to the window menu, you'll notice that the panels are set up in different groups. So the Pixel panels are for the Pixel Studio, the vector ones are for the Vector Studio. But we've got other setups as well. So there's a text option in here. There's tables, everything to do with tables. There is some help. As I mentioned already, there's the general panels, which are available for all of them. Just going to very quickly go down to panels and just reset the area that I'm in. Now, of course, I'm in the color grading area. I'm just going to go back to Vector for now. Anyway, have a bit of a play with that, try it out, see what you can do with those, and remember you can always reset things in panels and reset. 8. Toolbar Features: Now, let's have a look at the tools. If you go along to the tools that have got the little arrow over there, you'll see they've got more tools in their set. So when I click and hold, I can see some other tools coming up. Click and hold over here, and there's tons of tools in there. If you go to the tools, though, and you right click on one of those tools, over here, we've got a number of different things, so we can hide the tools, the first thing to do over there. So you'll choose hide tools, and you go, Ah, how do I get my tools back? Well, if you go to the Window menu, they're not listed in there. But if you go to the view menu, you'll see over here, we've got tools, and I can just choose show once again. So if you lose your tools, that's where you're going to find them to bring them back. Now, the other thing that we've got if we right click is the fact that the tools are docked on the side. If you untick it, you'll get something which looks like this as a little double row that you can move around. Once again, if I right click and dock them, I could jump to the side. We go down over here. This is a new feature which I really like hide subtols. Now, they've always been hidden in the past. But if I untick that, now you'll see that as I'm going to the different tools, the subtols in there just automatically appear, and I can move them around wherever I want them. So you know, if you're constantly using a certain tool and you're using variations on there, like this little Node Tool over there, and you might be flicking between those quite a lot or the text tool where you're actually clicking between the two types of text. This is great to keep them up all the time, but don't forget right click and you can then just hide those subtols as well. Now, there's a lot more to do with the tools. We can customize them as well, but just have a bit of a try with that at the moment. We'll get deeper into them later on. 9. Vector & Pixel Differences: The last thing I want to look at in this section before we get into the good stuff is having a look at the difference between vector and pixel. So most people realize that vectors are usually for things like logos and pixels are for photographs. But let me show you exactly why that's the case. I've got two little shapes that I've made over here, and the one on the left hand side, this is a vector. And the one over here is a Pixel. Even though I'm in the Vector Studio, it doesn't really matter. This is vector, that is pixel in there. So let's have a look at the differences between these. And to do that, I'm actually going to zoom right in. Over here. You can see when I go closer over there, look at the difference. This is a vector. It's absolutely smooth. Was this is pixels, and it's based on the little pixel shapes in my document over there. So a pixel or a raster image, it's often called is made up of pixels, whereas a vector is made up of lines. Now, that's all very well if we are looking at this at this size. But why is it so important, maybe to have your logo as a vector? Well, it comes down to scaling. If I make a logo really small like that, and then I decide, Do you know what? I want to make this really huge because it's going to go into this massive big poster. And once again, I'm going to do the same thing with this and make this one bigger. Like so. And let's have a little look. So with a vector, you can make the vector any size you like, and that edge will always be perfectly smooth. Whereas with pixels, when you make it larger, you might find that those pixels or that pixel effect and edge just keep zooming in, get bigger and bigger. You can see the individual little pixels there and you see how large these have become. So the idea is that if you're doing a logo, you want to create something which is fully scalable so that whether you've got it on a website or whether you've got it on a 48 sheet poster on the side of a building, it's always going to look absolutely perfect. The last thing about vectors is that you can actually change the shape quite easily with the little lines around the outside. Now, if I click on this little shape here, remember this is my vector shape. I'm just going to go over to the vector menu and just say, convert to coves because at the moment, it's just a circle object. You can't do this with a pixel object, by the way. So now I can use the little Node tool up there, and I can select these points that make up the shape, and I can pull them around and I can adjust them in here. We're going to be doing quite a lot of this later on. But it means that now I can change this to any sort of shape that I like. And you'll see how easy it is to create things like logos and graphics with these type of shapes where you can pull on the handles over there. These, by the way, are known as nodes in here, and the curves are called Bezier curves. If anybody ever talks about Bezier curves, that's what they're talking about. These little nodes with handles. Don't worry about trying that one out over there. Just go straight on to the next video. 10. Vector Shapes - Intro: In this section, we're going to be looking at the Vector Studio. So we're going to be taking the shapes. We're going to be putting shapes together. We're going to be using something called geometry, and then we've got a project after that, which I'll tell you about once you've gone through the basics of vector shapes. 11. Working with Simple Shapes: Now, I'm going to click on the New button over there. Or, of course, you can go to File and New to get into here, as well. And we're going to just choose a A four size. So in the left hand side here, I've got page sizes, and I'm going to choose that A four there. You'll see that says page sizes RGB, as opposed to page sizes CMYK. Now, if you don't know the difference between CMYK and RGB, I'll be talking about them later in great depth. But for the moment, if you think of RGB as anything for screen, and CMYK is anything that will be printed out, that's the quick way around it. You'll see that there's things like photos in here, canvases, videos, and what I just keeps going and going and going. But we're going to choose page size RGB, click on A four, and I'm going to choose landscape over there. I'm not going to do anything with any of the bits in here. I'm just going to say create document. Now, we're going to add some shapes in here and have a look at how the shapes work. So on the left hand side, I'm in the vector area here as well, by the way, I probably should have said that a moment ago. So I'm in the Vector Studio. I'm going to go down in my tools to these shapes over there, and I will just click and hold on them. And if you want to keep them out all the time, just right click and say, untakHd Subtools and that'll show you them all at the same time. And then I can click on one of these shapes. I'll use the rectangle, click and drag my rectangle in like so. Now, got to admit, when you first do this, you look at that and you think that is just so incredibly dull. Well, let's make it more exciting. I'm going to go up to this little tool over here. This is the move tool. I'm going to select the move tool, and first of all, I can click and I can actually move this image around. So if you select a shape, you can do it by clicking on it or you can click off of it on the outside that I've clicked out there. Let me click back again to select it. To change the color, we go over to this color area here. If you can't see it, you can go to the Window menu. You can go down and you can just reset your panels or if you went to general, you'll find color is in there as well. And I'm going to click over here on the outside, and this enables me to choose any color that I like. Now, once I've chosen that color, I can click on this inside bit to choose the shade and the lightness of it. So outside is the hue. Inside is the saturation and the lightness, so going from bright to dark. And this is why it's known as HSL, hue, saturation and lightness. Now, if your colors don't change when you're in there, make sure that this little button over here is selected. If you are on the other button, this is known as the stroke, which is the line around the outside. And if I'm changing the color there, nothing happens, it could be that I'm changing the line around the outside there. So let's click on that and change that in there. Now, using my Selection tool, I can click to select and move things around. I can also click and drag over part of the object to select it. We can grab a corner and we can scale things around. And if you hold down the Shift key while you're doing that, it will scale proportionately. We can move up to the top to this little lollipop that sticks up the top, and I can click and drag around on that to rotate an object. And if I do it while holding down the Shift key, it will rotate in degree increments. Over there, you can see it kind of going 30 degrees, 15, zero. So 15 degree increments around. When you're actually drawing the shape to start off with, if I go down to my shapes over here and I were to use the same shape again, held down my shift key before I started drawing, what it would do is it would draw a perfect square for me. And it's exactly the same with the other shapes as well. So if I go back in here again and I'll go back to the little circle, I'm going to click and drag, hold down the Shift key, and I get a perfect circle out of that. But once again, I can still use the selection tool to move it around, scale it or hold down the Shift key to scale it proportionately and change the colors in there. Now, you can try this out with pretty much any of these little shapes over here. You basically just pick a shape, click and drag, hold down the Shift key to get it to be perfect and change the colors in there. Let's just do one more over here, doughnut shape, click and drag, hold down the Shift key, change the color on that. Have a little bit of a play with that. You'd have to go through all the tools, just a few of them in there and see what you can get. 12. Select Multiple Objects & Transform Separately: I I've created a few shapes here, and I want to select them. So I'm going to go up to the move tool at the top and to select them. Obviously, I can click on them individually. But if I want to select them all, if I click and drag across them like that, I can select them really quickly. You don't have to encompass them all like this. If you've worked on an earlier version of Affinity, the default is that you actually have to surround them all. Here, as long as you're touching them, they will select. And then I can scale them together. I can rotate them together as well. But I want to show you this little display along the top. Now, this changes depending on what you're doing. If I click on the background, it gives me things like the document set up and the app settings. If I click on an object, it gives me the fill and the stroke and even the line or thickness of that stroke. So I can go in there and I can change the thickness of a stroke on an object ready quickly, as well as some other things we'll come to later. But if I select all of these objects over here, there's a little button that I want to show you over here. And this is quite unique because if at the moment I rotate these objects, they will all rotate together as if they are one group. If you switch that little button on, now, only one of them looks like it's selected, but if I rotate that one, they will all rotate at the same time. If I were to scale this one, they will all scale individually, like that as well. And this is really cool. But it's important to also know whether you've got it switched on or switched off, because the moment it's switched on and maybe I don't realize that it's switched on, and I go and try and select all these shapes, and it's like, Okay, why they're not selecting? Only one of them is selected. But if I move that one or rotate that one, you can see it switched on there. If I switch them off, then we go back to where we started with the selections of multiple shapes in there. Do have a little bit of a go with that button that's really useful, even if you never use it and you just need to know that it's there in case you switch it on by mistake. But honestly, it is quite a useful item. Now, what about this little window along the top? I can move it around and I can place it wherever I want. Unfortunately, it gets in the way. I found that as I'm working, it's annoying when it's over there. So if you go to the top over here and you move until you see that little orange square and move over the orange square, it will then allow you to snap it to the top so it'll just stay at the top, no matter what you're doing over there, rather than being right in the middle of things. So I'm going to leave mine up there for now. Okay. Do have a bit of a go with that. Play with that and check out that little button over there. Transform Objects separately. It's cold. 13. Shapes: I'm going to delete all these shapes. I'm going to select them and press backspace to delete. And let's have a look at some of the options over here with some of the tools. I'm going to start with this rounded rectangle tool and I'm going to click and drag to make a rounded rectangle. Now, while I'm still on that tool, you'll notice there's a red dot up there. If I go back to my move tool, it just disappears. But when I'm on this tool, I can see that dot. Now, I can click on that dot and I can change it to adjust the corners. And the same goes with most of the tools in here or most of the shape, shall I say, in here. If I go down to the star tool over there, click and drag a little star in. While I'm still on this tool, I can go to those corners and I can adjust them and move them around. You'll see one of them makes them more curved. The other one moves them in and out. If I go to the one at the top over here, I can round the top off like that. Really, I'm not going to go through all of these tools so you don't have to worry. I just want to show you a couple of them in here. I find this doughnut one is quite useful because I can make the doughnut shape like that. And then I can go along to this one at the outer side here, and this will allow me to decide how much of that doughnut I want. So maybe I want three quarters like that. And this one allows me to make the inside bigger or smaller. Just experiment with the tools over here. They've each got slightly different functions that the red dot little red dot does. But don't forget you can't be in the move tool. You have to be in the tool itself. By the way, down the bottom here, there's a CAT tool over here, and you can click and drag with a cat as well. Honestly, I don't know why that's there, but they put it in. The last one I want to mention over here is the little QR code. And all you have to do with a QR code is to click and drag it and then go to the top and put in the code or the URL that you want. So I've just copied my own website over there, and I'll paste that in. Click Okay. Red Rocket Studio is the business that I run or help to run with Allie, and there it is. There's the QR code for that particular URL. Anyway, try it out, put your own URL in there and have fun with it. 14. Transforming Shapes with the Node Tool & Curves: I'm going to make a little shape over here. I'm just using a rectangle for now. And although I've shown you how to use this black arrow tool, the one at the very top, the move tool, if I move the points on there, all we're doing is we're changing the scaling of this, whether it's proportionate or disproportionate. But if I want to move these individual points around without affecting the other points, then we need to use this little tool over here called the Node Tool. Now with the Node Tool, if I click on a point, you can see it just works exactly the same as the move tool. What we have to do if you've got one of these premade shapes, these are all kind of pre made different shapes that we can use and we can change the options of, we have to convert that into a proper shape that we can actually edit. There's a little button at the top over here. You'll see if I hover over it, it says, Convert to curves. Now, that doesn't mean that it's actually going to be curvy. It can, but it'll just convert them into points. If you can't find that little button over there, the earlier versions, if you're working with an earlier version, that had a big name next to it. What you can do is you can actually go to vector and you can convert to curves in there. It's both exactly the same thing. When you do that, what I can do now with this Node Tool is I can actually select individual points. So I've just clicked and dragged over that point there. You can see it's blue, and these ones are all white in the middle. And I can now move that around like so. I could select multiples, so I could select those two over there, and I could pull those ones around. We can do the same over here, those two plus that one. So I can move those three around together, or you can go to the line itself and you can actually pull out on that line. Now, I'll just make sure that I selected this first and you see when I go to the line, I can just pull that out over there. So, click on the shape to select. Go to the line and you can drag it into a curve. You can still work with these little points over here, but you'll notice that you've now got some handles which are appearing when you have a curve. Drag the handles around to adjust the curvature on this shape. Just pull that down, like so. And you can see how we can manipulate that shape around. Now, these curves and the handles we're going to be dealing with later on, but it's worth just having a bit of a play with them for the moment. Make a complete mess. You'll find that things can go really weird over there. Don't worry about it. When you want to delete it, just go back to your Node Tool, which you'll select everything and press delete or backspace on the keyboard. Now, of course, don't just use the little rectangle. You can try this with absolutely anything. To go down to this cog over here, draw a cog in there, go up, click on this little button. It's this one here which says Convert to curves. It looks actually like a mini version of a YouTube icon. It's got a little triangle in the middle. Let's click on that. Now I can select any of these points over here with the Node Tool. So I just select that one there, and I can move them around like that. You can do the same with the inner ones if you wish, or you can do multiple. Have some fun with that with all of those custom shapes. 15. Various Ways to Duplicate Objects: One of the things we're going to be using a lot is copying. So there are a number of different ways to copy items. I'm just going to take a little shape like this. I'll make a little triangle over there. Let's give it a different color. So I can either go up here to my color to the fill and choose a different color there or to this little area over here, click on that and change the color like so, whichever way you prefer, and it's easier for you to do. Now, back to my MVTol so one of the typical ways to copy is using the standard copy paste commands from the keyboard, and that would be on the mac, it's command C to copy command V to paste. You can see that there is, well, just one triangle. But if I move it, it's copied that triangle right on top of the last one. Let me do that again. On the PC, by the way, it's control and C to copy and control V to paste. And once again, it's paste another copy in there. I'm going to get rid of those two copies, so I'm just left with this one over here. Now, another faster way to do that is if you've selected the shape, and this is just a one thing, you can do if you're on a Mac, it's command and J. If you're on a PC, it's Control and J, and that will just make a copy for you pasted directly on the last object. Lastly, this is the favorite one of mine. I'm going to use on a MAC, the option key. It's the lt key on a PC. Just hold it down and you can just drag a copy like that. Really fast. Option or Alt and just drag your shape like that. Anyway, get to know some of those shortcuts which every one's work best for you because we're going to be using them so much in the coming projects. 16. Changing Corners with the Corner Tool: What if I want to round off some of these sharp corners? Well, we've got a tool for that, and this is the one it's called the Corner Tool. So with a corner tool, what I can do is I can select a point like that. I just click on it to select it, and you'll see that it's blue and those ones are white. If I drag now, what it does is it just rounds off that corner for me. Let me do that again. I'll go to this one. Click on that one to select it. And then if we drag that, now, why didn't that round off? Well, because it's defaulted back to the Node Tool. Can we undo that? Make sure that you're on the Corner Tool over there, and then when I click on that, I can round that shape off like so. But what about if we want to do multiple points all at the same time? Well, I'm going to go and get another shape over here. Let's make that a slightly different color. And what I can do with this little no tool is to click and drag over the two points. Now, if I click and drag on one, they'll both move at the same time. You could do all three at the same time, so I can grab all of them on the corner tool and drag them all together like that. This can be quite fun with some of these shapes if you go down. So for example, if I take this double star tool here, I'm just going to get rid of the one that's there and draw in my double star like so. I'm going to select all of them with the corner tool. So I'll just click and drag over all of them like that. You'll notice I haven't had to actually go to the top and convert this into a shape. So we'll just make sure they all go blue and grab one of them, and we can make them all corners like that or curves like that. Have a bit of a go with it. It really is a fun tool. More importantly, it's actually really, really useful. Try it out. 17. Making Shapes with Geometry: And I've got a shape here and I'm going to go and put another shape on top of that. I'll change the color, so it's pretty obvious what I've got. And I'm going to use my move tool here to select both shapes. It's really important for this particular example that you do select both shapes. Otherwise, it doesn't work. Now, we're going to be using something which Affinity calls geometry. You might also come across it in other packages being called Boolean operations or in the Adobe world, it's known as the Pathfinder tool. Now, what this does is it allows you to take two shapes or more. You can do this with as many as you like and allow one shape to cut away from another shape or unite them together or you'll see as we go along. So I've got both those shapes selected. There's some little buttons along the top here. If I go to this one here, it just adds them together and makes them into a single shape. I'm going to undo that. So that's either Command Z if you're on a Mac or Control E if you're on a PC. The second button here, once again, they're still selected. The second button here subtracts the front object from the object underneath it. So that's why the circles subtracted from the square because the square was behind or the rectangle was behind the circle. The next one over here intersects them, so it just leaves the overlapping area in there. The one after that subtracts the overlapping area, and the last one here divides the whole thing up. So when you click on it, nothing appears to have happened. But if you go here, you can actually pull this apart now and it's divided it into the little areas that make up those shapes. Now, I'm going to undo those, so I'm just going to keep undoing until I get back to where I've got my two shapes. There we go. We've got the two shapes there. If for any reason you can't see these little buttons here or you don't like using the buttons, you can do the same thing from the menu. Now, remember, we're in the vector area. We're dealing with vectors. So go to the vector menu. And down here, there is geometry, and I could say, add subtract intersect Excel. Which is this little one over here, which is the third one, sorry, fourth one along, and then divide. So I'll just use subtract does exactly the same thing. Do try that out. This is really useful, especially when it comes to creating things like logos and icons, and we're going to be doing that very soon using this particular technique. Anyway, have some fun with that. Make some interesting shapes and just do multiples, not just the two. Try it out. 18. Making Shapes with the Shape Builder Tool: Now, we've got another tool that we can use to add and subtract from shapes. And I'm going to get two little shapes up here. Let's get a square, and let's get a different shape. Over here, we've been using the square in the circle all the time. I will just take this little star and draw a little star in. Over there. Let's change the color of that. Now, I'll put these two together, and I'm going to select them both. So I'll click and drag over both of them with my move tool. And I'm going to go down over here on the left hand side to a little tool called the Shape Builder Tool. Now with the Shape Builder Tool, we've got some options along the top. And you'll see this says Shape Builder over here. This changes depending on what tool you're in. If I click onto other tools like that, you see it's changing all the time. So when I'm on the Shape Builder Tool, it's showing me options for the Shape Builder. Now, in the actions, there's a plus or minus, or there's this little option over here, which makes a new selection. I'll show you all three of those. Let's go to the plus first of all. You see, as I move over the shape, the shape itself has these blue diagonal lines on it, and I can just click and drag over those three shapes to unite them into one shape because we've got add on there. I'm going to use Command or Control and Z to undo that. If you go to the subtract option and once again, make sure that your shapes are selected, you can then just move across the areas and the diagonal lines are red this time to subtract. There's a shortcut here. If you are on the plus and you want to then change to the red, just hold down the option or the lt key, and when you start to drag, it will change it to the other one, that's now gone to the minus instead. Same again over here, I can hold down the alter the option key and just remove that little section in there. So what does this last one do over here? Well, this one's quite an interesting one, actually. If I select both of those again, so at the moment, there are two separate shapes. If I select them both, go over to my Shape Builder Tool and go to the third one. Now, if I go to the middle and I click on the middle, Nothing appears to have happened. Well, it actually has. You see, if I go back to my move tool here and go to the middle, it's actually made a copy of that overlapping area that I moved on. So these two are still the original shapes. It hasn't done anything to them. It just copies the bit that you've dragged on. So do try those out over there. Once again, these are spectacularly useful for a lot of things that we're going to be creating. Have fun with it? 19. Project: Create an Animal from Shapes - Intro: It's project time. I love doing projects, and I hope you do, as well. We've got a really cool one. This time, you can see it on the side here. We're gonna be using some basic shapes to create this little dog. If you don't like dogs, you can do a cat, you can do a rat, you can do whatever you like. And you'll see that I've done some variations afterwards. So you can change this to any animal you want. 20. Create the Dog's Head: For this project, we're going to start with a new document. So I'm going to go up to File New and just make sure that you're over in the sort of plus area. And we're going to do something in RGB. So we're going to choose a page size. I'm going with a five, and I'm going to make sure that it's landscape. Not going to do any other settings in here. Just check that this is actually on RGB in there. Let's click on Create Document. Now, I'm going to create this little dog using some simple shapes and using the Ni said Pathfinder and using the Shape Builder Tool. So let's start by making the head and then we'll move it to the side, and then we'll make the body and the legs and the tail. So for the head, I'm going to start off with a triangle. Now I can go down to the triangle over here and find the triangle tool and I'm going to click and drag a triangle out. Now, firstly, that's the wrong way. So I want to rotate it all the way around, so I'm going to go over here and I'm going to drag this around holding down the shift key so it does it in increments over there. And then let's give it a color. Now, we can change these colors later, so it actually doesn't matter what color you give your dog to start off with. And I want to round the corners of this face off. So I'm going to go up here to the corner tool, I'm going to select all the corners. I'm going to click on one and drag in to get this rounded triangle like so. Now, that's for the basic head. Let's make the jows I think they're called. So I'm going to do that with circles, so I'm going to go along here and I'm going to get two circles. I'm going to make one. I'm holding down the shift key so I get a perfect, perfect shape like that. Let's just give that slightly different color. And then I want two of these because they're going to kind of go over there. So we've got one, hold down the Alt or the option key and drag a copy. Now, I'd like these to actually be closer together, so I'm going to just move them in a little bit like that. Now, one of the things you can see, as I'm moving these around, I can't always tell exactly where things are in relation to each other. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to the view menu. I'm going to go down to something called snapping. And in snapping, I'm going to say enable snapping. Now, we can just leave all of these on their default. I'll just click on the little button to close that down. And you'll see now when I move things around, can you see how it actually snaps to each other so I can see where things are? These are kind of like smart guides. I'm going to pop those together like so so they're kind of next to each other, so I know that they are aligned, select them both, and then I'm going to use this button here to unite them into one shape like that. So that's going to be sort of the js of the dog. We then need a little nose on top of that really easy for the nose. It just can be a little shape like that. And I'm going to make that black, so I'll just choose black in there and place that in the right position as well. Once again, you can see now how it just lines itself up automatically like that. We need some eyes, of course. So same again using these little shapes here. Let's draw a little I like that. And my eye, I'm going to have it as a black fill, but the line around the outside, I'm going to make white. So I'm going to just choose white like that. Now, you can't see it over there, but when I put it on top of the dog, you might see a tiny little white line around there. Go up to the top. This is your width for your stroke, and you can just adjust that width to anything that you want. You can see how it can go really over the top like that. It's very, very simple. We can make a more interesting eye. And if you wish, you could make an eye just using two shapes. You can have a little shape like that, which is a white fill over there and pop that over there. And then you could do your eyeball separately over there. Make that a perfect circle. Fill that one with black and I can move that one across and then put the I in like that as well. It's up to you which way you want to actually do this. I'm going to keep mine really simple of this. I've got that shape there. Hold down the Alt or the option key and just drag a copy out. Now I've just made a bit of a mistake there by dragging the wrong thing. I've undone it using Command or Control Z. I'll try that again, so I'll select that, Hold down the alt or option key, and drag that across over to there. If you need your eyes to be a bit smaller, that's absolutely fine. Just change whatever you need. Have a bit of a go and get to this stage, and then we'll take it on a little bit further. 21. Create the Ears: Let's do some ears. I'm going to take a circle over here and just make a perfect circle like that because I just want a half a circle. So I'll then take a shape like this and just put it over the top. And can you see how when I'm dragging it over, it's showing me when I'm actually right in the middle of the shape. Selecting both of those and then using this pathfinder tool to subtract one from the other. Now, that's one way to make the shape. Of course, some of you might have noticed there is actually a tool like that called the segment tool, and I can click and drag to make a segment like so, and then go to this line and just pull that up as well. So another way to create a semicircle, use whichever way you like. But once you've done that, go along to your corner tool. Select the points and pull them in like that. As I said, it doesn't matter which one you do. I'll just do this one over here. Select it and pull that in so we've got those rounded corners. Now, I'll use this one over here as it's kind of in the right position. It's upside down, so we'll do that. This one ear is going to go over here. I'm going to make it a little bit smaller, so we're going to have one ear like that. Now, did you notice that? Look what happens when I drag and resize this. The little circles from the corners remain the same. So as I'm making the smaller or bigger, the circles don't change size, but everything else does as well. So you might find that if you've done the wrong size, and then you need to rescale it like that, you might want to go back into this corner tool and just grab the corners over there and just resize them a little bit like that. You can always come back to resize them at any time. So there's my one ear for the dog on that side. I'm going to hold down the old key, do the other ear. But I think this one should be at a sort of an angle to give them a little bit more character to place that one down like so. That will come in just a fraction over to there. Once again, try that out. 22. Add Final Details to the Head: I want to add a little shine to his nose, so I'm going to take a little shape over here, just the ellipse. Draw a little elliptical shape in there. Now, let's zoom in a bit here so we can see what we're doing. If you're on a Mac, it is Command and plus to zoom in. If you're on a PC, it's Control and plus to zoom in and likewise, it's command and minus to Zoom out or control and minus if you're on a PC. So I'm just going to zoom in like that. I'm on a track pad, so I'm just using two fingers to move across the page like that. But there are slides at the bottom and sides, or you can use this little hand tool over here to move your page around. And you'll see over here, we've got a Zoom function as well. Now, let's go back to this move tool here. So this is going to be the shine. I don't want to stroke on this. I'm going to click on the stroke and choose none. That's the little white dot with a red line through it. And I'm going to make the fill white. So let's move that up to there. We're going to rotate it round a little bit. I might even make it a bit smaller. Over there and just pop that on the side to get a sort of a nice shine. The other thing while I'm here is that these two ears, I'm going to click on that one, hold down the Shift key, and click on the other one. I don't want to stroke on those. I'm going to click on the stroke and choose none in there. Now, let's go along and give this little dog a tongue. So I'm going to go and choose a shape Over here, let's just use the ellipse or the rounded rectangle. Red doesn't matter which. I'm going to go with the ellipse. So we'll have a sort of tongue which is going to be this type of shape here. And I'm going to give it some color, so let's make that a nice red. Now, I've done that on the wrong thing. You find that you do this so often where you put the color on the stroke rather than the fill. There's a little button there, which has got two arrows on. If you click on that, it just flicks those two around, so your fill becomes your stroke and vice versa. Once again, on the stroke, I don't want any stroke. There. So that's going to be the tongue of the dog. Now, he looks very strange there because the tongue is on top of his jels. So if you get your layers up and you need to find your layers panel, if you can't find it, go along to the window menu, go down to general, and you'll find that layers is in there. I'm going to drag that layer, well, that object below the gels. So it moves it below those, but above the background. There. So we can now move that around. If you want to give him a little bit more character, you can angle it around a little bit. Whatever works for you, I'm going to keep it like that, just a little tongue sticking out. Lastly, his eyes look dead. If there's such a thing from a cartoon character, I want a little bit of a shine in them. I'll use the same technique that I did for this. So I'm just going to hold down the alt key. Let me select it first. Hold down the t to the option key, make a copy of that, make that smaller. You might find you even need to zoom in a bit further for this, and I can then put a shine over there. We'll make that smaller still. A little shine in that corner over there. Hold down the altar the option key and do another shine on that side. If you do a shine on the left of the nose, then the eyes should be on the left or right. If you do the nose on the right, then those should be on the right, because basically it's reflecting light, which is coming from one direction. I think the head is nearly done. I'm going to select all of those parts on the head. So I've selected them all. Over here, where we've got this little option, one of those things says group, and I'm going to click on group, so it'll group it together. Now, if you have a look at the layers, you see that it shows as a group, if I click anywhere on it, now I can just move the whole thing around. If you want to see the original parts, you can click on the little drop down in there. There's a tiny little arrow, and you can see all the bits inside the layers. Or if you click on it, you can ungroup it over there as well. So now we're back to where we were before. So have a bit of a go, do the shines, do the tongue, select everything over there, and group it together over there, and then we'll do the body over here, and then we'll put them together. 23. Create the Dog's Body: Et's create the body. I'm going to do that once again, starting with an ellipse. So we'll have an elliptical shape like that. Now, if I want to use the same color that I had for the dog's head, I can go along here to this little eyedropper, color picker, click on that, move across to the head and click, and that will actually select it. Now, why hasn't this actually changed color? Well, it's because at the moment I'm on the stroke, let's choose none for the stroke. I'll do the same thing again. I'll select the fill. I've got this selected here. Get the eyedropper tool. Click on that, and you can see change it to the same color as the dog. So this is going to be the body. We are also going to have some legs which are going to be sticking out with little feet. So let's do those. I'm going to do that using a rounded rectangle. I'm going to draw in my rectangle over there. And I'll use my move tool to just move it around so it's in the middle of that shape. You can see the green line. When I'm actually aligned up vertically, the green line appears. The red lines show horizontal. So over there, if I go, there we go. We've got a horizontal line in there. So I think something like that, I'll just line it up like that. And we need some feet which are going to stick out the end over here. So I'll do the same thing, use the rounded rectangle and just draw in some feet. This is kind of looking more like a rocket, isn't it? Over there. And same thing. I'm just going to move it until it's lined up in the middle. Now I'm going to select all of those items over there, and I'm going to unite them together into one shape using that little button up the top. If you prefer, you can use the Shape Builder Tool, go to the plus, and then just click and drag over the bits that you want to unite. You can see you've got to go over all of them. So sometimes that button is much faster, but the end result is exactly the same. So that would be the body for the dog. I know it's in front of him. So body and kind of the legs, the hind legs, which are sticking out like that. Have a go and make that shape, and then we'll put in the front legs. 24. Make the Front Legs & Tail: Let's make the front legs. What I'm going to do for this one is make a long thin rectangle. So long one like that over to there. And I'm going to build the legs out over here. I'm not going to build them on top because I can't actually see what I'm doing. If you wish, you could and just change the color in here a little bit so you could see what you're actually doing. But I'm going to do mine on the side. So that's going to be the first leg in there. And then I might make it a little bit longer. And then we want some toes. Or the pause. So that's going to be simply a few little circles. Once again, I will zoom in over here and I'm going to do a little circle over there. And we're going to hold down the alter the option key, make another copy of that one there, another copy there, and another copy. Over there. This is all stylized, of course. And then I can select all of those, unite them all together into one shape, and that will be the front leg. I'm going to place that over there, hold down the old key once again and make another copy over there. I think I'll just move these in just a little bit like that so they're fairly close together. I don't like the color of those, so I'm going to select them both. Use the eyedropper tool. Make sure I'm on fill, use the eyedropper tool and just sample that color that I had there. That's a little bit more subtle for that. Once we can change all these colors later, and then we need a tail. Now, the tail, I'm going to use a pre made crescent shape over here. So I just click and drag to make a crescent like that. That's going to be the tail. And you can see we've got some options over there. I think I'll do a thin tail like that. I'm going to make this a little bit bigger. Let's go over there and Yeah, nice thin tail like that. That's going to be behind the dog, so I'm going to pop it over here. I'm going to rotate it a little bit like that. And then I'm going to move that object below the two legs and the body. So I'm just dragging it below until you see the line there, and then you can let go and then I'll move it behind the dog. We're going to take all of that now and group it together. So how do we get this behind the dog? At the moment the face is behind there, all you do is you take that group and drag that entire group above the other one. Now, you got to be careful when you're doing this, because if you drop it inside the group, it'll think it's part of that group. So you need to keep going until you see just the one line, just on top of that group and then let go. Now, this group is on top of that one. I think the body is too big. I'm going to just scale it down and I'm holding down the Shift key to scale it a bit like that. There we go. Unfortunately, his front legs are getting lost in the underneath his head. So we'll make it just a little bit like that. So I'm going to go and select them. Now, because they're all grouped, I might need to ungroup them, then I can select the two front legs and I can change the color to something else. Let's try making them darker. Like that. If you want, at any time, you can go along to these things and change them. If you think that his legs should be sticking out a little bit like that, and that one should be sticking out, just go in, rotate them a bit, have a bit of a play with that. You might need to change the size on some of these until you get the size that you're actually happy with. And if you want to offset his head a little bit, it might be quite interesting like that, as well. But I'm going to leave mine all perfectly lined up like that. Have a go with that. 25. Add More Life to Your Dog: I have ungrouped my puppy, and I've just changed the color on some of these things to something which I prefer. Now, let's just give this dog a little bit more life. And I'm going to do that by using a rectangle and putting a rectangle over half the dog, so it's on the left hand side. And I'm going to change the fill of that color to white. So let's make that pure white like that. Go along to my opacity. You can see over here with an object, we can change the opacity of an object, and I'm just going to take that down quite a lot over there to just make one side of the dog slightly lighter than the other. You can see it just gives us an interesting look to the dog. Don't do it with any other color because you will see the shape. If I selected that and chose black, for example, you'd see the shape around there. It only works with white on a white background. There are other ways around this. If you do have to put something onto a different color, I'll be telling you about those later on. You can change the order in here as well. So if I went along to my layers in there, and I could go in and I could take this white rectangle. This is the one over here, and I could drag it down so it wasn't actually above the eyes and the nose and the ears so that only the head and the body and the legs got affected by it, it didn't actually affect this. You'll see if I change this now, the opacity, it's not affecting the eyes and ears in there. It's up to you what you want to do with that, but have a little bit of go with that. And once you've done with that, we're going to save it. So we'll have a look at saving and exporting our character. 26. Save & Export: Et's go and save this. I'm going to go to File and Save As, and I'm just going to put this onto the desktop of my machine over here. You can put yours wherever you like. And I'm going to give it a save, I'll call this dog character. I'm going to click on Save in there. Now, that is my editable version. So if I were to close this down over there, I can always go back to File, Open and find the dog. There it is the dog CHA, dog character, and open that up, and there it is. And everything is still as it should be for editing. Now, I'm going to also export this. I'm going to go to File. I'm going down to Export. I'm going to click on Export in there, and we can export in so many different formats. For those of you who are using Photoshop, you'll notice there's a PSD file in there. There's all sorts of different ways. And I'm going to just choose JPG at the top. So you click on JPG, and then you choose your quality in here. I'm going to go with, I think, just high quality over there. Talk more about thes settings and JPEGs and PNGs and all of them later on. But for now, I'll just go down, say export, and I'm going to put that onto my desktop so we can see that. Now, let me close that down. We'll just click Save. And that should be on my desktop. Over here. There is the JPEG file. You can see we've got it there. And this one over here is my editable version for Affinity. Have a bit of a go with that. 27. How to Find Your Files: Now, if you want to open your file again, you could go to File and go down to open and go and find it that way in there or you can just click on the little A item A icon at the top for Affinity. Click on that. It takes you back to this welcome screen. By the way, if you can't see this, you might be on that area there. Just click on Little House, and there is your recent document that you're working on. You can just click on that to come back and continue editing. I 28. Make Variations: Don't worry about sticking to standard colors. If you want to go wild with some different colors, just make a copy. So I'm going to select this dog here, hold down the alter the option key, whoops, and drag a copy out. And then I can just go through the copy, changing the colors. And remember, if you want to select a color, so I've selected that here, I could use the eyedropper tool to just click on the green that I've got from here there. And I just work my way around to get some wild and wonderful colors. Not only that, you can take these basic shapes that I've shown you and make all sorts of different creatures. I've done another one over here to show you that you could do something like a mouse. It's the same basic principle. The tail is bigger. I've made the head a little bit longer, and then I've created these shapes over here for the ears. Now, how did I create this shape? Because we don't have a tool like that? Well, what you could do is you could take a rectangle like that, and we want to basically make this bit come out so you can get your remember your Node Tool over there to select the point and take it out. But in order to change one of these, you've got to go to that little button at the top there and convert to curves. Now with a node tool, you can grab that corner and pull it out to make a shape like that. So that was how I got that shape there. And well, almost, I've rounded the corners. So then I used my corner tool to select all the points on there and just clicked and dragged in to create that shape like that. So once I got that shape, it's easy to hold down the old key to make a copy of that, make that one smaller. That goes inside there, and that was the pink in the ear that I'd used in there. Anyway, have a think you might be able to come up with some amazing creatures that you've created on your own, as well. And please share them. We love seeing what you're doing. I might love to get some other ideas from you, as well, about the creatures that you've created. Most importantly, have lots of fun with this one. 29. Backgrounds & Text: Et's make an interesting background for this and make it into a logo or an icon. So we'll start off by just having a square background with rounded corners behind one of these. And I'm going to do that by going along and making a new document. So I'm going to go to file a new. I'm going to create a new document. Once again, I'm using a four in there. Remember, size doesn't matter for vectors because it's fully scalable. And I will just create a document there. Now, I'm going to go back to my dog and mouse. You've might have different things, and I'm going to copy it. Now, you see the mouse has got this sort of white area around it. So I'm just going to move that to the side, and I'm going to then select the mouse. Copy it. So I will use Command C or Control C, depending Mac or PC. And I'm then going to go and take that over here. But before I actually paste it in, I'm just going to make a little shape. So I'll get a rectangle, drawing the rectangle that I want. I'm holding down the Shift key, so it's a perfect square. I'm going to use my corner tool over here to select all those and just round them off a bit to the size that I want. I think I'm going to take that I'm going to get rid of the line around the outside. So get rid of the stroke over there, and then go to the fill and give it a fill color, maybe a dark gray like that. And then I can paste my rat on top of that or mouse, whatever it is. Now, I need to be careful that I'm back on the move tool over here. You can see my mouse, well, it doesn't fit in there very well, so we're going to have to tweak it a bit. Now, I'm going to move this to the side so I can do things to this quite easily. And I'd like my mouse to be white. So I'm going to start selecting parts, and I'm going to say I want to get that part there, and then I'm holding down the Shift key to say this one, that here, and that here. Now, if you find that things are not selecting very easily, remember, you've got group, you can just ungroup over there very, very quickly. Now, I'm going to just change the color of all of those at once and make it quite light. Now, I've got this and this, which are really dark, so I'm going to lighten them as well. Now, for some reason, the feet in front of the head. So I really do need to move them around. Now, over here, I can do that in my layers. If you ever look at all these shapes that I've got in my layers? What I'm going to do is I'm going to take those two. Over there you can see I can click on them to select them in there and just move them down below the ears and the nose. But above the background shape. Now, what's happened here? This you'll find happens occasionally. You think, I've moved those round. Why are they just It's almost like giving him stripes on his face. Why is it done that? Well, because of where you've moved them to, you see over here this polyline, if I click over there those two shapes are actually inside that shape now. We're going to be looking at this later on this sort of masking effect. So if you find that happens, just undo it. Use Control or Command Z to undo it. And the next time you grab it and move it, be very careful that you're actually moving it not on top of the shape, but underneath the shape. So over there, I'll go underneath that shape there. And I'm going to take this tail, I think, make it a little bit more upright. Like so, and I'm going to change the color of those to a much lighter, paler pink as well. When I'm happy with that, I can select all of that, and I'm going to go along, group it together, and then this one can go underneath that. And my rat can go in the middle or mouse, whatever it is. I think I might make it a little bit smaller. There we go. It's presented rather nicely over there. However, I still want some text over here, and I'm going to call this a rat, cause to me, it looks a little bit more rat like. Also, I find that that's maybe a little bit too dark, the gray in there. I might need to lighten up a bit as well. But for now, let me put in some text. Now, I'm going to go along to the text tool. We haven't talked about the text tool yet, but there are two types of text tools. There's artistic text and this frame text. I'm going to be using artist artistic text, and I'm going to click and drag to the size of the text that I want. And I'm just going to type in. All caps the word rats with a z. Now, if I select that over here, I've got some options for the text. And instead of aerial, I'm going to choose Aerial black. You can pick anything you like in here. Your typefaces that you've got in here will entirely depend on what you've got on your system. That's quite an interesting one for that. Oh, I quite like that. And then you can actually just grab a corner with your move tool over there and just pull it out if you need. So I'm just going to pull that out, so it's the same size as that. In there. Let's select that. I'm going to choose a color from in here. I think I'll go with eye drop a tool and pick that gray. That looks good. But to emphasize the word rat in there, I'm going to select the z over there, once again with the same text tool and I'm going to pick a pink from the ear. That looks quite interesting over there. I will go and just change the colors of those. Now remember, these are grouped together. So if I click in my layers here, I can see all the parts, and then I can just select them very quickly. So in here, I'm going to hold down the Shift key, do those, those, and those, and this one here. Now, because I use Shift, when I clicked on those three and then went to this one, it also selected in between ones. So what you can do is if you hold down either Command or Control, depending on the MACOPC, you can then select them individually. And I'm going to go to my colors over here and just maybe lighten them up a little bit. So we've got slightly more of a light color rat in there. I'll do the same with the feet now, select both of those, and let's make them really light in front. Do have a bit of a go with that. Try putting your design onto a background, get a bit of text in there as well. Use sympathetic colors to your shape. Don't put too many colors in. Keep it nice and simple and create something interesting like that. Dry out. 30. Background Variations: Let's try another variation. I'm going to take the dog this time, so I'm just going to get rid of that light area, select the dog, copy it. Let's go and do a new document. So up to the top, over to the plus, and I'm going to just say create document over there. Now, this time, I'm going to do something vertical. So I'm going to take my rectangle tool. I'm going to put in a vertical shape over here. And I will round off the corners, only because I like rounded corners for no other reason. So I'm just going to select this. But instead of actually rounding off all of them, I'm just going to round off the bottom ones. So I'll select those two and round those two off like that. And then let's give that a color. Once again, just something to get started with. I'm going to paste my dog in, and I'll place him down the bottom, like so. I might make him just a little bit smaller. Let's move him down to there. And then I want to put in some text along the top, but I want to show you a little trick with the text. So I'm going to go and get my text, which is my artistic text, and I'm just going to click and drag and put in the word hound. Well, that's kind of big, really. So I can take that. I'll just select it all. I'm going to go up here to the size and just take the size down a little bit alike so. We don't have to use this. As I said before, you can actually just grab a corner and scale it up and down. And I'm going to go with something like aerial black. So it's a fairly heavy duty typeface that I've got in there. I'm going to make that a little bit smaller. And what I'm looking to do is to make that just slightly smaller than background. I'm going to pop that over there. Now, I'm going to select the background and the text. And then I'm going to go up to my geometry options, and I'm going to say cut out the overlapping areas, and I'll get something which looks like that. Once again, it's just very different. And let's say this is a game called Hund, and I can just get a little bit more text in there, click and drag and say the game. Just so we've got something else over there. Of course, I can always go in and change that background color, and we just try something lighter, try something darker. Oh, that's actually looking quite good, although this bit of text will then need to be lightened up as well. And maybe we can change the color on the dog. But anyway, do have a bit of a go with that. It's such a lovely technique where you just take your shape, put some text over it, and then knock out the overlapping areas. 31. One More Background: I'm going to do one more background over here, so I'm going to just do a new document up to there. Same again. A four. Well, let's do it landscape. And I want to do something interesting for my rat or my mouse. If you're doing using the dog, maybe I'll do some bones with a rat. I'm going to do a piece of cheese, so I'm just going to select it. Copy it. And let's go back to this document here. And the cheese I'm going to do, you won't believe how easy this will be. Take a shape like that. I'm going to make it sort of a cheesy yellow, like so. I'm going to go to my Node Tool because I want to make this into a wedge of cheese. And to do that, I need to then convert this into curves. So now I can select that point and pull it down to get kind of a wedge shape like that. I want some holes, so it's going to be Swiss cheese, so I'm going to do some holes in there, so I'll take an ellipse, like so, and I'm actually going to just change the color on that ellipse so I can see what I'm doing. I'm going to pop an ellipse in over there. Hold down the alter the option key, do another one, do another one. And then I'm also going to do another one there and then make it smaller. So once again, every time I'm scaling this, I'm holding down the Shift key, so that can go over there. Hold down the old key, make another copy, maybe another copy over there, and one last little one. I can go there. Maybe we'll have another version there. Now I'm going to select all of those. So I'm selecting every single one of them. And when we go up here to the subtract option, what it'll do is it'll subtract all the top objects from the bottom object. Look at the layers. You'll see we've got all of these top objects and the cheese is the bottom object. So when I choose that, it subtracts all the top ones from the bottom one. There's my cheese. I'll just get rid of the stroke around the outside. And I can then paste my rat in front of that. Over there, we get interesting little graphic like that. Anyway, try with the dog if you haven't got a rat or any other animal that you've got find something appropriate. For the dog, I might make some bones, and I would probably do bones by just doing a shape like that, doing a little circle. Over there, and let's have a circle on that side. Hold down the old key, another one there, old key, another one there, old key, another one there. I can select all of those and unite them all together to make the bone. And then, you know, we could have one like that and maybe hold down the old key and a few more in a pattern shape like that. And then put the dog in front of it. Whatever you want to do is absolutely fine. Just enjoy the process and use these little tools over here. Have a go. I 32. Strokes, Fills, Colors & Gradients - Intro: Et's move on with the shapes. Now, we're going to be looking at different modes so you can see your artwork not just as solid colors, but in something called X ray mode and line mode. We're going to be looking at strokes and we're going to go into swatches. So we'll look at solid colors, how to create solid colors, how to save your solid colors, and also how to work with gradients. And we're going to do some really, really cool gradients. 33. Fill & Stroke - The Basics: Et's create a little shape over here and have a look at the fill and the stroke. So when I've created the shape, it's coming with this kind of gray background, and there's a black line around the outside, which is the stroke over here. Now, to change the stroke, you can either do it by clicking on the stroke up the top there or you can go over here as well. And to change the width, I can just move across and decide on a different width for that little area. Now, we can also choose from more options about the width. I'm going to go along to the little well, it kind of looks like a brush stroke. So I'm going to click on that, and you can see, first of all, we've got a slider in there. That's fine. We've done it before. But within this area, you can also change things like the dots or the dashes, shall we say. And then there's a last one over here, which is a brush stroke, and we'll come to that later on. Now, when it comes to the colors, as always, you choose the one you want. Change the color in there. Now, I want to go from stroke to fill, and of course, I can go up here and I can click on it or I can go over there and I can click on it there. But a really nice fast way of doing this is to use a shortcut, and the shortcut to get between those two is just X on the keyboard. There's no control or command or shift or anything like that. It is purely just X. X will toggle between the fill and the stroke. So I can toggle and I want that color for my stroke, press X, and I want that color for my fill in there. You'll also notice that there is a little arrow over here, so I can actually click on that arrow and change my fill and my stroke around. Now, there's a shortcut for that as well, for those of you who like shortcuts, and that's Shift and X. So shift in X does that, but X will just bring one or the other to the front. Now, we can also, while we're in here, remove the fill or the stroke. And we do that by clicking on this little forward red line in there. If I click on that, I've got rid of the stroke. If I do that, I get rid of the fill from there. Now, this shape here has got no fill or stroke in it. You see, if I click around, I can't see it. If I click and drag over it, then I will select it. And you'll find if you click and drag just a little bit, it will pick it up, but by just clicking won't actually select it at all. No, this looks like it's a mistake, having no fill, no stroke on a shape like that, but these are helper objects, and we will in the more advanced section, get into why we need to use those little shapes for different things. So don't forget, you've got your filling your stroke over here. You can change the colors quickly. You can use X to flick between them. You can use shift in X to flick those colors around. And lastly, and I love this little shortcut because very often I'll go and I'll create something and say, Okay, I want that shape there, but then I want another shape on top of that, so I go and create my shape and go, A, I want this one to not be filled. So rather than having to go to the top there, I can press X to bring the fill to the front and see how the little red thing, it looks like the forward slash on the keyboard. So if you click forward slash on the keyboard, that will remove the fill or the stroke. Quite a lot of shortcuts there, I'm afraid, but you can ignore them if you like. And you can just use these little ones up here. Finally, down the bottom here, we've got exactly the same thing. You can go to the fill and you can go to the stroke. Well, it seems quite a long way to go down there, click on the fill, and then choose it from up the top. You can while you're here, double click on these and bring up a color picker, as well. There's so many ways of doing exactly the same thing in Affinity, and you just choose the way that works for you the best. Anyway, have a bit of a play with those settings. I 34. Outline & X Ray Modes: I've made some shapes here, and I've got some without strokes, some with fills and strokes, some without fills. And there's actually one, if I drag over it over here, you can see hasn't got anything in the middle. Now, if I were to click and just click in the middle of that shape just with one click, it won't show it. If I click and drag inside it or across it, it will show up and become selected over there. And if I've got something like this that doesn't have a fill, you can see there's none on the fill there. Once again, if I go over to it and click, it doesn't select it. If I click on these items, because they've got a fill, one click will select them, but that doesn't always select it, you sometimes have to click and drag to get it to select. You get used to it and you just do it without thinking in the end. But just remember, a click won't go, but a click with a drag will, whereas a filled item, you can just click. Now, this one here, Yeah, it won't select. That one will. Okay, now, let's have a look at other ways that we can see this because if I've got objects on my page which are not filled, how do I know that they're actually there? Well, we can go along to the view menu. And in the view menu, if I go down to mode, you'll see I'm actually in vector mode. There's pixel modes in here as well, so I can actually view things as if they were pixels. But we've got a wireframe mode. And there are two modes in this wireframe the one is the outline mode, and the other is X ray mode. Now, let me show you outline first, so if I go into outline, it just shows everything purely as an outline. And you can see that this one here that doesn't have a fill or a stroke on it, it shows up. So with these ones here, once again, if I click on them, nothing will happen. If I go to the line and click, then I can select them. But if I click and drag a little bit, I can select any of those items in there. Oh, what's Xray mode? Well, let's go into mode and you see. If we go to Xray mode, it shows a little bit of the color, so you get an idea of what's actually going on with colors in there. And once again, you've just got to click and drag a little bit to select the item before you can start to move it around. They're really useful, those little modes in there. I'll just go back to mode over here. And especially if you've lost something or you can't find it or you've got white on a white background, just use X ray mode, or sometimes you might have an object which is underneath another object and you don't always see it. Once again, use outline mode in there. So I'm just going to go back to vector mode, which takes me back to the normal mode of that. Have play with those, make sure you feel comfortable with them. 35. More Shape Settings: Et's have a look at a few more shapes that we can do. I'm going to go to my shapes again, use a rectangle, and I'm just going to draw in a little rectangle like that. Now, so that you can see it a bit better, I'm going to go over to my color and just make it a bit lighter so it's easier to see. Over to the stroke, and I think the stroke, I will change the width, so it's a bit thinner like that. Now, have a look over here at some of the other options. You'll see as you move along, we've got this little settings option or presets option. If I click on there, I can then just very quickly jump to a different preset. If I do that, you'll see that it shows me that shape in there. If I do that, it cuts off the corners. Now, if you choose one of these, you'll find that you still have the little red dot, so you can actually just change the shape once again. Now, honestly, my favorite of these is actually this one here because when you click on it, you can then choose which of the corners you want to round off independently. So the bottom right at the moment has got a curved version on it with 60%. If I go to the top left TL over there, and I'm going to choose round it, and then in here, I can choose how much I want to round it off, or you can go to the little red dot, and you can just round it off like that. I can grab this one over here and round that one off. You can do these really cool shapes like that. You'll see them quite a lot on different designs because they're so useful. Anyway, do try that out. Remember, you can always pull things back again. Like that if you need to get back to the original shape over there. Have a go. 36. Color Panels: Et's have a look at this little color wheel over here, I'm going to pull it out, so I'm going to grab it by its name where it says color and just pull it over here to make it easier for you to see. So with a color wheel, around the outside, we have got what is called the hue. That's the color on the color spectrum. If I click on this purple, you'll see as I drag it around, the hue is changing. The color is changing in there. When I go to the middle, this then changes the saturation or the lightness. So I can go from dark to light across like that. You can see if I go almost from black to white, dark to light, and then really saturated, vivid or no saturation or hardly saturated at all down to the bottom to gray. And you can do that with any color in the color spectrum. Now, if you don't like working like that, you go up to this little V over here. Click on the V. That's the color wheel. You can go with sliders instead. So in the sliders, if, for example, you're working on a document and you want a specific CMYK color, you can come in here and you can just type in your CMYK values in here. Or you can click on this little color area down here to choose the colors, or you can just drag the slides to what you want. Of course, you could always go in here and you could use RGB instead, once again, you can type them and you can pick from the colors in there. If you've got something like a web color that you need, and that would be your hex colors that you might have in your brand guidelines, you can type your hex number straight into there. Once again, that will show those colors in RGB mode. Um, there are so many more of them in here as well. I don't want to give you all sorts, but I will go to HSL because I like this. This gives you the hue as a slider, and then the saturation over here, from no saturation to fully saturated. And finally, the lightness from black through to white or the darkness or lightness of that color. Now we can go to the top here again. There's so many of these. We can say, Well, what about as boxes? So you've got the hue over there, and you've got the saturation over there, and then you can choose the lightness over there. I just there are so many options. You choose the one that you want to work in. The last one that I do want to mention here, which is actually really useful is the tint. So I'm going to go up to the top and choose tint there. Let's take this little green triangle. If I were to tint this, I can change the color and I can lighten it up. You can see I can get a really light tint of that color all the way through to white or all the way through to the color that I've chosen in there. So it's just lightening that color like it's adding white to it. Now, it's important to know the difference between tint and opacity. Because if I go to this one here and we look at opacity, let's move that across to there we'll change the opacity until it's the same color. Look at that. Those are almost the same color. This one is tint, that one is opacity. So what's the difference? Well, the difference is that if I put this one on top of that one, the opacity means that things underneath will show through. With a tint, it's a solid lightness of that color in there. So just watch those two there it's important to know the difference. If you don't have anything underneath them, well, in that case, it probably won't make any difference at all, but it's as soon as you have something on top of something else that you'll see the difference. Now, other ways to choose colors in here as well. By the way, I'm going to go back to my wheel 'cause I like to have that one up over there, entirely up to you. I can go over here to the top and I can click in there. We get the same thing in there. Same with the stroke. We've got the wheel in there, or you can choose any other way of viewing it. Lastly, I promise this is the last one I'll do with these colors. As down to the bottom, you can go down here to the fill in the stroke in your toolbar and double click on that fill or stroke. And once again in here, you can then just choose your colors from the hue along the top, and then the saturation and lightness over here, or you can go in and you can pick it using any of the other methods that we've looked at. Lastly, you can put in your RGB in there or your CMYK numbers if you've got those in your brand guidelines, or you can put in your hex number over here. If you don't need brand guidelines, well, you can just go wild and pick anything you like. Let's close that. I'm going to stop there, have a little bit of a look at those, get to know them and get to know what options there are in here as well, just in case at some stage you open up and looks like that, and you go, Where's it gone? You can always change it back. Try it out. 37. Swatches: Now, let's have a look at how we can actually save our colors into a swatch. I'm going to go to the Swatches panel over here, and I'm going to put it out again to make it easier for you to see. Now, we've got different color swatches in here. And if I click over here, you'll see that we've got things like colors, gradients, grays, hatches. There's some of the other panels in here. All you've got to do is choose one to see the colors in there. I'll just go back to my main colors in there. And finally, we have got these pantone range in here. Now, pantons what are known as spot colors. Pantone is just a brand of spot color. And if you are printing something, we'll be talking about this later when we come to print. You might want a specific color ink that you want to use, and you can do that from the Pantone books. Now, if I go over here and say, Okay, well, that's all very well, but I want to save my own colors in here and make my own particular swatch. Well, go to the top up to there, and we can then add our own palettes. Now, there's an application palette and a document palette. I'm going to choose the document palette first. I'm going to say I want to make a new palette called a document palette over here, and I'm going to call this Blues. There. I'll click Okay. Now, I want to put some blue into there. So I'm going to go in and pick the color blue that I want, so I want a sort of a blue like that. And then to add it into this little swatch, click on that little icon over there with one with a plus on it, and we'll add it in there. Well it's difficult to see because it's so dark. Let's do some other blue. So I'm going to have this blue here. I'll add that one in. Let's have a lighter blue. Once again, add that in over there and a more sort of turquoise teal color blue in there as well. Now, if I click over here, you'll see that I've got this swatch called blues. If I go back to my colors, I can always go back to Blues, and I can then pick colors from there. So I want to use that blue there and this one over here, and that one's going to go over there. That's okay for this document. But if I went into a new document, over here and let's just click the new document button. Now, where's my blues gone? If I go back to this document here, the blues is there. Well, when you're creating a panel or a swatch, if you do it as a document palette, it's only for the document that you're actually in. So let's do another one, which is an application palette. Once again, I need to give it a name. I'm going to call this one greens. You can call it anything you like, really. And then I'm going to go and add some greens in here, so I want to use the screen here, sort of a very very vivid color. I'm going to add that in, and it's adding a sort of a more saturated version of that, maybe a darker version of that green. I just keep adding as many of these in as I like and maybe more of a sort of a yellow green over there as well. Okay, so I've got those greens in there. Now, if I go to another document and I'm just going to open up a new document here, you'll see that my greens are there, and it's part of the application rather than just the document, they will always be there. If I go back to this one here, once again, click in there. There's my greens over there. So do be aware of the difference between these two. Document palette is only for the document you're in. Application palettes are for well, any document that you're working in. One last thing. If you go up to the top here, you can go in and you can rename any palettes that you like. If I click on Rename palette. This is actually the color palette because I'm in that one. I don't want to call that rename that one. I'm going to rename Greens. So I'll go over there. I can rename it greens and yellows. Over there. And I can also delete palettes that I don't want. So we can go down here. We can delete them. We can duplicate them if you find you've got a really cool palette, but you want to make some changes, adjust to a version of that. Anyway, do have a bit of a go with that. Try it out. Get to know these swatches because once again, they're so useful for holding your colors and your brand colors. 38. Gradient Basics & Pigment Blend: Let's have a look at creating gradients or shades or blends. So people call them different by different names, but it's when one color blends into another color or as a different shade. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go across. I've got my object selected across to my tools, and I've got a tool here called the fill tool. If you hover over it, it's called the fill tool. Now, if I click on that tool, I'm going to move across to my object, and I'm just going to click and drag over there, and you can see, well, it's very, very subtle at the moment, but it's gone from purple here to a darker purple on that side. Now, if I click on this, these are called stops over here on our gradient. If I click on that one there and I change the color, and I say, Well, let's make that orange. You can see how we get a graduation of colors from one color through to the other one. I'm going to make that a bit brighter in and at any point, I can go to these stops. I can click on that stop, and I can change the color to something else. Whoa, that's a bit much. Let's go back to purple over there. I can also drag the stops around, so I can just pull this over there to get my gradient to go in different ways. You don't have to stay within the shape, either. I can sort of pull that out and maybe that bit out there if I just wanted that sort of more subtle as subtle as purple to orange is going to be in there. So do be aware as you're doing this, that you can pull them out over there, and you can get some really interesting graduations of colors. All you have to do is click on the stop that you want, whichever one that might be and choose a color or a shade of the color. Now, if you've used affinity before, particularly when it was designer, you'll know that when you do these gradients, you get a bit of a messy color. It's not very nice color in between, sometimes, especially if you're going from one extreme color to another. So there's an option up the top which they've included called pigment blend. If you switch that on, you'll see that this is changing, so it's going from yellow into sort of a weird pinky brown color and then into purple over there. If that was more of an ink, when you went from one to the other, let's do it with blue. Actually, that would make more sense there. If that went from yellow to blue, when you mix them together, that would actually be green. So if you click on pigment Blend, you'll see it'll go from yellow into green into blue over there. So using pigment blend, it blends the colors as if they were something like inks or paint or something where you know that you take two colors, you mix them together to get a third color in there. You can switch it on, you can switch it off. It really depends on what you want to do with those colors. But do have a bit of a go. It's the fill tool over there. If you go back to your move tool, that line will disappear if you need to adjust it. Just go back to the fill tool once again, and those little stops will appear for you to work from and don't forget the pigment blend up the top. Try it out. 39. Add & Delete Stops: You'll notice there's a little line in the middle there, just that crosses the main line. If you drag that, it will adjust your gradient. So in this case, it's predominantly blue, and then the graduation sort of middle point is over there. Likewise, I can do it that way. And if we have pigment blend on, it's the same again, so I can kind of move the green from one side to the other. I'll just switch that off for now. If you want to add more colors to your gradient, just go onto the stop and click on the stop and you can then pick a different color, and you can keep adding as many of these in as you like. Like so. If you want to get rid of a color, that green looks awful. All you do is you click on it, and then you can either click on delete or backspace on the keyboard to remove it. I'm going to get rid of that one there and delete. Now, I've got this stop, this stop, and this stop. What would happen if I deleted this stop? But if I click on that stop there and press backspace or delete, now my gradient just goes from there to there. If we delete that one, we go back to a solid shape and you can click and drag again for your next gradient. So do try those out and get to know those the way that little line works, adding points, moving this middle section around and deleting them. 40. Save Gradients: Now, I've got this really groovy gradient over here, and it goes from yellow over there to a burnt orange on that side. And I want to save this gradient. If we go to the swatches and I went down instead of my colors, I chose gradients in there, and I went to save it. What would happen is when I clicked on the gradient, it doesn't save the gradient. It just saves one of those colors. So, how's that working? Well, you see, with the stops, if I click on one stop over there, that's now the color that it's chosen. If I click on this stop here, that's the color that it's chosen. And when you save, you're saving those colors there. So how do you get the gradient? Well, go to the move tool. Click on your shape, and now you can see my fill or the stroke if you've applied to a stroke is apply has got a gradient in it. Now, if I choose to save it, there we go. It's saved in there. So just remember when you are working on a gradient over here, let's just add another color in there. We'll go from purple to I don't know, green there. And I want to do that one vertically, all I need to do is to go to my move tool, click on there and then save that gradient straight in there. Once again, you can save these to the document or to the application itself. If you want to get rid of something, so I've got that solid color in there, you can right click and you can just say delete fill, and you can delete solid colors. You can delete gradients, you can delete anything that you like with that. Once again, try it out. 41. Other Studios: I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, Tim, we've been spending so much time in this vector area. We've been looking at colors, we've been looking at shapes so far. Are we going to go into pixel and out mode at all? The answer is, you've actually been there. You just don't know. You see, the great thing is, we've been learning this in vector, and I've been doing color and swatches recently with you. But what about if we go into Pixel mode? Well, in pixel mode, there is exactly the same. There's a fill tool over there. There is swatches. There's colors. They are identical. If we go into out mode or shall I say studio, once again, it's the same. We've got a fill tool there. We can do gradients, we can do swatches. It's the same with everything that we've been doing with these simple shapes. I'll just get rid of this little shape that we've got over here. I can take a simple shape like that. Over there, you'll see all the shapes in vector. If I go to pixel mode, once again, I can go in there. We've got all those shapes in pixel mode as well. And we can go to out mode, and you've guessed it, those shapes are also available in Loud mode. So all the stuff that you've been learning so far, although it's all in the vector area, is absolutely applicable to pixel and layout studios and, of course, any of the other studios that you want to work in as well. So you've been doing three and one without actually realizing it so far. 42. Gradient Poster Project - Intro: And we've got another project. This one, we're going to create something which you could use as a poster. You could use it as a post for social media, but it's going to be comprised of a lot of gradients. But look at this, look at the colors that we've got on here. And I want to show you how to blend your gradients together with this, and we're going to be adding some text to it, as well. Let's get started. 43. About the Project & Clip to Canvas: For this project, we're going to make this amazing poster using gradients. And I just want to take this apart first to show you how simple something which looks so effective can really be. Now, this will be a poster for a T which is going on. I've called it Tuesday Talks, and this one is all about natural satellites which are things like celestial bodies orbiting planets, I E the moon. So it's just a intricate way of saying, we're going to talk about the moon. Anyway, you can do yours on any particular subject you like, but I've chosen things like moons because of these circles that are so nice to do. Let me take this apart to show you how simple it is, and then I'll show you how to build it. But the first thing is, if I start to move things around like this, you can't see them on the outside. You see, when I pull that out, you can see my groovy colors in there, you can't actually see this. So I'm going to go up to the view menu. And what I want to do is I want to switch off clip to canvas. And what that does, then, is it shows you everything which is outside the canvas. So if I pull that out over there, you can see what it is. When I start to pull these out over here, you can see them on the outside. So if you prefer to work like this where you can see things on the outside or you've put something on the outside and you can't find it, it's view and clip to canvas. You can switch it on and switch it off in there. So what we've got here is a black background. Over there, we've got some text, and I'll show you how to put that in. And then we've got these three little well, these three large circles with gradients. And the gradients are radial gradients. We'll be looking into that. But more importantly, as you drag these across each other, you can see how they interact with each other like that, and you can kind of see the overlapping bits. Underneath them, and I want to show you how to do that. And then finally, we're going to put a color over the top like that just to once again, the top's got a gradient on it as well, and we're going to blend those together to get that really interesting sort of blue, celestial look, but with a little bit of color coming through as well. Anyway, I'm going to close mine down, and then we're going to get started. So let's get going. 44. Create CMYK Document & Radial Gradients: The poster that we're going to create is going to be printed on an office printer. So we're going to make this a four. And the office printer works with four colors of ink. So most printing works with four colors of ink. These are Sian magenta, yellow and black. Now, if you do this in RGB, or red, green, and blue, you're going to find that when you print it out, even if you send it to an external printer, the colors will change a bit, and I'll show you a little bit about that later on. But we're going to start off with a document which is in Ci Magenta yellow and black, which is known as CMYK. So I'm going to go to File and New. And down in my pages, I'm going to choose an A four page in CMYK. You can see over here these are page sizes RGB, page size is CMYK. There's my Ci Magenta yellow and black icon. Now, over here, we don't really need to worry about any of these bits and pieces. It has put in something called a bleed. Now, we'll look at bleeds at a later stage, but the bleed is just an extra little area where if you've got a printer which prints to the edge of the page, you usually want to print it a little bit bigger, so when it gets cut by the gelatin, because pages are not usually printed on A four pages for commercial printing, don't have anything leftover. More of that later on. We don't actually need the bleed on here because it's going to be printed on an office printer, and chances are it won't have it won't be able to print edge to edge anyway. So I'm going to switch off the bleed in there. And I'm going to click on Create Document. That's this little pull this up so you can see it, little button at the bottom over there. Now, what is this thing over here? Well, this just shows me very quickly a little margin. And we can completely ignore that. We don't have to use it in the slightest. It helps us to lay out the document, though. So I'm going to go along, and I'm going to make the circles that I want in here. And I'm going to start off by using an ellipse and just drawing an elliptical shape in here. I'm going to put a gradient in there. Now, let me start by filling it with, and I was using green for the background. I don't know whether you noticed. But when you go to these colors over here now, they're not as bright as when we were working in our GB. I'll just show you if I do a new document and this is a four, and I go to the green. Look how vivid that green is. If I were to just put into a circle like that, you can see it's really, really bright. If we go to CMYK, that's as bright as it gets because a printer, which prints to CMYK is not able to print those very, very vivid colors that you get using red, green, and blue light. So if you're creating anything for print, and you think, Oh, my goodness, why is it not as bright as it was on screen? Chances are you are seeing it on screen in RGB mode. When it prints out, it just uses CMYK. You'll find that the greens particularly change and also the blues, the very bright blues in there. Once again, I'll just change that to a blue. Oops, that's not quite what I wanted. To a blue like that, that looks so bright there, not quite as bright in here. It's just the nature of printing. Because we're using cimagenta yellow and black ink, you cannot get those super vivid greens and blues. To a similar extent, it does affect reds, but not nearly as much as those two. But anyway, we're going to make the best of this, and we're gonna make it look awesome. So I'm going to start off with green over here. And I want to have a gradient which is a circular gradient which is going to go from a darkish green like that to a yellow. And I want it to be over here the yellow to give it that sort of spherical look that I want for my planets. So I'm going to go over to my filtil and I'm going to click and drag. Now, at the moment, this is not giving me a sphere. It's given me a gradient which goes from one side to the other. If you go up to the type of gradient, it's a linear gradient. I'm going to choose an elliptical or a radial gradient over here. I think I'll probably go for radial. And you can see now if I pull this over, and pull it in. It goes from that light green to the dark green. Let's change the light one to maybe a yellow so you can see it a little bit better. There we go, and we'll pull that out so we get a radial gradient. And once again, I can move the center around to wherever I want. And because it kind of goes slightly darker over there, it gives me that really nice sort of sphere. Over here, I might even pull this out just a little bit. In there. And you can change the colors and just get something which looks really interesting there. Now, I want a second one of these, so I'm going to hold down. Oh, by the way, I'm going to get rid of the stroke from that before I forget. So no stroke over there. I'm going to hold down the Alt or the option key to drag a copy in there, and I'm going to change the gradient slightly on this. So over to the fill tool, and I think I'm going to move the gradient up there, the dark a bit. Let's try it over there. I want to be able to see one or the other in front or behind each other. Let's move those to a cross like that over there, so we can see both shapes in there, they're looking pretty spherical now. I might even go and change this one a little bit more pull that out to there, make that a little bit bigger. There we go. That's looking much more spherical now. So have a bit of a go with that. Make yourself a new document. It's going to be CMYK. Your color is not gonna be as bright as possible. If you want to make it RGB, by all means, do so, but bear in mind that if you were to print it, it wouldn't be as bright. But it's fine for the web. Have a bit of a go, get that far, pop those two in. And once you've done those, do another one over here, and this is going to be the little moon. Those are going to be the planets. And over here, we're going to change the gradients on this one from a yellow to a different yellow. So we'll do something along this line over here. So it's going to be bright over to there. So you know how to do that now. Don't forget you change the options up the top. When you in fill, you go from linear to radial. By all means, have a look at some of the other ones. You get all sorts of weird and wonderful gradients in here, and we'll be looking at some of those later on. Try it out. 45. Black Background & Blend Modes: I let's do the background. I'm going to go and get a rectangle, and I'm going to put this over the background like that. You notice that my rectangle slightly bigger than the background. I honestly doesn't matter that we'll be cut off later on. And I want to make this black, so I'm going to go over to my color and just choose black at the top over there. Now, I want to move this below the other shapes, and we can do this in two ways. We can either do it from the layers, and you can see I've got my shapes there. And I can actually drag that down below those shapes. Or if you prefer if you find that you keep dragging it and dropping it onto one and you think, why has that gone really weird, what you can do is you can go to the layer menu, go to a range, and what we're going to do is we're going to move the object which is selected to the back, and that'll move it down like that. You can choose whichever way you prefer to do with that. Now that we've got that, let's have a look at what happens when we start to mix these together. So I'm going to get my move tool and I'm going to click on this shape over here. And then I'm going to go along in my layers. So I've got my layers up there, and I'm going to change the mode. Now, these are called modes, and there's tons of them. And I'm going to change mine to something called hard light. You can just about see that second one through if I go to hard light there. There's soft light. You've got all sorts of different modes, and you can experiment and see what you like. In here, there's some really weird ones. But I'm going to be using hard light. Vivid light is actually quite cool as well. I'm going to go with hard light over there. Oops, missed it. Let's try that again. Hard light ever there. So I've done it. That's on the second one. I haven't done the background one because the background one doesn't matter. It's the ones above it that are going to be interacting with that one. Let's go to my circle and do the same thing. I'm going to go to my circle and try hard light on there. So, you can see now how they show each other through. You might find that you're not actually seeing quite as much of the detail as you want, but go along to your gradient tool. Click on the color and try adjusting the color to see what you get over there. You can see as I'm pulling this around or changing the colors. Oh, that looks so much better now that I've made it ever so slightly orange. I can see the other two underneath. I'm going to click back on this one here. Once again, go to my fill tool, click on the dark green, and I'm going to experiment with different shades of green in there to see if I can get a really nice overlap or change the colors in there as well. Oh, that's interesting, but I preferred that green there. So we've got that sort of subtle overlay. Once again, just move them around until you get something which you find really pleasing. So have a go, pop in your black background, and then go to the top two. Don't bother about the circle at the bottom. If I go to that one there and change it, all it's doing is it's interacting with what is right underneath. Over there. If you want to try it out, by all means do so, but you might get some weird results on that. I'm just going back to normal mode in there. Have a ga. 46. Add the Top Gradient: Et's put the color over the top. So I'm going to go over here and I'm going to do another color on top or another shape on top. And with this shape, once again, I'm going to be using the gradient over here. Whether it's solid or sorry, linear or elliptical, doesn't really matter. I think I will I'll try it like this. And I'm going to choose some colors. Now I'm going to choose some blue, so I'm going to get a light blue there and a dark blue. Over there. Let's now mix this together with the layers underneath and then we can adjust it and see what works best. I'm just going to go down. Once again, we've got hard light over there. That actually looks really nice with that soft light on there. I like those colors that are jumping out, but I'm going to probably go with hard light. Then I'm thinking, Well, that doesn't look so great because it's too light at the top. Let's try that as a radial gradient and I can move them around kind of quite like that. Let's try adjusting the color in the that looks pretty good. It's a subtle background. It's not too much, and I can then put the text over the top, and it won't interfere too much with the text and what I'm trying to say about it. Anyway, pop something on top. Try it out. Honestly, you can use any of these that you think look really cool, and there are some really amazing results that you can get in there. Just have a bit of a play and see what happens. 47. Add Title & Use Tracking: I I want to bring in some text now, so I'm going to go down to the type tool. And when you go to the type tool, there's an artistic text tool, and there's a frame text tool. Now, we're going to be using the artistic text tool, and we're just going to click and drag to get the text to the vague size that we want doesn't have to be perfect. And then I'm going to put in some text over here. So I've got the word natural satellite. And I'm going to select the text that I've got, and then I want to start changing it and adjusting it with my type settings. Now, first of all, I'm on aerial by default. And I would like something a little bit more well, subtle. So I'm going to select the text. Sorry, I just lost the N in my selection. I'm going to go down. I'm going to find something like Helvetica. Now, if you're on a PC and you don't have helvetica, try something else. I honestly doesn't matter what you use in here. I'm going to go with Helvetica, and I'm going to try Helvetica light like that. Mm. Yeah, kind of like that. But then I realized, You know what? I should have had this all in caps. Now, although we've got a lot of settings over here, I'm going to go to the Winder menu down to text and open up the character settings. So these settings here, are all the extra settings that are not along the top here. Of course, you can still get to the same ones. There's my size over there. There's my size in there. Here's my typeface. There's my typeface up the top. But one of the things that we can do in here very, very quickly is we can change things from lowercase to uppercase with this little button. So I just click on that, and all of a sudden, I've got the uppercase characters or all caps. You've also got a small caps. If you want, that means that capitals will still remain large, and the other ones which are lowercase will become smaller, but in the shape of capitals. I'm going to stick with that in there. Now, I'm going to go over to the text. I'm going to click on the little lollipop that sticks out, and I'm going to rotate this around. I'm holding down the Shift key so it'll rotate in increments so I can get it absolutely vertical, like that. And then I think I'll take my move tool and I'm going to pull this out a little bit like that. But when I'm looking at that, I'm thinking, you know, that's quite difficult to read. The moon is such an important subject. I want to make this a little bit more cinematic. So I'm going to go over here, and we've got some options in position and transform. If you can't see them, just click next to position and transform in this character option. On that little arrow, it'll drop down. And over here, we've got something called tracking. Dragging changes the distances between the characters. And you look, as I'm dragging, so I've just clicked on that VNA, I'm just dragging like that to change the distance between the characters. It's not changing the characters themselves. It's not scaling them. It's only changing the distance. I'm going to do that. Like, so, I think, make it look interesting that way. And then I want to scale it down. So I'm just going to grab the end and scale down like that until that natural satellite fits into my margin. You don't have to have it within the margin. I'm just using it as a guide to help me. The other thing is the color of the text, which at the moment is black on that background. So I'm going to go and change that to white so it'll be easier to see. Oops. Here we go. That's looking a lot better and much easier to see. If you'd like to get your main name along the side, whatever subject you've chosen to put in, op it in over there, and then we'll get some more text down the bottom here. 48. Add More Text & Use Leading: Now, as you can see, I've put some more text in. And I've got this bit here, celestial bodies orbiting planets. And just to do that, I just popped it in, did a return after bodies, and then I wanted the same thing, but smaller for the seven to nine in the main hall. So all I did was I took that bit of text, held down the option key, made a copy, changed the text, and scaled it down like so. Now when it comes to the other text over here, this is pretty much the same thing for this text, but I've just gone for bold instead. But what I do want to do is change it a little bit because it looks boring. So I'm going to go over to the character panel, and I'm going down over here where we've got all caps, and I'm going to use small caps over there. So I'm going to take off all caps so you can see now that the T's are larger because they were capitalized and everything else is capsules, but smaller. Second thing I'd like to do is to move these two closer together. I'm going to go up over here to this little option. Now, this is leading. It's called paragraph leading, as you can see, and if I click and drag, I can move things closer together or further apart. So I've just moved those closer together like so. And there we go. It's looking pretty good, very, very subtle background in there. Have a bit of a go with the rest of your text. 49. Export as JPG: This is going to be sent out to people who are going to print it on their office printer. So I'm just going to send it as a JPEG. I'm going to go to File, and I'm going down to Export, choosing Export in there. And on the left hand side, I'm going to pick JPEG. And then we've got different qualities in here from low through to high. I'm going to choose the best quality, and this gives us a width and height in here in pixels. We'll be talking about all of this later on. The quality is set to 100 in there, and I'm then going to go down and export it. If this stuff doesn't make sense at the moment, don't worry. We will definitely be going into it later on. I'm just going to click on Export over there and place it somewhere where I can find it. So I'm just going to call this Celestial bodies or CB over there. And let's click on Save. And that's now done. 50. Convert to RGB & Add Moon: We created this in SamwK mode. So the colors were fairly muted compared to what they could look like in our GB. And we saved out as a JPEG, which is a SMweK JPEG. But what about if you wanted to put it online and you wanted brighter colors than what we see here? Well, click on somewhere which is not an object, so just click so nothing is selected on the background. Go up to your document settings up here. Click that, and in here, we can change the document from CMYK into RGB. And we're using the one which is eight in there. So I'm going to choose RGB eight, and I'm going to then click OK. Now, look, you'll see straightaway the colors have changed. If I just undo that, that's how it was, and this is how it is as an RGB file. The way the colors react in RGB mode is different to the way they react in C and wear K mode using these blend modes. And I can just change them in here if I don't like it or if I think it's too bright or not bright enough, I can go in there, go back to my fill over here, and let's just pick a slightly different or brighter color in there. There's no right or wrong here. I'm just choosing different colors to see what I can get over there, there we go, we've got a brighter blue on that. And you see my other greens should be a lot brighter than they were. Wow, that looks really cool. In fact, you can just change this and do whatever you like. If you don't like the overlay, get rid of it. In fact, temporarily, if you go to the layers, you can just poke it in the eye. There's a little eye over there. Sorry, it sounds dreadful. But you can just poke it in the eye and go, Yeah, I like that and then make the text black instead. And that might look really cool as well, depending on what you want. Just can't undo what I've done. I'm using Control or Command Z to undo those, and I'll just switch on that overlay color in there. And by all means, you have a bit of a go with the ones underneath and change them, too. But I want to bring in a little moon, as well, a photograph of the moon to just have in the corner because this is obviously all about the moon. So I'm going to go up to file, and I'm going to go down to place. Now, the image that I'm going to place before I place it, I got from unsplash.com. Unsplash.com is a website with free images, royalty free images, shall I say, they're not just stolen images. They're royalty free. You choose the ones that don't have the plus on them, that one's got a plus on them, but the ones without a plus on them, those are free to use. All you have to do is to click on it and go and download it in here. So I downloaded a medium size, which then put that into my Downloads folder, and I can just go back again into affinity. And then I'm going to place it in here. So I'm going to go to File and Place. I'm going to find it. So that was in my Downloads folder, and there it is over there. Now, all I've got to do is to click and drag to bring it across. Now, you can see the problem here is that we've got this black background behind it. But let's try and see if we can get rid of the black background and make it a bit more subtle using some of these modes. From normal, if I scroll down, you can see we've got things like darken, which only shows the darker areas. The opposite of darken and multiply is actually lighten and screen. And so you can see I can choose one of those. Actually, I quite like that screen because it's gone slightly bluish, and that gets rid of the black background behind it, so I can go Whoops. I'm going to place that wherever I want it now, and I've got that background removed. Now, this technique only works if you're in RGB. If you try it in CMYK, you actually end up with a slightly light color around the outside, and you can see that background in there. So just be careful. As I said, things behave slightly differently. These modes behave slightly differently, depending on whether you are in CMYK or RGB mode. I quite like that where it is, but maybe I'll just pop it in the corner over there, so we just get a little bit of the moon coming through like that. So once again, if I like that, I'm going to file. I'll go to Export, and I'm going to export that out. Once again, as a JPEG, best quality. This will be exported as RGB, and I'm just going to choose Export in there. We'll call that one moon, and I'll save that one out as well. Let's have a look at those. If I just go back in here again, you can see on my desktop. There's a lot of files on my desktop. But these are the two files that we're actually interested in. This one is the RGB version. You see with the bright colors. This is the CMYK version with the more muted colors in there. Have a bit of a go with that. Have fun with that and try some other designs using different gradients as well and see what you can create. 51. The Pixel Studio - Intro: It's time for another studio. We're going to go into Pixel mode and we can start working with photographs. And I want to show you a little bit about how they work, how layers work. We're also going to use something called an adjustment layer. And we're going to do some adjustments to our images. So if it's not bright enough or dark enough, you can change it. If you want to make it black and white or a single color, you can change it in here. 52. Pixels & Megapixels: And let's go and open up a photograph now. So I'm in vector, but I'm going to go to file, and I'm not using place. I'm just going to say open. Now, I've got an image over here of a cat, and I'm going to open that up. I'll show you where to find it if you want to try it out later on. But we've got a cat in here and you can see it's opened it and it's jumped straight into pixel mode. Now, does that mean I can't go back to vector? No, I can go back to Vctor if I want to do some drawing in there on top of that. But when we're dealing with pixels, we tend to work in pixel mode because it's got the appropriate tools in this mode or studio. Now, this is a photograph, so it's made up of pixels. And let me show you the pixels over here. I'm going to zoom in, so I'm just going to use Command and plus or Control and plus to zoom right in. Let's go to the I, and you can see all those little squares there. Each one of those is an individual pixel. So when you're looking at colors, you're looking at a mass of pixels in here and you'll find that pixel can only be a single color in there. So, the more pixels we have in an image, the higher the quality of that image is going to be. So when I go along to something alike, Pixabay over here, and I click on the Cat. I just searched in Pi sorry. No Pixabay. Pix Bay is another place where you can get free images. I meant Unsplash. I go to unsplash.com. I've searched for CAT. I've gone to this image here, and I've clicked on the CAT and over here, these numbers here are the number of pixels in the image. I chose the biggest one I could, which is 5,100 by 3,400 pixels in there. So for a high resolution, go with the highest number you possibly can. If you're doing something which is really small for social media, you don't need those high numbers, you can go with something in the medium size or even small size potentially. We'll come back to how these sizes actually work on documents in a little while. Let me go back to affinity over here and have a look at something else. If you are taking a photograph yourself, now, whether it's on a camera or whether it's on a phone, the images are taken in pixels now, the cameras and phones don't measure pixels or don't measure images by this number of pixels, by that number of pixels. They give you something called megapixels. So what is megapixels? Let's say you've got a camera with 12 megapixels. Megapixels means millions of pixels. So if you've got a 12 megapixel image, it means that there are 12 million of those little dots in your image. So how can you figure out how many megapixels your image is? Over here, I can see that there's 5,184 pixels across by 3,456 down. And if you times that by that, it equals 17.92 million pixels altogether. So one can just times across by down, and that gives you how many pixels in the whole thing, and that's what mega pixels are. They're just a way of measuring the number of pixels. The more pixels you have, the higher the quality of the image is going to be within reason. Anyway, I'll stop there, grab yourself a cup of tea to sort your brain out after all that, and then we'll move on to the next area. 53. Crop Options: I'm going to go to File, and I'm going to open some images, and I've given you these images in the folder with all the assets, and I'm going to start off with this image of a car. Now, this image looks great, but maybe we want to crop it down a bit, and we want to get rid of some of the other things. So we've got a cropping tool over here. So if I click on the cropping tool, it gives me some cropping options along here. It also gives me the size in pixels of this particular image. So it says it's 4,000 pixels across by 6,000 pixels high. Now, although you don't need to know this, if you wanted to work that out in megapixels, you would just times one by the other. So 6,000 by 4,000 is 24 million. So this is actually a 24 megapixel image. Now, over here, I've got some options for cropping this. First of all, I've got unconstrained Unconstrained allows me to just resize it to whatever size I want. I could do something maybe like that where I've just got the leaves at the bottom, which looks really good. And you can see my final result will be 3,700 by 3,100 over there. I'll just click Apply and that's it, it's done. It's cropped down. And over here is the information at the top. So it's 3,700 by 3,100 in there, which equals, and it tells you 11.383 megapixels. I'm going to undo that. So I'm going to use Command Z or Control Z, depending whether your Mac or PC. Over there, 4,000 by 4,024 megapixels. Now, that's using the unconstrained can't pronounce it unconstrained version of cropping. If I go down, I could use the original ratio, and that just takes this four by six ratio and allows me to crop up and down with that particular ratio. The next one is a custom ratio. So if I want to square, I could go, say, two by two or one by one over there. And that would then give me a perfect square, and I can just change that in there. Once again, when you're happy with that, click on apply. And you can see we've got a square over here. The pixel sizes are the same. Let's undo that in there. Now, once again, moving down over here, we've got something called resample. Resample is really interesting, but to do that, I'm going to show you this unconstrained first. I've gone back to my original sized image, and this time, we're going to have a look at this resample. But to do that, we're going to start with the original ratio. If I use the original ratio and just scale it down like that, pop that on the car. You can see it's going down to a different pixel size. Remember, it's 4,000 by 600. If I were to apply that, we've now gone down. We've got 1,400 by 2,200 pixels in there. So it's gotten rid of the extra pixels from the image, and the image that we're left with has got a lower number of pixels in it. We're going to undo that. If you do this and you use resample, now, once again, I will still pull this size down over there. And I'm going to click Apply again. So what it's done is it's given me this cropped area, but it's made up more pixels. You can see it's still 6,000 by 4,000 pixels in there. So Affinity has actually made some up for us, rather than just giving us the pixels that were left. It's taken the ones that are there and doubled them up virtually. The quality is not necessarily brilliant, but it might be better than it was if you just used the other method of going off cropping down. Let's go and open up another image, so I'm going to go to File and Open. And I'm going to find this one over here. Now, the problem with this image is that the horizon is a little bit on the squiffy side. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go into the cropping tool. I'm going to move just to the edge over here. You can see the cropping cursor has gone to a double arrow. And I'm just going to click and drag around until I manage to line that up perfectly. Having all of these lines in there really helps to get that absolutely spot on. I'm happy with that. I'll click on apply and that's done. Now, there is a faster way. I'll just undo that. If you go to the cropping tool, you can go straight over to this little tool over here. It's the straighten tool. And what happens is, if you click and drag on the horizon, it'll automatically straighten it for you. It's really, really cool and works so fast. Now, that's not just about horizontal cropping. It also works vertically. So I'm going to go and open up another image. I'm going to go to file and open and find this one over there. So the buildings look like they're leaning over a little bit to the right hand side. So I'll go to my cropping tool over here to the Straten. And all I've got to do is find one in the middle and drag that down. Alright, so you can see it was very subtle, but it's just straightened up those buildings perfectly. Don't do it on one of the edge ones because otherwise, whoops. Let's try that again. Don't do it on one of the edge ones because otherwise you find that your whole thing tends to fall over quite badly. Once you've done that, you might find that you actually need to crop in a little bit like that if there are bits that are missing. Anyway, have fun with that one. Try it out. It's really useful. And then we'll move on to the next area. 54. Layers in Pixel Studio: Let's have a look at layers now, and especially in the Pixel studio, because we've had a quick look at them in the vector studio. I've gone to my layers panel. Once again, if you can't find it, you know where to look in the window menu, and I'm just going to pull this down a little bit so you can see my layers on this image. Let's move it over to that side there. So there are a few layers on this image here, and I'm going to go in and just start switching them on and off. You See, first of all, at the background, we've got the background layer, and if I switch it off, you can see that's the background, and the other areas are just layers on top. This bit here is actually a layer. If I switch that off, you'll see that was the original photograph, and that's the layer that's been added on top. Let's go to the cat. If I switch off the cat, it was added separately, and I can switch off the shadow as well. By the way, these images I just got from Unsplash. And finally, the graffiti on the side of the building, that can be switched on and off as well. So if I switch off all those layers, you can see what the original picture looked like before I started adding in bits and pieces on there. Now, those layers can be switched on and off, as I said. If you don't want one, you can take the layer. I really don't like that graffiti, so I'm going to take it and just drag it into the bin over there so we can drop it on the bin to remove it completely. Likewise, this new building here, I don't really like it. It's actually been AI generated, and I'm going to move that into the bin, as well. But I do like the cat over there. Now we can move these around an object on a layer. This is layer one, and if you want, you can just double click on it and name it. I'll just call this one shadow so I can go to the cat layer using my move tool I can move the cat anywhere I like. I can also go to the shadow and then move the shadow around. Place that back underneath the cat, as well. If you select one layer, you can hold down the Shift key, select a second layer, and then you can move them both around at the same time. The individual layers can be scaled, they can be changed. They can be adjusted, and we'll be getting into all of that as we go through. But what's going to happen if I then went to the vector studio? Look at the vector studio, and you can see the layers in there show me exactly the same layers. We've got the background, the shadow, and the cat. We don't want this character panel up for the moment, I'll get rid of that. So what about if I made a shape in here, made a vector shape? And I went in and decided that it would be really cool if I had a little star in the corner. I'll just pick a color for the star. Let's make it bright orange. Over there. And I click and drag to make a star in there, and you can see the star pops up as another layer or object within the layers panel. So whether it's things from the studio, the Pixel studio or things in here, you can just flick between those studios and it's the same layers that you're seeing in there. Now, these are different types of layers because these layers here, the can I've called it. Let's try renaming that and actually call it cat. So the cat, the shadow, and the background are all pixel, whereas the star is a vector shape, and once again, it could just be taken and scaled around if you wished. But I don't know whether you can see because it's quite small, but what we have over here are slightly different icons on the left of the lay if I just click on the background so you can see that a bit clearer. That one there shows little shapes of this kind of little triangle and a circle and a square in there. Whereas this shows little dots which are pixel. If I roll over it, you can see it says that it's a star. Understands that the star in here tells me that these are pixel layers there. So you do have different types of layers, and they all work. In all of the studios. If I go in here, I can go to my star. I can adjust my star I can add more items in there. I can use multiple shapes. As we did before, I'll hold down the old key and make another one. I can select both of those, and I can mix them together using any of the bits that I did before. Now I've made those two shapes, and I'm in the pixel layer. If I go to the vector layer here, I can then use these ones, and I'll just unite them into one shape over there. Once again, you can see that's now called a polyline, and it's got a very different little icon over there as well. So do watch these little icons as you're building or if you get an image from somebody else because it'll tell you the kind of layer that they are. But don't worry about doing one thing in one studio and one thing in the other studio. You can flick between these studios as much as you need or as you like. Lastly, within the layers panel in here, whether it is in the vector or the pixel, I can go along here and I can change the opacity on items I can also go in here and I can change the modes into different modes. So I think I should move that over so you can see what's happening to the cat as I go down the different modes, get different overlays over there. And, of course, if I went to the stars, the star layer, and I can use I'm I'm on top of the stars now. Let's move that to the side there. You can see I can use this for different effects on the photo as well. Well, that soft light's quite nice, it shows up, I still move those around if I wish. Anyway, do have a little bit of fun with that. I've provided the image of the beetle and the cat over here so the layered file so you can open it up. It won't have the polylines, the stars in it, but it'll have those three layers. Have a bit of a play with it. Add a few more vector bits in there, do whatever you want. Just get to know how these layers are actually working. 55. Save as Affinity & Photoshop: Now, if I decide to save this image and I go to File and Save As, and when I'm saving it, what I'm doing is I'm saving it as an affinity example, and it's the dot AF extension that we have in here. So I'm just going to put this onto my desktop over there, click on Save and it's saved exactly as it stands at the moment. I'm just going to close it down, so I'm going to go to File and close to close down that document. And you'll see if I go and open it up again. There it is on the desktop. Over there, it's got the AF extension. Open it up, and it's exactly as it was. Now, if you're going to pass this on to somebody else who's working in the Adobe area, IE Photoshop, well, what you can do is because they can't open up AF files, but you can go to File and you can go to export. And then when you're exporting it, you can export it as a PSD file over here. So with a PSD file, this will keep all of those layers for them. And I'm going to say preserve accuracy in there. You can go through these settings and have a look and change all the bits and pieces so you can preserve either the accuracy or the editability. I'm going to click on Export over there, and let's call this layer example two Click on save, and that's then save that out as a PSD file for me. You can open up PSD files in affinity as well. If I go along to file and open, you'll see that I can either open the AF file or the PSD file. Click on open, and there it is. All the layers are in there. Now, you can open up quite a lot of the Adobe things within affinity. I have come across a few slight issues when I've been opening up really huge documents, and I mean, really, really big documents within affinity. But it's nothing that can't be overcome with a few slight tweaks, but for most work, should be absolutely fine. Anyway, have a little bit of look and save this out as an AFFle. Save it out as a PSD if that is your thing and you're dealing with people who are using Adobe. 56. Adjustment Layers: I'm going to go to file and open up another image, and I'm just going to get this one that we looked at earlier, which was the car. Now, I want to make some changes to this, and I'd just like to adjust the color or the lightness and the darkness, those type of things. So to do that, I'm going to use an adjustment layer. Now, the adjustment layers are in the layers menu here. They are the little black and white circle at the bottom. If you click on that, you'll see there's a lot of adjustments in there. You can also go to pixel and we can get to the adjustment layers from this area as well. So I can say new adjustment layer, and they're pretty much the same things that we have in there. Now, let's start off with a really nice simple one. I'll click over here and I'm going to go down to something called brightness slash Contrast. The brightness and contrast sliders give me two sliders, and the one allows me to brighten up the picture, so it's changing the brightness, and the other one adjusts, well, the contrast to make it more contrasty or less contrasty. You can see if I increase the contrast on this, what's happening is we're losing detail in the shadow areas and in the highlight areas, but we're making the whole thing to well, for want of a better word, pop, it just looks a bit more exciting that way. If you go back this way, we're getting more detail in the shadow and the highlight areas. Look at all the detail that's coming in underneath the car as opposed to the contrast, when's that way, we lose the detail in those areas. So I'm going to increase the contrast a little bit and maybe just darken down a small amount. Now, if I'm happy with that setting, and I like the look of that, I'll close this window down. And you see we've got a new layer called the brightness and contrast layer. So if I don't want to see it, I can poke it in the eye over there, and I can switch it on and I can switch it off. If I really don't want it, I can take it and drop it into the bin like that. Let me do that again. So I'll just go in here. I'm going to use brightness and contrast. I'm going to make this a lot more contrasty and a little bit brighter. Close that down. And once again, I've got that brightness and contrast in there. But if I thought at this stage, you know what would be really interesting if I could adjust those settings again, all you have to do is to go to the adjustment icon and click once on it, and it will open up the brightness and contrast settings for you again or whichever adjustment you've got. I can make my changes, close that down. Come back again to this, click on there, and it opens it up. At any time, back into the one click and I can see my settings and change them. I can save the document out as well and come back to it in six months time. And once again, I can just change those settings. Nothing is set in stone, and as always, you can always click on the bin if you wish to delete it. But what about if you have that on a layered file like this? Well, I'm going to click on the top layer over there. I'm going to go and add a layer on here and an adjustment layer to this. And once again, let's just go to brightness and contrast, we keep it nice and simple. And I'm going to adjust the brightness. And see what it's doing, it's affecting everything. It's affecting the cat, the shadow, and the background in there. Let's just go a little bit silly over here, close that down. So an adjustment layer affects every single layer underneath itself, and that's really important. So if I were to take this brightness and contrast adjustment layer and drag it underneath the cat, not onto the cat, but underneath it, now the cat's not selected or not affected by it. If I drag it underneath the shadow, the shadow is no longer affected by it. It's only affecting the background. So an adjustment layer will affect everything, every layer that's underneath it. Let's go over here to the vector studio, and we'll put on a little shape in here. Once again, I will just choose a simple shape. Let's use a crescent over there. I'll draw in my crescent. I'm going to make that blue. And if I take my brightness and contrast adjustment layer and move it above the crescent, try and get it above the crescent or we'll move the crescent below it. It's easier to do it that way. You can see how it's changing the brightness of that crescent. If I switch this on and off, it's affecting the crescent. If I move that below it, it's no longer affecting the crescent. Adjustment layers don't just affect pixel layers. They affect all the layers. One of the things to look out for here. Well, I'm finding this very bright, so I'm just going to turn it off for the moment. One of the things to look out for here are the little icons. So once again, we've got the Pix icon. We've got the Shapes icon, and over here, this little icon is the adjustment layer icon. Have a bit of a play with that and make sure that you feel confident moving that up and down. By the way, when you move it, don't drop it onto a layer because it'll just disappear, and you have to go and find it by clicking over there and pulling it out. Make sure when you drag it, you drag it to the line. Have a go. 57. Levels: Let's have a look at the lightness and darkness of the image. The question is, how do you know when it's actually correct? You see, when you go along to brightness and contrast, and you change the brightness in here, is that right? Is that right? It's very difficult to tell, and it gets even worse because you might not be looking at your monitor at its correct brightness. Let's say, for example, you've got your laptop and you're sitting in a tree in a park, doing a little bit of editing, and the sun's kind of shining through. How do we know by changing the brightness that we haven't over brightened it or over darkened it? Because the sun's shining on our screen. Or you're sitting in bed late at night with your laptop on your lap and you're doing some editing, and you can see all the details because everything is so dark. But the next day, you look at it and go, well, actually, it does look a little bit too dark, doesn't it? So the brightness and contrast is not an accurate way of getting our lightness and darkness. The best way to do it is to use something in here called levels. Now that's the one at the very top. Now, I know that when I open this up, you can look at that and go, Oh, my goodness, that is just so scary. Well, it's not as bad as it seems. Let's put it that way. I know a lot of people don't like graphs, and I totally understand that, but this is not that bad. What happens here is this little graph just shows us the light and the dark areas of the image. We're just looking at this white area here. Ignore the blues and the reds and the greens in there, and just look at this white area here. So on this image here, it's showing us that over here, there's a lot of detail. So these go quite high in the darker areas of the image. So that's probably the dark trees in the background. There's dark bits down here by the wheels. This is quite dark down here. There's not that much. They don't go very high of the sort of lighter areas. And the very light areas, there's not that much either, which is surprising because there's so much light sky in there. Now, if we have a look at this, this is looking at it in color. If we look at this in grayscale mode over there, now you can see a little bit more clearer that actually all of this area here, which is really quite dark, that's dark there. Even the car, when you take away the red, is actually quite dark. This is dark down here, and there's a little bit of sort of lightness in the sky. So this just shows us the darker areas and the lighter areas over here how much there is of each of them. Okay? That doesn't make perfect sense, so let's have a look at a problem picture so you can see the details. I'm going to close this down. If you want a black and white picture, that is not the way to go about it. There's a much better way, which I'll be showing you shortly. So I've got another image over here. Once again, you can find this in the images folder. And this particular image looks okay ish. But we really need to make sure that there's dark areas and lighter areas in there, so it looks really good, and you can't always tell. Let's go down to levels over here and have a look at the levels. Now, look at this. What this is showing me is that there's lots of darker areas here. Let's look at this in gray scale. So there's a lot of dark areas in here, and then it sort of comes up here. It doesn't actually get towards the whites. The whites are right over there. So, in fact, there's no whites in this image, and you can actually see it. If I move this over, that is white there. That's actually just dark gray. So you would expect that to be pure white or very, very white. So if we've got that, how can we fix it? And this is the important part. And this is where, as I said, it becomes really easy. You see, if we want to fix the lighter areas, the white areas here, we go to the white level slider, and you just drag it back. You can see this a little bit over here. Well, I'm going to drag that back until it gets to where the detail starts over there. And now we've got something which actually is white. And the same with the black, if I go back to the black level detail there and pull it up this way, eventually, we'll get some blacks coming into our document, as well. And that is looking so much better. If you have a look, the before and the after. It's just got so much more punch once we've got those black and white levels correct in there. And at any time, you can just go back, you can click on that little icon. And if it's not right, you can adjust it in here. Be careful pulling these too far over. You'll start to lose detail in the blacks, if you pull the black too far across. Likewise, you'll start to lose detail in the whites. If you pull the white too far across, there's no detail in there anymore. But you usually just drag them in until they're touching the dark area and the light area over there. Now, this level, as it's known or it's also called a histogram, you'll find all over the place, a lot of cameras, particularly professional cameras have got histograms on the back, so the photographers can actually see if the exposures correct without actually having to look through the lens all the time and trying to hopefully judge it, even though there's a lot of bright and dark areas around them. So it's a very accurate way of working and setting up your black points and your white points in the image. Once you've done that, if you've got your black points and your white points correct, you can go down to the gamma over here and just change the middle tones to adjust it to how you think it should feel because images are all about feeling. I'm happy with that. Once again, click this, but I haven't done anything destructive. We can switch that off if we don't want it. Do try it out on this image, and if you've got any other images of your own that you want to have a go with or any that you can find in the folder that you want to try out, by all means, do so. I 58. Curves - What Do They Do?: I'm going to open up image. So I've just double clicked on the blank page there to go in to open it, and I'm going to find this image. And what we're going to do is we're going to look at another way of actually getting the light areas to go darker and the dark areas to go lighter if we need an image. So as you can see from this image here, we've got some lighter areas here on the right hand side of the screen, her left. And there's some darker areas over here. Now, to control those areas, we use something called a curve. And I'm going to go and put the curve in by going down to the adjustments over here, find curves. And it brings up this once again, slightly scary window. But let me take you through it so you can see exactly what it does and how it works and how you can get the best out of it. See, what we've got in the background are actually levels. And you can just ignore those because we're not dealing with levels at the moment we're dealing with this line here called a curve. Now, I know it's not a curve at the moment. It's a straight line, but hey, we'll sort that out. So the thing is this goes from the dark side, the dark pixels here, black, up to white over there. Now let's take that top point, and if I pull that down to about halfway, you can see everything is getting darker and darker and darker. So this side controls the lightness or the pure whites over there. If I take that down to there, you can see everything's getting really dark. The other side controls the darkness. And so if I pull this up, nothing will be pure black if it's pure black, it's down there, all the way up like so. In fact, if I put this in the middle there and this in the middle, the whole picture just goes gray. If you do it the other way round, everything that's white goes black and vice versa, so you get a negative in there. But we don't want to use that at all. I just wanted to show you what would happen if you put it in the wrong way around. Now, if you have been messing around with this, like I've just done there, you can click Reset to just get it back to the straight line so. So the middle here is the middle tones. So if I were to click in the middle and I move this down the tones would get darker. If I moved it up, the middle tones would get lighter. But as you can see, it's also affecting the lighter tones and the darker tones down there. So pretty much most of the image is getting lighter or darker. If I'm darkening this down, I'm not affecting the pure whites. The pure whites are still up there. Likewise, if I lighten it up, I'm not affecting the blacks which are down over there. So how can we actually use this? Well, you see, if I put that in the middle over there, what we can do is we can go along to the lighter areas. This is this pit over here, and I can click to put another one of those points in, and I can lighten the lighter areas, and I can darken the darker areas. So you can see how it's made it more contrasty, or I can lighten the dark areas and darken the light areas over there. And that's made it less contrasty. So what we're dealing with here is contrast. And you'll see that when you do this, if you make an image more contrasty, you get the shape here, which is like an S. This is known as an S curve over here, so an S curve will make things more contrasty. The more of an S I make that, the more contrasty that image is going to become. If you want to reduce the contrast on an image, then you do the opposite of S curve. So this is a reverse S, so it kind of goes like that over there. And once again, I'm going extreme here. You can see how it's really making the image look awful. Generally, with these curves, you don't do extreme moves like that, maybe just little moves to effect it. Let's just reset that once again. So what I'd like to do is to stop here so you can take a few moments to try this out on an image and just have a bit of a go, move these around up and down, put some points on, pull the points around, see what happens to the image. You know, you can go completely wild with these if you like, and, you know, pull some things up and some things down and get really mad looking images in there. But if you make a mistake or you do something deliberate like that, you can always just click Reset at the top to go back to the original. So take a few moments. Have a play with that. Don't do anything perfect for the moment. Play and see how it works. 59. Using Curves: Now, I'm going back to the curves over here, and I'm just going to click on that little icon. And what I'd like to do with this picture is to actually reduce the lighter areas in it. So I don't want to affect the darker areas. So I'm going to click in the middle to stop me from affecting the middle tones. I'm going to click in here to stop me affecting the darker tones. I can just go to the lighter areas here and maybe pull it down just a little bit over there, and you can see how we're reducing the lightness of those very light areas. If you want to get rid of the pure whites, you can actually pull this down as well, so you can go to the top and just pull that down. But we don't want to do that. We want to keep the white areas in there. So now that I've done that, it's very, very subtle. I'm going to just close this down and we can switch it on and off with a little I over there, you can just about see how some of those really light areas are just darkening down slightly. Let me do this again, but with a different image and make it a little bit more obvious. So we'll get rid of that. I'm going to double click go in and find this other image that I provided here. So with this image, I like the face. I like the lightness on the face, but I want to lighten up some of the darker areas here, maybe because this was a shot for this particular top and we want to see more details of it. So I'm going to go in here, go down to my curve put them on there. Now remember, I don't want to affect the lighter areas. I don't even want to affect these sort of middle tones. So I'm going to put a point over here on the line. Let's just make sure it's right in the middle and a point there so that doesn't move. And then I can go to the darker areas here and I can just lighten up those darker areas a little bit. Now, I'm going to pull it from here and then maybe take this and drop that down a little bit like that. Once again, I'm going for subtlety here so we can just lighten up the top a little bit. Let's close that down and have a look at before and after. And you can see it's fairly subtle. Now, it has affected his top, but it's also affected his hair as well. Over there, you can see that his hair is being affected, but his face isn't. So when I switch that on, no difference to the face. Yes, some of his beard is being affected in there. Now, later on this course, we'll have a look at how we can control this where we can select certain areas and just say, we want to only affect that area there. We don't want to affect his hair. But the idea is that you can control the darker areas or the lighter areas just using a little curve like this. And I hope that's taken the scariness out of these because if you just go wild with them, they don't seem to make sense. Anyway, try that out on this little portrait over here as well. 60. Correct Image Color Using Color Balance: A I'm going to double click and go and open up an image that I've got of this family with their dog. Now, it's a lovely picture. I really like the picture, but something seems to be wrong with the color in here, and the colors just look very, very strange. So let's have a look at how we can correct the color. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go along to my layers. And first of all, before I correct the color, I'm going to make sure that I correct the lightness and darkness or check that the lightness and darkness is correct. It looks okay here, but you can't always tell. Well, I say you can't always tell over in the right hand side, underneath your color, you'll see there's a color tab there. If you click on histogram, there's a little histogram that shows me the lightness and darkness in that image. Now remember, from our levels before, we were using a histogram, and this histogram tells me that there doesn't seem to be much in this right hand area, which is where the whites are. So maybe there's no pure whites in that. So let's go along and see if we can fix it with levels. If that went all the way to the end, I wouldn't bother about fixing it in levels over here. So I can tell that there's no whites over there, so I'll use my white level and just drag that little line until we get to the whites in there. And look at the difference that that's made to that picture. Already, it's starting to look better. The whites are looking better, but it's still not right from a color perspective. So color correction is really a very subjective thing, and I might look at an image and think it's one color, and you might look and think it's another color. So if you don't see the same colors that I'm seeing, don't worry about it. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're wrong and I'm right. It's very, as I said, subjective. Now, the way that I do it is I actually decide what's wrong with the image first before going in to the color balance area. If you jump straight into the color balance area, you've got these little slides and think, What do I do with them? You start moving them around and colors just go all weird and all over the place, and you've got no idea how to get back. So I'm going to get rid of that. So what we do is we look at the image and we say, I think that the image looks too and put in the color that you think it looks too much of. So for me, this image looks very, very green, yellow over there. And that's absolutely fine. I can say that image looks too green, yellow. You might think it looks too green. You might think it looks too yellow. You know, it's up to you. But I think it looks too green, yellow. Now that I know that, we can go down to our adjustment layers, and we can put in a color balance, and that's over here. So we know or we think that this image looks too green and yellow. So over here, we've got green. Over there, we've got yellow. These kind of colors are opposite each other each other. If I think it looks too green, I add the color which is opposite, which is magenta. If I think it looks too yellow, I add the color which is opposite, which is blue, and look at the difference that's actually making here. So as I'm adding or I'm subtracting green and I'm subtracting yellow, the colors are looking better and better. I'll just keep going. If you go too far, you can always come back a little bit. That actually looks really nice, just like that. And I'm going to close that down. Now, let's have a look at it before and after. So that's what it was before, and that's what it is now. So the idea is you need to have a look at the image, decide what you think is wrong with it, and then you can add the opposite color in. Let me open up another picture over here, so I'm just going to use a shortcut, which is either Command and O to open on the Mc or control and open on the PC. I'm going to find the other image that I've got in here, this one over here. Now, when I look at that, it's looking I'm not sure purple or red. I'm going to go with a purple color in there. I think it's a bit too purple. Once again, I've checked the histogram. The histograms absolutely fine. It goes from one side to the other. So I don't need to go in and put in any levels on there because the histogram is already perfect. As I said, if you can't see the histogram, it's in with a color or you can find it in the window menu. I'm going to go down here and find my color balance. Now, remember, we thought or I thought that maybe this was too purple. I can't see purple. There is no purple in here, but what there is is blue and magenta. And on the color spectrum, purple is kind of a combination of those two colors in there. So if I thought it was too purple, well, I would subtract magenta and I would subtract blue. And let's see what we can do over there. That's looking better already. What about if I thought it looked too red? Well, if I thought it looked too red, I could subtract red. Which is actually cyan. Yeah, I don't like that, actually. It looks too cold still. So I think I was right the first time, and I would then subtract magenta. Oops, subtract magenta, and subtract some yellow as well. And you can just play with these until you feel confident and happy with it. Now, should we actually go in and use the third slider in there? Because I could go in and say, well, actually, I want to make it warmer so I could add a little bit more red to the image like that if I wanted to. You don't have to. Ideally, you just use two sliders to correct the color in there, because it's not actually about the amount of color that you move, it's about the relationship that these three things have to each other. Have a look at this. You see that we've got that kind of triangle there. If I moved that one there, that one there, and this one here to create the same triangular shape, you see the colors are correct there. Same if I put this one here, that one there ish. I'm just sort of roughly, once again, we've got the same correct color in there. So it's about the relationship that these three have to each other. If you are going to go extreme like this, be careful because it can make the image lighter or darker. I don't know whether you noticed. The image seems darker here. If I correct it up here with that one there, this one here and that one there, the whole image seems lighter. If you gain to do that, switch on this little button. It's called preserve luminosity and that'll stop things from getting lighter and darker. But I would suggest, let's just reset this again, doing two, we want to get rid of the magenta. We want to get rid of the yellow in there. And when you're happy with that, you just close that down and have a look by poking that in the eye to see the before and after. If it's not right, double click, go back in again, say, Well, maybe there should have been a bit less of that and a bit more of that. I think that's absolutely spot on. Once again, we'll switch it on and switch it off. Try it out and remember that it takes years and years and years to get very, very fast at color correction. I'm not trying to put you off, but I'm saying that if you find that you look at a color first of all and you think, I can't see that color in there, don't be disheartened. Just keep at it. And it does come with time. When I look at an image to see the color, I look at certain things because if we go to this image here, there's a lot of green in the image. So how did I know that it was green? Well, I'm looking at things like whites. Do they actually look white or a gray color? And that way, that tells me that there's a color in there. I also look at skin tones over there. So these skin tones here, did they look a little bit sickly over there? And yes, I can tell they're looking a little bit yellowy green in there. Same with this one here, looking at the skin tones over here at the father and the baby. Once again, he looks very, very red or purple. And the child also looks a little bit purple. Have a bit of a play with this. As I said, it takes time. Don't get disheartened, have a go and try a few images like that, especially the ones I've provided, which are incorrect. 61. Make a Color Image Black & White: I've closed down that other image. If you wanted to save it with the adjustment layers, remember you just do a save as to save it as an AF file, Affinity file, or if you go to file export, if you're exporting at something like a JPEG, you will lose your adjustment layers. They'll still remain. The effect will still remain there, but it'll squash them altogether. I'm going to double click, and I'm going to go into my images, and I'm going to find an image of a child with some pigeons, and this is the one that I want. And I want to make this black and white. So there are a number of ways to make something black and white. You've seen some of them already, where you just remove the color. I could go into quite a few of these, but the one I'm after is actually the one called Black and White. There it is over there. Now, it automatically makes this image black and white. When we look at him, we go, Yeah, it doesn't look great. It looks a bit weird. Why is that? Well, in black and white here, we can control what colors are lighter and darker. If that's switched off over there, you can see that we've got different colors in here. So there's some blues on his hat. There's some greens around here. His skin tone is kind of a lightish pink color. So I can go along to the reds and maybe darken down the reds and yellows to darken his skin tone a little bit. You see how that's actually affecting the skin tone now, as I'm darkening those down because he looked very, very light. You know, we can almost go white over there. So we just darken those down to darken down the skin tones. I don't go to the greens over here, and I could lighten or darken the greens in the image to get a bit more detail on the bags that he's looking in. So with the black and white option, you can lighten and darken areas to make the image look as you pictured it. Let's have a look at another one over here. So I'm going to go along to this travel picture. The sky is slightly blue, and we've got these orange lights coming through over here. Let's make that black and white. So now I can actually control things. I can go to the sky, maybe the blues and just darken down using these sliders over here, the sky a little bit over there. Remember, these were sort of orange, so I could make them even brighter with the red and yellow sliders, or I could darken them down. If they were too light in there, you can see I'm not affecting the sky over there. Let's have a look at another example. I'm going to take this picture of a car over here. We've got a blue sky. We've got an orange car. Let's go to black and white. Wow, that's really over the top. So I'm going to go to my oranges and take the orange down a little bit. I can make the car virtually go black like that by darkening down the reds and the yellows a little bit. You See how it's brought out the reflections really beautifully over there. And maybe the sky, I want to darken down the sky with some blues over here. Be careful you don't go too far. I don't know whether you can see. If I do that, it kind of breaks the sky up a little bit. So you have to be careful that you're not overdoing it in there. There are other ways to darken down the sky where we won't get that effect as well that we'll look into later. But for now, I'm just going to tweak those and darken down a bit. Greens, what about the greens? Are there any greens? Well, it doesn't look like there's any greens in there because nothing's changing. So I'm happy with that. And I'll close that down. Now, one of the things that you can do with an adjustment layer is you can change its opacity. So if I go up here, click next to the opacity, little drop down. And I can say, Well, I only want half of that black and white to come through, and you can see I can control how much of the black and white adjustment layer I'm actually using. So I could bring in almost a hint of color. It's kind of got that old faded postcard type of look to it now. Let's have a look at one more example here, and I'm going to go and open up a file that we've already worked on, and that is this layers example here. So remember that an adjustment layer affects every layer below itself. So if I go to the top and I put my black and white right at the top over there, you can see the car's gone a little bit too orange. Let's take the red and yellow down just a little bit. Like so. That's right at the top there. If I move it below the other layers, but just above those two, you can see everything else goes black and white, but the cat's in color, and the graffiti is in color. If I move it above the cat, I can have the graffiti in color, as well. If I wanted to have the cat in color, but the graffiti black and white, I can just drag the graffiti and drag it underneath that layer over there. So you can adjust your layer stacking order to decide which bits you want in color and which you want in black and white. And it's not just about using black and white here. The same thing applies to any adjustment layer that you're working on. Anyway, have some fun with the black and white and get some color images. Have a look at the colors first, and then try adjusting those sliders to lighten and darken various areas on the image. 62. Recolor: Et's open up a picture and change the color to make it look a little bit older. What I'm going to do is find one of those car pictures. Again, that's the one that I want over there. Now, this car is absolutely lovely. The colors are so nice with the pink and the blue sky. But I want to change this into a single toned image, not just black and white. I want it to be a sepia toned image, so it looks kind of slightly older. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go in here and I'm going to make this black and white using my black and white adjustment layer. Now, why am I doing it black and white first? Well, this is so that I can control the colors in here. Let's go to the pinks and darken down the car just a little bit over there, and I'm going to go to the sky and maybe darken that down. A bit as well. There's no right or wrong here. Adjust the colors as you see fit. So I'm kind of happy with that, but I want to give it the old image feel. So I'm going to go down here and I'm going to find an adjustment which allows us to put the color or put color on top of it. And this option is going to be called recolor. Now, when you first do it, you look at it and you think, Oh, my goodness, that is absolutely awful. But bear with me. What we have in the recolor window is a hue slider, and you can choose any color that you like in that little window there. I'm going to go with something which is orange. But here's the trick. Take the saturation and drag the saturation right down like that. So we can just have a little bit of brown coming through. You could make it more yellow or more red, depending on what you want. Now, I'm going to close that. Let's just hide the black and white layer underneath. So you can see without the black and white layer, it would kind of look like that. With a black and white layer. I've been able to get a bit more lightness to the car. So you can go to either of these adjustment layers at any time, double click the black and white and go, Yeah, let's make the car lighter or darker. I'll make it lighter. And then I can go to my recolor and I can change the recolor at any time, as well. If I wanted something a little bit more sepia like, I could maybe go along to the blues and give it a little bit more color in there to get that sorry, I said sepia, and I meant more like a cyanotype. So I've gone along to the cans over there and added a bit more saturation. I like the Sepia look, so I'm going to go back to the yellows. And close that down. Now, if we wanted to take an image and use it maybe in a presentation as a background, put some text over the top, something along that line there, let's say, for example, this was going to go into PowerPoint and you're going to put some text out to the top. In your recolor, you can then go down to the lightness at the bottom. If I drag that lightness all the way up, you can see I can lighten up the whole image over there, so we can then just use it almost like a watermark and then put text over the top, so you just get that sort of rough image behind it. Or you could go the other way. You could darken the whole thing down like that. And then once again put white text on the top. This is a really lovely feature for PowerPoint presentations or for social media posts where you just want some text, but you want a little bit of an image in there as well. And don't forget, once you've done that, you can always still adjust the color in here. If I wanted something maybe my brand color in there. Let's say the brand color was a sort of greeny color. I could do something along that line there and then put my text over the top of that. Anyway, there's so many ideas. Just have a play. I'm just going to give you a few that you can think about, but I'm sure you'll come up with tons more ideas where you can use this feature. Remember, it's recolor, and if it's a color image, put a black and white on top of it so that you can adjust the black and white independently of the recolor adjustment. Try that out and have lots of fun with it. It's one of my favorites. 63. Split Tone: Let's open up another image. I'm going to go with this car, the black and white picture of a car. And I want to put a tone on this, but I want to use something called a split tone. Now, split tone is a very traditional method from analog photography, where you would take a print and you would tone it so that the highlights got toned one color, and then the shadow areas got toned a slightly different color so you could have sort of yellows and browns split together. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go down over here to my adjustment layers. I'm going to find split toning that's really quite near the bottom over there. And when we do split toning, you have the highlight area and the shadow area. So the highlights at the moment, I'm going to choose the sort of yellow, and the shadows, I'm going to go with, well, sort of a red. And then I can pull this up. So I can pull this highlight up and you can see how the lighter areas are going yellow. You can actually go quite a long way with this. It's, it's quite delicate. If I go to the shadows, then I'm affecting the shadows. You can see how the shadows are now going red. If I pull that highlight in, we've got mostly reds in there. So we've got a split of two colors yellow for the highlights and reds for the back. Now, you can do a very sort of traditional split where you might have yellows for the highlights and maybe some sort of more orange for the dark areas, the shadow areas. Or you can go completely over the top, and I could say, I want to have yellow for the highlights, and I want to have blue for the shadows. There. And we get a lovely sort of combination of those two colors in there, and you can have as much of them as you want. Now, there's a little balance down here, and if I adjust the balance, I can have more of the yellows or more of the blues in the image. It's up to you. There's no right or wrong. You just decide what you want to do with this. I'm going to close that down. Let's have a look on another image. So I'm going to go and open up the car. We looked at this car before we made it black and white. But I want to take this car and use the split tone on that. So let's go and find split tone. Now, look what happens. If I choose, I'll use the same yellow and blue, yellow there and blue there, and I'll push the highlights up and the shadows up. You see it still keeps the color inside there. So it's mixing the split tone with the colors that exist in the image already. So I can still do the balance and get more blues or more yellows from that. Now, this is a great way if you want to get an image which looks like a very old photograph, that's kind of changed color slowly over the years, it's a lovely way to put a split tone on top of that to get this effect. However, if you wanted something which is more just the black and white split tone, just go and add a black and white adjustment layer. Over here, let's find black and white. Lighten or darken the areas that you want to effect in there. Now what's happened? Well, I've lost the split toning because my black and white adjustment lair. I'm sure you've figured this out already is above my split tone. If I do it the other way around, there we go. The split toning is now above the black and white, and I could just go back into black and white. I might just make a few more adjustments in here. But just work with the ones that you have. Do try that out. Such a lovely technique and so easy to do. 64. Use Hue & Saturation to Change Specific Color: I'm going to open up an image that we've looked at already, which is this one here with lots of colors in it. And let's have a look now at an adjustment layer. Called HSL. HSL stands for hue saturation and either lightness or luminosity. You can choose either of those. Two, over here, they go with luminosity, but it's lightness. Now, when you open this HSL app, we have got a really weird looking color wheel here. There's a hue shift, a saturation shift, and a luminosity shift. Now, the idea here is that I can go in and I can just shift these colors around. And you can see the colors on my screen are really going weird. So what is actually happening? Well, if we look over here at the car, you'll see that the car is kind of a ready orange. And let's have a look at it over there. So there's redy orange over there. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to shift the color. So watch that area there. I'm going to shift this over until the car goes blue. You can see here the ready orange, what was ready orange has now become blue. Let's just go back again. The sky is kind of blue, which is over here. If I move this again, what was blue has now become yellow. So it's taking all the outside colors and just spinning them around, which then obviously changes them on the image as well. We've kind of got a greenish color in there, and if I do this, yeah, we've kind of got that green going to a sort of a well, sort of a bluy color, I suppose, in there as well. So we can do that. We can also do the saturation here so we can reduce the saturation and go to black and white. This is once again not the way best practice to do a, um, a black and white image, and we can lighten and darken the image. So what about all of these dots? Well, what I'm going to do is I'm going to just close this down, close this image, and open up a different one to show you how this actually works. So I'll say, Don't save over there. I'm going to go and open up another image here. So I've got this S Volkswagen beetle, which is predominantly orange. So this orange in the foreground, the background, you've kind of got blues and greens going on. If I want to change the color of the car, I can go into HSL, and this is really what it's for. If you've got a specific color in your image that you want to adjust, you can go in here and you can say, I want to adjust just the greens, and I click on green. And now when I'm doing my adjustments, you can see it's adjusting all the background colors. It's not adjusting the orange of the car because what it's done is it's just said, Let's just adjust these colors over here, and then it kind of falls off to there. So it goes that's what it gets adjusted, and this is sort of semi adjusted until none in there. Okay, that's fine if you want a background like that, but maybe I wanted the background to actually not have much color in it. I could use the saturation and just desaturate the background in there as well so we can go virtue to black and white. We can darken the background or you can lighten it, as well. You can see how those darker colors are lightning and darkening. But I'm sure what you're waiting for is for me to change the color of the car. So, okay, I'll do that. I'm just going to reset this again over here. The best thing to do here is to take the picker over here, click on the picker, and then you can move onto your object and click on it. So it's the picker. Click your object, and you can see it's now chosen those oranges that are in the car. If you wish, you can move these actually further apart. So I could say, Well, actually, I want to do those yellows as well. Make sure I get some yellows in there at the same time and maybe any pinks. In there, too. Now I can go in and I can adjust the color of the calf. So let's drag that over, and you can see I'm only affecting the car, not the background as much. I say as much because there's still little bits over there, little bits over there. And if I move this out the way, you'll see the light has been affected as well. So this is not perfect for changing the color on an item unless that color is only that color and nothing else is selected, as well. But it's really useful later on when we can actually do a rough selection around an object and then go and change the color. So I'll just take that one back again to there. Now, I'm going to do this again. But instead of changing the color, I'm going to change the saturation so I could desaturate the car. I could darken the car down. So if I wanted it sort of a dark brown, I could do that, or I could lighten up the car. In fact, I can lighten it all the way up, so it looks like it's actually white in there. That's a really nice trick to change the color of an object using this lightness to very quickly lighten it up. Do be careful, though, when you're doing this, we're losing those reflections in there, and even a white car would have some sort of reflection on there. I'm going to go with something or actually, I suppose that color there does work. With a very light orange on there. But have a bit of a play with this and don't forget to use that color picker. I will go back again to that other car that I had the colorful car in there. Or tell you what. Let's try, I don't know what that car is. That one. So same again. I'm going to go into there. HSL, I'm going to use the color picker and I'm going to click on the C. Let's try that again. I'm going to use the color picker, so click on the picker, click on the pink of the car to select it. If it's not quite in the right place, we can always move this around a little bit. I'm thinking there should be probably some more pink over there. And then we can just adjust the color of the car as well. That's actually working really well because their backgrounds not changing in the slightest. And we've managed to make it yellow, and I can either increase the saturation that looks horrible or decrease the saturation, lighten it, or darken it. So we can actually get an almost white car over there. As I said, although it's affecting certain areas, it's actually affected his face. You can barely see it, but it has, we will be able to get rid of those areas at a later stage. Try it out. It's a really fun tool to use. 65. Selection Tools - Intro: So far, when you've been working on your images, you've been affecting the whole image. So we're going to use some selections so we can just select part of the image. So when you want to change the color of the car, it doesn't affect the background. It doesn't affect the sky, for example. So we're going to be using selections, and they're different types of selections. Some work automatically, some are manually done, and some work better than others. And I want to show you which ones you can use for which type of image. 66. What Do Selections Do: Now, what do selections do? Well, I'm going to go along, and you'll find that there are different selection tools. We're going to be looking at the various selection tools as we go through this course. But for now, I just want to take this rectangular marquee selection tool to demonstrate. If I were to click and drag like that over the dog, this area inside here is selected, and that area outside isn't if I'm doing anything to the picture, and although we haven't got them yet, when we start looking at things like brushes, if I were to paint with a brush, you'll see it'll only paint in that selected area. I'm actually going to use Command or Control Z to just undo that. You can just keep undoing. Second thing is, when we add a adjustment layer, if I go down to my adjustment layers here, you can see I've just got the background in there. I'm going to click on the adjustment layer, and I'll go down to something simple like brightness and contrast. And when I change the brightness, it'll only affect the area that is inside that selection, whether it's brighten it up or darkening it down. Now, what is it actually done? Well, first of all, I'm going to get rid of the dotted line around the outside, the little marching ants. I'm going to deselect this area by using command or control and D. It's a nice, easy one to remember because D for deselect. If you ever looked at my layers, what I've got in the layers now is an adjustment layer with a little mask added, and once again, we'll get more into masks as we go along. But this is a quick way of just selecting the area. So when you apply the adjustment layer, it only affects the area that you want selected. Let me get rid of that adjustment layer over there and do this again. So I'm going to take a little shape over there. I'll take a little ellipse and draw in a little elliptical shape there. And then I want another one over here. Now, if I click and start to draw another one there or another one here, you can see what it's doing is it's just drawing the ellipse over and over again. So you'll find that if you just click like that, it actually deselects as well. It's much easier to use Control D or Command D to get rid of that selection. But you can just click. Oh, if I've selected an area there and I want to add another area in, we can go to these little buttons along the top. This is the different modes. If I click the second button, now, even though I've got a selection there, I can add a second one in. It doesn't have to touch, but it can, if you want. I'll just do a third one over there. And then we can go to the third button, and this one subtract. So if I click and drag over here, you can see how it's subtracting a circle from that. If I click and drag over there, I can subtract another one, click and drag to subtract another circular shape in there. Once again, if I then add an adjustment layer, let's go in and just choose very simply brightness and contrast and we'll darken it down. You can see it's only affecting that area in there. So I'm going to stop this. You can just experiment with this. You're not destroying your picture at all, doing it this way because you've just done it on the adjustment layer. Don't forget you can deselect very quickly if you're on this button here, by just clicking, or if you're on one of the other buttons where you can't actually just click because it just things you want to add or subtract, use Command D if you're on a Mac or Control D, if you're on a PC to deselect really quickly. Last thing in here, by the way, before you try out is when you're making these shapes, let's just go back to this one over here. You can move into them to move them around. And if you're drawing and it's drawing from the center, you can change that. So you can switch off draw from the center, so now it'll draw from the corner outwards. It's up to you as to which way you prefer to draw. Try it out. 67. More Selection Uses: I what else can we use selections for? Well, if I were to click and make a little selection like that, and I'm just going to move it across over to the dog over there, I can actually copy that area onto a new layer. Now, if I go to edit and copy, you can see that copies actually grayed out. The trick here is to make sure that you've actually clicked on the layer, so the layers orange. Now you can use Edit and copy or you can use the shortcut if you know the shortcut, and then I can use Edit and paste. To paste that in as a new layer. Now, I want to get rid of that selection so I can use my shortcut that I've showed you or just click with the selection tool. There is one more selection that I haven't showed you in here, and that is, if you've got a selection like that, and you go to this button over here, this will leave the intersected area over there. You can see as I move over it, it just keeps the intersected area in there. Anyway, I can now go back to my move tool over here, and you'll see I've got a new layer and I can just, let's try that again with the move tool. And I can then just move that selection or that layer around like so. We could, of course, do exactly the same with a new document copy and pasted into a different document. Now, what happens if we go back to the vector area? Well, if you click in the vector area, your layers will still be there. So if I was making another shape in here and I put in a new shape over there, my new shape is between those two layers, and I can still move these around over there, I'll just take that one and drag it below or above those shapes. So the shapes also come in as layer objects in here. So once again, just try that out using copy and paste to copy and paste into as a new layer object, which is a pixel layer, by the way. If I go in there, you'll see that it's a pixel layer, that's a rectangle layer. And yeah, make sure you feel comfortable with that and then come back and we will keep going and look at some more. 68. Still More Things That Use Selections: Let's get rid of that layer there. So I'm just going to press delete or backspace on the keyboard to remove it. Now, once again, one more thing that we can use with the selections, I'm just going to do another selection around the dog now. Nothing's happening. You can see when I'm dragging, and that's because I very stupidly forgot to change my mode back to the standard mode in there. And I'll just draw a little shape around the dog's head in there. And then if we go up to the pixel menu over here, we've got various filters that we can use. For example, I've got a whole lot of blur filters in here and I can go along and choose one of them. I will just use the simplest blur that there is, which is Gaussian blur, which has just got a nice little slider over here and you can see how I can blur out that area as well. Now, this is very destructive because when I click apply, you can see it does it on that background. Let's deselect that. If you don't have a selection up by the way, and you go to pixel filters and whichever of these filters you choose, I will go back to Gaussian. Once again, you'll see it will affect the entire layer. So be careful. They do affect everything unless you've got a selection up. Have a quick go with that. You can try any filters that you like in here. To be honest, there's tons and tons of them. But for the moment, just have a go and make sure that you understand how it actually works in there with the selection. And 69. Invert Selection & Use With Adjacent Layers: I'm going to undo using Command or Control Z, those things that I've done so far to get back to my original dog and deselected. If you do have a selection and you can't remember that shortcut, the Command D or Control D, just go along to the Pixel menu. Go down to Pixel selection and just choose Dselect in there. That's the long way round. Now, let's say that I've made a selection around the dog over there, but I want to affect everything except the head of the dog. Well, what I can do or the selection, shall I say, what I can do is I can go along to Pixel selection, and in here, I can choose to invert. Now, by inverting, what it does is it inverts that selection, so everything is selected except the dog. If at this stage, I went along to my pixel, filter, and blur and gaussian blur, I can blow everything except the bit that I've got in the middle of that selection in there. Now, that's a very, very harsh edge. You'll see if I deselect it, it doesn't look so great, but I'm going to show you other ways where we can actually change that and get a much softer edge from it. It works exactly the same if you're doing something with adjustment layers. So I'll just open up another image over here. Let's go back to this car that we had. And if I had a little selection, I'll just use a rectangular selection. Let's say, I'll like that over there and just selected maybe half of that image in there. I can then go and do something on this half. So I'll go over here and I'm going to say, let's recolor just that one half over there, and we'll make that all yellow like so. And then I can go to my pixel menu, go down to pixel selection and say invert. So it then selects the opposite area. So then if I go to my adjustment layer, go down, and this one I'll choose black and white, so it'll make everything else black and white. So we've got two different adjustment layers here. One is selecting one part, which is that one there, and the other is selecting that part over there. This is non destructive because they are adjustment layers, and you can always bin them if you don't want them. And we will just deselect the long way round by going to pixel selection and deselect in there. Try that out with having a selection and then inverting the selection so it's the opposite way round and do it with some adjustment layers as well. 70. Selecting Freehand: Now, do you remember when we went to the adjustments over here, and we chose HSL on this particular picture of this little beetle, and we could then decide to pick a specific color. We can use the color picker, click on the color over there, and then just adjust that color over here. But I don't know whether you noticed that unfortunately, when we were adjusting that color it was also adjusting a little bit of light up there, some flowers over here. It was also adjusting the front there, this indicator, and the rear indicator and lights as well. And that's going to be a bit of a problem because although the cars looking great and we can change it as much or as little as we want, we don't want to affect those areas. So let's have a look at how we can do this with a selection. I'm just going to get rid of that over there. So I'm going to do this as a pretty rough selection. I'm going to use the free hand selection tool. And this little tool allows you to just draw around the shape that you want. Now, you'll see that we've got different types of selections. Here, I'm going to take you through the other two shortly. But for now, if I just do this sort of new mode, and I can say, Well, actually, I want to select this area here over there all the way around. You can see I'm being pretty rough with this over there around the front of the car. But I don't want to affect those flowers. Back to there. Now, I haven't selected those. I haven't select these, but unfortunately, I've got the front light, the back light, and the indicator in as well. So let's go and get rid of those from the selection. I'm going to use Command and plus or Control and plus on the keyboard to zoom in, and then we can just drag across. Now, I'm on a computer with a track pad. I can just use two things to move across. You might have different ways of working with your computer to move things around. But if you're not sure, there is a little hand that you can actually use to move things around the page. We'll come back to that in a second. But for now, let me go over to this little tool here, go to the not the add option, but the subtract option and just subtract the bit that I don't want to be affected. So I'm just going to go up there like, so I don't want that bit affected. I don't want this bit affected. Now, once again, I'm going to zoom right in over here so I can be a bit more accurate. I don't want that bit affected there a I want to keep that nice orange. Let's go to the back over here. If you're having trouble moving around, you can use the little sliders over there and that one as well, by the way. You can also, we haven't really talked about this much. You can go to the navigator up here and you can just drag the navigator around like that. It's quite nice, quick way of doing it. But I'm still on subtract, so I'm going to just subtract this bit over here and go down Oh, we're down there. And subtracted this bit. Doesn't matter about these outside areas because the tool that we're using won't recognize them. It's only going to be recognizing orange. So we didn't actually have to be that accurate about selecting the car perfectly. Let's go back here again and say, Okay, well, let us do the HSL now. And once again, you can pick a color, use your color picker to click on the orange of the car, and then I can change the color, and you can see it's not affecting that bit there, it's not affecting the lights or those bits or the light at the back in there. So I can go pretty extreme on this. I'm going to make this actually a darkish red like that. Happy with that. We'll close that down, and I can then deselect this with my shortcut, and we've still got our colors in there. Do try this out. Remember, this is not set in stone. It's an adjustment layer, so you can switch it on and off at any particular time. Try it out on that image. 71. Using the Magnetic & Straight Line Selections: Well, we start this little section. If you can't find that hand tool, I said, I'd show you in a moment, and you don't see it here. You can go down. There's a little double arrow. If you click on that, you've got the view tool over there and you can then just move around with that particular tool. The second thing is also to do with the way that you're interacting with the image. If you find that the layers are a little bit too small and you can't see what's going on, you can go up to the top to the drop down. Click on the drop down, and these are the thumbnail sizes for those little layers. And I'm going to say large thumbnail there makes it a little bit easier to see what I'm actually doing or what I'm working on. It's up to you, depending on your screen size, you might and you might not have those issues. Now, looking at this picture over here, once again, it's been provided for you, I'm thinking that I would like to change the color of his hat to kind of match the greens, something similar on the bags. Maybe it's a image that, you know, you want to put your brand colors into, and you're not quite happy with the color of the hat. You don't want to change everything. We don't want to change this bit over here. We're really just looking at the hat itself. But for this selection, we want to be a bit more accurate than we were with the last one. So I'm going to just move across and use Command plus to zoom in or don't forget, you've got a little slider over here. You can zoom in, you can zoom out with that slider and then move around with the navigator. Just make it a little bit smaller over there. So to select this tool, I'm going to use the free hand selection tool there. But instead of actually having to draw very carefully all the way around, I'm going to go across to the little magnet. If you click on the magnet, make sure you're on the new selection mode over here. Then you can just click once on the edge. Now, you don't have to hold down the mouse. In fact, don't hold down the mouse, move it along. And you can see I'm not actually being that accurate and it's finding that edge for me. I'm not that accurate. You'll see as I'm moving around up and down here, it's still finding that edge for me. I'm just going to keep going all the way around. It means you can do a fairly quick selection without having to be super, super accurate. It's finding the edge for me. I'm going to move around here. Oops. Now, I made a bit of a mistake. So what do we do then? Well, the easiest way is to use your delete or your backspace key on the keyboard and just click and move back along that line to where you want to go to. So I'm just going to go down there, follow this line around. Now, sometimes it will go in the wrong place. I've just forced it over there, and we can just use backspace to go back again. Let's get back to this bit here. And once again, just around to that. Oh, now, it's gone a little bit out, so backspace again. And I'll click back at my Start Point to get there. Now, if you can't find your start point, just double click to finish it off. Then I realize that I actually want this little section in my selection as well. So this time, rather than doing it freehand, I'm going to use the straight edge selection tool. I'm going to click on the Plus on this add option here. If you forget, when you make your selection, you'll lose that one that you've just done. I'm just going to click. And what this does is allows you just click point to point. You can see if I just do that. Point to point, and it gives you a straight edge. And when you get back to the beginning again, it'll just make that into a selection. I'm just going to undo that. So this time, I can click over there, click along there. Make a mistake by clicking out there, so use the backspace on the keyboard to get back to that. I can just add that bit in like so. Now, I've gotten my selection. I'm reasonably happy with it. So I'm going to go along, and I'm going to add an adjustment plan. I'm going to use HSL, I'm going to zoom out. Over here. So we can click on a color there. If that's not quite right, use the color picker and you can then just pick the color that you want to adjust. So we're just looking at the blues in there. Although this doesn't matter so much because we've got a very accurate selection around there. But I'm using the greens or the blues in there because that's the bit that I want to really affect like so. Now, as you can see, as I'm doing this, there's some bits that aren't actually changing very much. Look at that. I just do that. So you can see sometimes you're going to have to pull these out, or if you don't want to use them, you've got an accurate selection, click on this little multicolor one. That gets rid of that. Remember, you can always reset everything again if you've made a mistake. So back in here, I would click on that multiclod one which gets rid of the more accurate selection because we've made a selection correct. I'm just going to change this until I get to some sort of green that I kind of like over there. You darken it down. Maybe it's a little bit too bright in there. We just want something along that line. I think that's a good green in there. And I'm done with that. Let's deselect that. Now that you've done that, you think, Oh, my goodness, do you know what? It'd be really nice if I could have another adjustment layer to control the contrast on that. So do we have to select it again? No, not if you've got one of these masks because all you do is you go to your mask, hold down. Now, if you are on a Mac, it's command. If you're on a PC, it's control. And click and it'll bring it back as a selection for you. So I can then go and add another adjustment over here. I'm going to go to well, levels over there, and I'm just going to increase the black level over there and maybe push the white over as well. So we can make something a little bit more contrasty. Like so. So you can keep going. If you've gotten rid of your selection, going back to the last mask, hold down command or control MacAPC and click on the mask to bring it back as a selection. Now, why is mine not coming back as a selection while I'm clicking? Well, make sure that you go to the move til first, make sure that that layer is selected, and then try it again, and that'll bring back that selection for you. Do have a bit of a go with those. We're using this free hand lasso tool. Use the different types in here, the standard free hand one, the straight edge, or the magnetic. And if you use one of these and you start to go and you go, Oh, oh my goodness, it's just it's just following me all over the place, and you get lost like that. Press escape on the keyboard, that'll get you out of it. Have a go. 72. Use the Object Selection Tool: I'm going to get rid of these two layers. I'm just pressing backspace or delete on the keyboard to remove them. And let's have a look at other ways of selecting. Now, there is a little tool here called the Object Selection Tool, which is actually quite a nice tool, but it's not perfect, which is why you need to understand how to use the other ones. You see, with the Object Selection Tool, as you move around, it shows you areas that it can select for you. And it shows that I can select the child very, very quickly, although it leaves out the glass cup and I'd or plastic cup, and I'd have to select that separately. But what about this hat? It won't allow me to select the hat. Well, if I go over here and click and just drag a rectangle around the hat, you can see it does it very, very quickly for me, but it's not perfect. So if we zoom in, you can see how it's got some of the background there, and this is why we need to then go over here to the free hand Lasso tool. I could then go to the magnetic Lasso tool, choose subtract, click drag along the line here, surround that area that I don't want to get rid of it. Like so. Sometimes it can be quite quick, sometimes it's faster to select it independently and get rid of it by yourself. You can see we've got all this bit here to remove, as well. So as long as you understand that sometimes it's faster to do it manually, sometimes it's faster to use one of these little object selection tools over there. 73. Color Subject on B&W Background: I so let's try selecting the child over here, so I'm just going to click once and it's selected. That's not bad. We will have to have a close look to make sure that we've got the bits that we want, and I'm going to zoom into his fingers over here. And it's not great. So let's go back to our manual tools over here, the freehand selection tool. I'm just going to do this free hand. I like to zoom in really close when I'm doing this free hand over there. Go to the add option and just add in this little bit over here that I want. And then I'll actually go over to the straight edge Lasso tool and go to the subtract option and say, I don't want this bit here, and I'm just going to use sort of clicks. So click point to point over there, all the way around there and subtract that bit. And the same with this one over here. If you do lots of little clicks, it'll be right. If you just do one big click, you'll just get this long straight line in there because this is so small, nobody's going to notice going to keep going all the way around here. And then what we're going to do is we're going to select the opposite, so everything except the child. So I think that's okay. Let's just check that. Oh, look at that. This is a kind of a gap over there. So I'll use the free hand lasso tool, go to the subtract option, and just subtract that little section over there and subtract that bit. You can be as accurate as you want with this. I think that's everything. You can see. The more you look, the more you'll see. And if I go over here, I can see there's this section. So I'm going to go to the magnetic Lasso tool, go to the add option. You can see how we can mix and match with these tools over here, and let's see if we can just go along there. I'm just clicking to add my own points over there if it won't do it properly. I try it's free hand. I'm just clicking. Let's just add that bit in there, and we'll add this bit in. I'll do that free hand for speed. So over to there on the add option, I'm just going to add that little bit in like that. Right. I'm going to stop looking because I'll see more problems otherwise. So I've got that selected. I'm going to go to select the Invert, so that's pixel Pixel selection and Invert. Just be careful that you don't go to layer and select in the layers because then you all this stuff gone? So it's pixel and the selection is that way. Anyway, I've got everything else selected. So I'm going to go over to my adjustment layers and choose black and white to make everything black and white, except for him. And I think I'll darken down some of those greens as well. Let's just deselect that in there. We've got a color picture or in a black and white surround. Do try that out. It's a nice quick and easy way of having combination of black and white and color by just selecting your main object, which is usually easier to select, invert the selection and then make everything else black and white. Remember, it's not set in stone, you can switch it on, you can switch it off and you can also go along on this adjustment layer and change the opacity so we can get a little bit of color coming through, just a small amount of color, but he's mostly in color there. One last thing. If I want to get my selection back, remember, hold down Command on the Mac or Control on the PC and click. And I can always go back and I can say pixel selection, invert. Now I've got the child selected, and I could go up here to let's go with vibrance. Vibrance allows you to increase the saturation of the colors. I'll just increase the saturation of the colors or you can use vibrance over here. It's a bit more subtle over there. Here we go. So one selection now selects the child and its saturation. The other one makes the background black and white or almost black and white. Anyway, try it out. Once you've tried it on this image, have a go with some different images and see what you can do with them. 74. Project: Create an Image Composition for Social Media - Intro: JectTi again, we're gonna be creating this really cool image, and we're gonna be using cutouts to do that. We're gonna cut out the house. We're going to add shapes in the background. We're gonna add in text. We're going to change the color. We're going to adjust the color in the window. So many things. I hope you enjoy it. 75. Extend With Canva AI: For this project, we're going to start off with an image which looks like this. And we're going to actually extend this image slightly because you can see the roof is kind of cut off. Now, we're going to be using the AI Canva AI for this, and you will only have access to this if you've actually paid for the pro version of Canva. So if you don't and you're on the free version, don't worry. I have actually added in the image which has been extended for you to work on, or you can just ignore the fact that the roof is sticking out a little bit. It's not going to be the end of the world. But let me show you how we can extend this first of all. So I'm going to open this image, and we've got this lovely, I don't know, cottage house. And what we want to do is we want to change the background with a bit of a gradient in there. We also and some text, we also want to extend this out so we can see the edge of the roof as well. That's the first thing we're going to do. Now, to do that, from pixel, I'm going to go across to Canva AI. If you can't see Canva AI, it could be because it's switched off. If you click on those three little dots in there, you'll see that you can actually switch it off and switch it on, so it appears in there. So just switch it on so you can get into it quickly. Now, what I want to do is I want to go down to these tools over here, and I want to use a tool which is called the Generative Expand tool. So I click on that. Now, it's really easy to do. All I now need to do is to go to the end and just pull this out a little bit like that. So pull it out, let go. Now, you can see the way that I've done this is kind of so the house, the middle section of the house is in the middle of these thirds over there, and I'm then going to go across and click Expand, and you just wait for it to do its thing. Right, there we go. Let's have a little bit of a look at this. It's actually done a really good job with this. You can see how it's extended that little section over there, made it look quite realistic, and it's done it on a new layer. So I can't see my layers in Canva AI. I'm going to go back to pixel, and here's my layers over there. You can see it's put it in on a new layer over there. So I'll just pull that down a little bit, move that variation out, and we can switch it on, switch it off. Over there. It's even added a little bit of a tree in there. Now, sometimes it works beautifully like that, sometimes not so much. So let me show you an example of this. I'll go across to Canva over here, Canva AI, shall I say? Click on that generate and let's add in some garden at the bottom over there. Once again, I will click on the Expand and we'll just wait. Right, there we go. Now, you can see it's done some weird things with the stepping stones over there. It's not as bad as it could have been. I've done this sometimes. I tried it before on this image to see what it would do with the foreground, and it had stepping stones all over the place. It didn't make sense. Fortunately, this time, it's not too bad, but it's still not right. The shapes of those aren't correct. You can, of course, go in here again and repmpt it to do a new variation in there as well. I'm not going to do that. I'm actually going to undo that because all I want is this little extra bit added in over here. Now, I'm going back to my pixel layer because I'm actually really happy with that. And I do want to keep it as a separate layer. I really want to just squish these layers down, so I'm going to right click in here. I'm going to go down and I'm going to say merge down. And that'll just merge that layer into that one, and we've now got that as a single layer. Anyway, if you have Canva AI, which is and you've got the paid for version, have a bit of a go with that, try it out. If you don't, just open up the one that I've provided for you with the extra area on that. But 76. Select the House & Clean Selection: Now, let's have a look at how we can actually cut this house out. So what I want to do is I want to go along and try the Object Selection tool first. Now, with the Object Selection tool, I can just move over the image, and you can see nothing's happening at all. Why is it not picking it up? Well, you need to make sure that you've actually clicked on the background. And now, when I go to that tool, it picks it up and it sees the house. Now, that seems to be okay. Let's just click it and see what sort of selection we get. And it seems to be quite a good selection. Now, it doesn't matter about this area at the bottom over here not being selected because we're only interested in making sure that the top half of the house is cut out correctly, and you'll see why as we go along. So let's have a look at this selection. To do that, I'm going to go up to an option called refine. And that's this little button at the top, and I'm going to click Refine and it then shows me the selection against a red background. Now, at the moment we're previewing it against an overlay. If we looked at it against a black mat, now you can see the problem if we zoom in Look at the roof over there. It's not terribly clean. There's a bit of roof coming through there. Let's have a look at that on a white mat. There we go. It's even worse now. You can see how bad that roof is. Some of the areas of the roof are pretty good. It's a bit of a funny bit there, maybe a strange bit over there. So what we could do is we could actually start off by having this as a selection and then editing that selection manually. So I've got that as a selection. I'm then going to go along, and I'm going to go down to my Freehand selection tool. And then we can zoom right in. So once again, I'm using Command or Control and plus to zoom in, and it's move along over here. You can see how bad some of these bits are. Now, I'm going to be honest with you, if you were doing this just for something to go on social media, so it's going to be quite small. This wouldn't matter. This bad selection here wouldn't matter. Maybe you could clean that up a little bit, it'd be alright. But if this was going to go onto a huge poster, you'd want to make sure that these were pretty good. So I'm going to clean them up. I'm not going to do every single one of them, because otherwise, you'll get really bored watching me, but just to give you an idea, I'm going to start off over here with the free hand magnetic tool. I go to the plus, and then I can just run along here and see how that does. Of selecting those little bits over there. Let's go around on there. You can see it's starting to lose it completely, so we'll escape out of that. The other way I could try is by using the straight hedge tool over here, and I can just go along there and click onto those bits. All the way round. And select them that way. Or we can use the free hand tool and actually just do it freehand. I can go along there around there, surround that bit to select that. I want that little bit in there, surround that surround that. You see it could take quite a while to do all of this correctly, but it will give you a better result. Now, the ones along the top over here, I want to subtract those. So I'll actually do that with the straight hedge lasso tool. I'm going to go along to subtract, and I will click over here and say, let's get rid of that and all the way along here and then go all the way around it to there. Oops, I seem to have made a mistake there, so I'll just get rid of that one as well. You just play with these until you get what you want. If I've gone too far, I can then go and add those bits in where these are not perfect, I can go round them like that as well. If you find something like that, sticking out on the outside, you go to subtract and you can subtract that section too. Just work your way around the document, you can suddenly see how bad some of these are and once again, add or subtract them. Now, as I said, I'm not going to force you to watch the whole thing over there. I just want to do these two last ones, and then I will go around mine while you're trying yours out as well. So let's just get rid of that a little bit over there. Remember, you're either adding or subtracting. If you go too far, you can just add it back in again. I'll stop there, and I will continue with mine to get it right. And you can have a bit of a go with yours as well, until you get that selection apodespot on. Don't forget that chimney there is not part of this little cottage and the top of the house there is not part of this cottage, either must be one that's sitting behind it. So just get rid of those. Don't worry at about any of this down here. So just make sure your selection is from about here across to about there as a good selection, and then ignore the rest of this. It's absolutely fine. Try it out. 77. Add Bottom of House to Selection: Now you've got your selection looking really good. We're going to go and do one more bit to our selection. We're going to take the free hand selection tool, use a straight edge, go to the ad, and I'm just going to add in this little bit over here, so I'm going to click over there, down all the way around to here. Just add in that bottom section, like so. It doesn't have to be neat as long as it looks something like that. Let's copy this onto a new layer. So I'm going to go to edit and well, look at that. It's grade out. Why is that grade out? Well, it's because we haven't actually selected the background layer. I'm going to click on that. It's gone orange. Now I can do my edit and copy. You know your shortcuts, that's absolutely fine. Copy and then edit and paste over there. And that'll give us a second layer with a copy of the house on. You see if I hide that first layer that's the one that we've got. We don't need this selection anymore. We can just deselect it. So I'm going to use Control D or Command D to get rid of that. So we've now got the house as a copy on a separate layer like that. Now, this means that if I go over to the vector side and I take a shape, and I'll just draw in a little shape over there, let's just give it some color. And I move that shape layer underneath. Now, be very careful not into, but underneath that copy of the house. You can see very clearly where we've got that really nice cut out over there, and we want to blend two shapes together like this. But I'm going to get rid of that for the moment. Have a go, make sure you've copied and pasted it into there as a copy on a separate layer. A 78. Add Transparent Gradient Background: I I want this document to be vertical, not horizontal. So I'm going to go and add some extra space up the top. And to do that, I'm not on one of the pictures over here. I've just clicked off of them onto the background. So the document setup comes up. And if you're in vector or pixel, it doesn't matter. It's the same document setup button. I'm going to click in there, and what I want to do is I want to change the page height. And over here, I'm going to change the height of this to 7,000 pixels in there. Now, you can see, once I've changed that, this little window over here pops up and says, Well, what do you want to do? What is your anchor point? I'm going to have the anchor point being the bottom, so all the new space comes in at the top. If you click in the middle, the new space will come in above and below. And obviously, if you click at the top, it'll come in just below. So I'm going to click at the bottom, so the new space comes in above. Click Okay. And you can see we've now got all of this new space right at the top. Now we're going to go over to vector mode if you're not in there already. And I'm going to take a shape just using a rectangle, and I'm going to put a rectangle right over just down just below where the gutter of the house is. So about over there, I think is perfect. And we're going to move that below the house over there. Now, I've moved it and something's gone wrong. What has happened? Well, as you can see, there's a little arrow there. If I click on that arrow, it shows that this red shape is actually inside that shape over there, so it's using a mask. And this is something I've mentioned before that will happen to you time and time again. Just undo it. When you drag, don't drop it on there, make sure you're underneath. So you just see the line underneath the house and drop it, and then we've got the house coming in above the red over there. Now, that should be fairly straightforward for you to do. Just watch out for that dropping it. But now what I'd like to do is I'd like this shape to actually fade out. Over there. We haven't looked at this yet. We're in vector, and we're going to go along to where we had the gradient fill tool, and we're going to use the transparency tool. Now, the transparency tool, I'll just click on the rectangle over there works the same as the gradient tool with a little line. So I'm going to start up here and just drag down to the edge over there. And you can see how that slowly graduates out. You can make this as big or as small as you want. So, in fact, I kind of like that. Maybe I wanted to go a little bit further, so I could go back to my move tool. I could make this shape even bigger still. And once again, I'll go back to the transparency tool, and let's make that fade out a little bit more. So we get this lovely fade going across from top to bottom. Have a bit of a go with that. It's giving us this really lovely feel where the house is there in full, but the background just fades out. Try it out. 79. Add a Gradient to the Shape: A Now, let's put a gradient on here, as well. So I'm going to go once again to the fill tool. Let's just select the rectangle there, and I'm going to click and drag like so. And then I can go along to my gradient. Click on this side, choose a color for it, click on the other side, choose a different color over there. Now, that looks awful. So let's start off with this color here, so it blends nicely into the entire background. I'm going to click on the little Eyedropper tool. And move down and choose one of these sort of dark greens over there. So you can see the dark color comes in over there. And then I'm going to go to the top over here. I want this to be an early morning scene. So I want the top to be kind of a bluish color, and let's just go with a sort of blue like that. And then I want to put another color over here to give the feeling of sunrise. So that one there is going to be sort of more of an orange type of color. And I can just move that up or down as much as I want, move these around until I'm kind of happy with the look. I think that is too dark. Let's go with more of a lighter pinky morning sky, pinky orange morning sky. That's, yeah. That's not looking too bad at all. I think we'll go with something like that. You can sit and play with this for hours until you get it as you want it to be. Don't forget that's a linear gradient. You could try it with a radial gradient if you prefer, although that looks like really strange like there's some sort of alien coming down. And don't forget. Try it with a pigment blend, as well, and you might find you get a slightly different result. I actually prefer it with pigment blend off for this particular example. Anyway, once again, have a go and get this lovely blend going on here. I 80. Add Adjustment to Affect Just the House: Now, how would this work with adjustments? Well, I'm going to put a black and white adjustment on to show you. If I go to my adjustments and I add a black and white, you can see, because it's the top shape over there or the top layer, shall I say, it affects everything all the way down. If I move below the house, the house comes back in color, if I move it below that one, it's just the front and background over there, which is in black and white. So that's all very well. But what about if I wanted to just affect the house over here? Well, when you drag this, and this is what I was telling you not to do before, if you drag it on top of that layer, it will pop it inside like that, and it now only affects this layer here. You can see there it is over there, I can switch it on and switch it off. So we can have an adjustment layer just affecting one layer like that. If I wanted another one here on the background, I could then just put one on the background to affect the background. It won't affect that one because it's below it, as well. Now, let me undo that. Again, I'm using lots of Control Z or command zs to undo the black and white. There we are. Actually, what I want to do is I want to not make it black and white, but I want to change the vibrancy of it. So I'm going to go down to vibrance. And I'm going to affect the saturation. So just push the saturation up just a little bit over there, and you can see that it's now affecting both the house and the sky. Now, that actually doesn't look too bad, but if I only want to affect the house, I would just move it and drop it on top of the house layer. So now you can see if I open that up, it only affects the house layer. If I click on there and adjust it and go really wild, once again, we're only affecting the house. Have a little bit of a go with that and see how that works. 81. Add Warmth to the Reflections: Now, with this lovely background that we've got, when you look at the house, well, it looks really a bit strange because you've got these warm lights in here, the warm lights over there, but there's a bit of a reflection of a blue sky over there, and it would look so much nicer if these windows and those windows were a really nice warm orange type of color. So let's do that. I'm going to go back to pixel mode over here and I'm going to zoom in so I can get close to those windows. Now, for this example, you don't have to be too perfect about it. I'm going to use the freehand selection tool, and I'm going to go across to the straight line the polygonal. I always have problems pronouncing that one. The poly or, you know, you know, the one straight lines. And I'm going to just start over here and just make some selections around the window areas in there. I said, that don't have to be too perfect. Now, make sure you're on the add option and you can then add in the next one. Over there. And we're going to go through all of these windows one to time slowly. If you make a mistake, use your undo or you can subtract with the same tool again as well. Once again, up to there over there, cross. And then these ones, well, we're going to cheat. We're actually just going to go from there all the way up to a great big square around there. Down that one and back to the start. So, let's make sure we're right on the top object. Just hide that one for a moment. I'm going to put an adjustment layer on, and I'm going to go with, I think, a brightness and contrast to start off with. Let's zoom out so we can see the whole process. I can take the brightness down a bit, so it's not quite so obvious. So now I've done that one. Let's add a second one. Once again, the selection is still there. If you've lost the selection, don't worry. You can always go back and hold down the command or the control key and click on that to get your selection back again. And back in here, I'm going to use color balance this time because I want to warm it up, so I'm going to add some red over there. I'm going to add some yellow to it, as well. Quite a lot of red, actually to get that nice sort of warmth to the sky and there. Right, let's deselect that, and you can see what we've got if I switch those off compared to that over there. 82. Add Text and a Shape: I've put in a shape in the vector studio, and I've put in two bits of text over there, so they're kind of the same font size. Now, the first thing that I want to do here is to sort out where these bits of text should be in relation to each other. And you can see I've just planked them straight in at the moment. What I'm going to do is I'm going to move the word cozy across to the left until the Y meets up with the edge of the M in there because I think that will look a little bit better by just moving it down over to there. Now, you can use the arrows on your keyboard to move things around over there. I like to hold down the shift key, and that way I can move bits around like so. So I think that looks a bit better because you've then got that sort of straight line there. The edge of the C goes there, the E goes over there, and it's a lot more balanced. I'm going to take my circle because my circle is just a little circular shape. I'm going to move it underneath the house copy layer, not onto it. Otherwise, you end up with something like that, but right underneath it over there. Now, do be careful when you've got text or any object like this, and you put it too close to a shape. You see if I put it right right over there, just above the house. What happens when you have two shapes next to each other is they cause tension. This little section here is so close to the M that there's a lot of tension going on. I know it's sort of it's not really sort it out with a background if I move that down to there. That would be better. But there's still so much tension as one shape touches the other. So be really careful with that and make sure that there's a bit of a gap. They should either overlap completely or they shouldn't be touching at all. It just makes things look a little bit more professional when you're doing it that way. Now, we can then just play with our colors so I can go over to here. And once again, I can use my selection tool over there to pick a color, maybe something from the photograph itself. I can go to the text, select both bits of text, use the Eyedropper tool and select a text color from the shape as well. Really, there's no right or wrong here. Just watch that your colors don't clash with each other. I like those two colors because they come from there. I like the background, the circle, because it comes from there. I'm finding that I'm not that happy actually with the gradient in the background. So what I could do with the gradient is I could actually just go and change it and maybe pick a different color for the background itself. So instead of having a gradient, we could have a solid color like that, and just play around until you get something that works for you. I'm going to leave it like that, although I say I leave it like that. I always go back and fiddle a bit more. Let's try dark green on that background instead. Anyway, as I said, no right or wrong, experiment, try it out and get your layers all sorted out. 83. Save, Resize & Export: I've changed my colors again. I can't help but fiddle. I took this gray from the curtains on the house because I love the colors in here, and I think it all works together fairly well. Now, obviously, you can put in much as many other details as you like. If you don't want to circle, do a different shape, or you can do something entirely different in there. It's up to you what you want to pop in here. Once you're done, go to File and Save as. And in here, we're going to save it. I'm just going to put this into the images folder that I've got to share with you. So I'll click on save in there. And then I'm going to go to File and export it because I want to export this out for the web. And I'm going to be using JPEG Best Quality. Now, what I do need to do here is to change the width or the height. You don't have to change both, just one of them. And the width, because I want this to go for social media, 1080 pixels or 1080 piers, it's often called, which is usually the height, but 1080 pixels wide is probably quite a good starting point. So I'm going to put in 1080 there. And you'll see, when I click onto the other side, it goes over here and shows me the equivalent size. So it'll just resize it down to that. Let's go down and click on Export. And once again, I'll export it out, and it's ready. At another name. And this will be then ready to upload to social media. Have fun with that. Once you've tried this one out, try it with a different image. Now, I'm going to suggest that at this stage, you don't try anything where you've got people with hair because hair is a little bit challenging to cut out initially. And I want to show you some tips as we go through the course at a later stage. But try it with cars, houses, buildings, and anything you like, really, which has got quite a harsh edge. Most importantly, have fun with. 84. The Layout Studio - Intro: Onto the next main studio, and this one is called Layout. And once again, if you come from the Adobe side, you'll find this is like in design. If you came from Affinity, this is like publisher. So we're going to be taking stuff. We're going to be taking pictures. We're going to be taking graphics, and we're going to put them all together into layout. And then we're going to be working with multi pages, and we're going to be creating multi page documents. There's so many things we can do and we can work between the different packages as well. So we can start in out, but we can then go into the pixel area, or we can go into the vector area and add to the document. So rather than having to change to different applications, depending on whether you want to do photographs or logos, we can do it all in one. You'll enjoy it. 85. Why Use Layout Studio & Tweaks For InDesign Users: Et's go across to Layout Mode. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to open up a document so that you can see all the details in here and I'm going to go to File New, and I'm going to use page size CMYK a four. You can try this with any page. I honestly doesn't matter. I'm going to go over to Landscape because, well, it looks a little bit easier that way when you see it on screen and click on Create document, but any size will do. Now, let's jump back to vector. Let's go into L out Mode over here. Now, the first thing is that a lot of the tools in here are very similar to what we get in vector mode. Pixel mode is slightly different, but these two vector and Lot are really, really similar. Obviously, we've got a few differences in there, but most of them are the same. Now, the next thing I want to address is for those of you who have been using Adobe in design, because when you do this and you start looking at things like master pages, over there and you go, Hang on a second. That looks so strange. Well, I want to show you how you can set it up so it will feel much more like in design that you're used to. Just going to go to the top over here, and I'm going to go with small thumbnails. Can you see how that already starts to look a lot like traditional in design? If you take the pages and you put them over on this side over here, then, well, all of a sudden, we have something which looks so much more like in design. And when we start to add more pages in over there, you'll see it's the same sort of thing. For those of you who are not coming from in design, you can leave your pages on the left, and I'm going to reset mine back to there in a moment, anyway. But have a quick look around. You'll find that there's a few new panels in here, like the Pages panel in there. There's a few more tools over here, but it should be pretty much recognizable, especially if you've been to the vector side. 86. Multi Pages & Bleeds: So, why should we use layout rather than vector if they're very, very similar? Well, layout allows you to lay things out in multi pages really quite easily. You don't have to use multipages. You can just do it on a single page as well, but it's all about ease of laying things out. Let me show you how we can do this with multiple pages. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to file and new. I've chosen CMYK page size because this is for print, and I've gone over to portrait mode, and then up the top here, we've got our size, and there we go. We've got our A four size in millimeters. You can change that to anything you like. The color format is CMYK because this is for printing, we'll talk about the color profiles a little bit later, and then I'm going to go down. We'll also talk about image placement. But let's go down to multi pages. Now, you might find that switched off. You can switch it on, and I can then put in the number of pages that I want. I've just typed in eight over here, and they're arranged horizontally. So if I click on Create document, over there. You can see I've got all my pages 1 below the other over there, and in the pages panel, I can see them. So we can just jump to pages very quickly by double clicking. So the great thing about this is that it's all about laying out the document and working very fast with a multi page document. Now, that's very much like word where you have one page below the other. So let's have a look at how we'd create this if we were doing it for a magazine layout or a brochure, which is multi page. Going to go to File and New, once again, same thing over there, just keeping the same size. But in multi pages, we switch on facing pages. Switch that on. Once again, I will stick to eight pages in here and create the document. Now, what you can see is this one here, this is my cover, so the cover is on its own. And then you open up the magazine or the brochure, and you have two pages next to each other and another two pages next to each other, and another two pages. And finally, we get to the bottom where we've got the back page over there. So this allows you to design things where you can actually see the whole spread, the double pages together. And that way, if you want to put a picture over both pages, that's absolutely fine. Remember, you can just double click over here to jump to the page that you want to go to like that very fast. So you can kind of treat this area like a navigator, if you wish. Now, you'll notice that we have got over here a margin and a little line all the way around the outside. So let's go back into here again. I'm going to go to file and New, and I'm going to go over to my portrait mode over here, and let's look at a few more options down here. So I'm going to move down a bit to my multipages. I'm going to keep them switched on for now. I'm then going to move down to margins. The margins are the inner blue line. They're just there to help you with your design. You can completely ignore them if you want. In fact, I think they're too big. I'm going to make mine 12 millimeters over there, and I really should link them together. So if we do that as 12, now I've messed them up a little bit. I'll just do them manually for the moment. There. So that should be my margin. Then we've got the bleed on the outside. Now, we've talked about a little bit about the bleed before, but let's go into a bit more detail now. I'm going to click on Create Document. You see, I've then got my margin over there. The little blue line is around the outside, so that's the bleed. So what happens is when you put something onto the page, it's going to go to the edge. Now, that could be just a little shape. Like this, let's go and give a different color. And let's say I wanted a shape over the bottom part of my page like that. Over there, let's get rid of the stroke around the outside, so we don't want that. Oops. So, I could do this in two ways. I could actually put the shape, so it went to the edge of the page. Over there. And if I was doing this for screen use, that's exactly what I do. I just put it so it goes to the edge of the page in there. But if this was going for printing, when you print or when you send these to the printers, they usually don't print on individual A four size pieces of paper. What they do is they print on rolls of paper. So you have this page and then the same one again next to it and next to it and next to it on this roll, and then they print the other side. And then a big guillotine comes along and cuts this up into appropriate pieces. Now, these are not right next to each other. There's a bit of a gap between this page and the next page. So if you imagine that when the gilatin came down here and cut, and it was just half a millimeter out, now, half a millimeter is nothing when it comes to cutting up masses of pages like this. So. What would happen is that your document would appear, and I'm just going to do this manually to have a tiny little white line down the side because the gillotin was slightly out and cut over that side a bit much, or maybe the paper stretched or maybe it was just a very humid day and the paper was slightly off a bit. So to get around that problem, what we do is we add some extra space over here up to the bleed. And then the printers will print this out with that extra space on there. And then when the glotin comes along and cuts, it doesn't matter if the giltins not perfect because it'll be just cutting off that extra space, and your design will go right the way to the very edge. Now, it could be that you're doing it for colors like that, or it could be a photograph. If you've got a photograph, once again, I could either have it to the edge of the page, but then there's the possibility that it might have a little bit of white on it, or I would put the frame for the picture right the way to the edge over there. Let's just go and bring in a quick picture over here. I'm going to use place. Find an image. And you can see that my image now goes to the edge of the bleed, and these extra bits do get cut off. So bear in mind that they will be cut off in the final print. As I said, if we're doing this for screen, it doesn't matter. We can just pop that in there. Like that. Nothing's going to get cut off because there's no paper to print on. Do have a little bit of a look at this. So go into your new document over there. Go down here, change the margins if you wish. But then go down to the bleed, make sure you switch the bleed on and put in a bleed size in there. Now, the industry standard is 3 millimeters. Occasionally, a printer will ask you for a bigger bleed, especially if you're doing a huge banner, maybe up to 5 millimeters. But if they don't specify, 3 millimeters is absolutely perfect. Anyway, create the document, have a look around, make sure that you understand what these things are doing. And remember, this margin over here is purely there to help you. If you get it in the wrong place, it's not the end of the world. 87. Adding Pages to Your Document: I now, I'm going to go along and do a new document over here and I'm going to put in just the one page for the moment. These are in multi page format, and we've got facing pages switched on, and they're arranged horizontally. I'll show you what happens when you arrange them vertically in a moment. And likewise, we're starting on the right hand side. So all of this is the default setting, and we can also switch on the default Master page. Now, we'll get into Masters later on, but let's just switch that on for now. I'm going to click on Create Document. So what we have here is the master pages up there. So, you know, if you don't see anything there, it's because the master pages are not switched on. And we got our pages down here. Now, if I want to add more pages, there's a number of ways you can do it. Firstly, you can go up here to the pages option, click on the little plus over there and say Add pages, and you choose how many pages you want to add in. So this is my cover, and then I want two inside pages, and I want a back page. So I'm going to add in three pages in there. And over here, it says, Which page do you want to do you want it to come in after? Well, we've only got one page, so it's going to be after page one. We'll click Okay, and there's my extra three pages in there, and you can see them on the screen. Now, another way to add in pages is to go up to the document menu over here. Go to pages. If you just click on New, it just adds in one more page. You can see I've now got five pages in there. If you go to the document menu and you choose Add pages, it's kind of the same as clicking on whips that little button over there, and you can choose how many you want. So I'm going to add my new pages, and I'm going to add in another three of those over there and click Okay. I've now got eight pages. One of the things to be aware of when you're adding pages to a document, if you haven't done stuff for print before, is that your pages over here should be in sets of four if you're going to be doing this double page spread kind of thing, and it's going to go for print. Because when they print this, they don't print it on individual A four sheets. As I said before, it's printed on a large roll, and this will be one page here. It'll be this sort of A three size. That would be another page over there. So you can only have sort of four pages at a time. You can't have five pages in a document. It just wouldn't work. So do be aware of that. When you're laying out your document. It's always got to be in sets of four. And if you find that there's, you know, one or two over at the end, well, you could just have them as blank pages. What I do is kind of cheat sometimes and just put some lines on it and say notes. So it looks like it's actually deliberate to have those extra pages in there. You can make new pages there. You can make new pages by going to the document. Lastly, now remember, I've got eight pages there. You can also make new pages by going to the master page and dragging that in. And you can see I've now got ten pages in there. Now, that obviously doesn't divide by four. So let's go in there, drag the scene again, and I've now got 12 pages. So this document would actually work correctly. Have a bit of a look at that. If you don't see anything in the master pages, it is because when you've done your new document, you need to make sure this default master is switched on. If it's switched off, you clereate the document, you won't have anything in there. If you have done that by mistake, you can click that little button there and just make a quick master page in there. 88. Document Setup to Change Existing: Now, as I said before, if you don't know what a master page is, don't worry about it. We're going to go through that step by step later on. Let's go back to our pages over here. So I've got 12 pages in here. If I want to get rid of some pages, I can just click on the ones I want to get rid of and then click the little bin at the top to remove them. I'll click there again and use the bin to remove them, and I'm now down to eight pages. If you want to go back and change some of the settings in your document, because maybe you've decided that you don't like this to be as these spread pages like that, and you just want them to be in single pages because it's not going to be printed out and you're just going to be emailing it around. What you can do is you can click the Document Setup button over here or you can go to Document and set up document setup. It's exactly the same thing, both of those. Now, this takes us into this really scary window, but don't worry. It's absolutely fine. It'll be really easy once you see how it works. So this shows all the pages in the document from page one, two, three, shows the master page as well. So when we're making any changes in here, it's going to be changing the ones that are ticked. So if I didn't want to effect the master page, I can switch that off. I can switch off page one or page two, whatever I wanted in there. So I can go along over here and I'm going to go down to my orientation, and I can then just click on that to make my pages landscape if I wanted. If I click Okay, you'll see all my pages are now landscape. Let's go back in there again. I'm going to keep the portrait because it's easier to see what I'm doing. And so I'll click on there and okay that. So back again. Now, moving down a little bit over here, we've got facing pages. So as I said, I can switch those off. Click Okay. And now my pages are just as single pages in there. Let's go back to the document setting. If I switch those on and chose vertical instead of horizontal, now my pages will be sort of up and down like that. So when you look at the double spreads, they're actually vertical rather than horizontal. Not something you're going to be using too much of, I imagine. Let's go back there and go back to horizontal. And we can start the first page either on the right, which makes sense for a document or on the left, which means that you won't have that sort of first one page. I'm going to switch that back onto the right in there. And then we're going to come back to the color later on and over here the margins and the bleed once again. If you've forgotten to put in a bleed, you can come and you can put it in over there. Let's just click Okay and go back to this document as it stands. Once again, try it out. 89. RGB VS CMYK: When we're creating a document, one of the options we have here is to choose from CMYK or RGB. And if you go down, you'll see photos don't have anything. Canvas is nothing, video and web nothing as well. So why have some of them got CMYK and some got RGB? Well, it doesn't matter what it says up there, because if I click on something, I can change the color format in here from RGB through to CMYK in there. You'll find some of the other things like photos will automatically have an RGB, Canvases will have RGB, web will have RGB, as well. So when you go in here, you can change them. These are just quick presets. So what is the difference really between RGB and CMYK? I've mentioned very quickly earlier on that CMYK is for print and RGB is for web. But I want to actually show you this in a graphic here. And then I want you to see what happens when you choose the wrong colors. So there are two main color modes that we have CMYK, which stands for cyan, which is the blue, magenta is the pink, yellow, and K, which is black in there. So these are inks. By the way, why is it K? Well, it's because it was the key color that we'd be using. Also, if you used B in there, it might get confused with blue in there, so makes more sense. So these are inks that we use, and we put them onto a white paper when we're printing. And most printing is done using magenta, yellow and black ink on a white paper. If you're doing anything for screen use, and by screen, I mean, whether it's your laptop, your computer, well, anything really that's a device, digital cameras use RGB. So do projectors, so do well, smart watches. Anything which is a device which has to have light because all those devices have to have light, they use red, green, and blue RGB. If there is no light, then you have black. So whenever you see black on a screens because of a lack of light. And if you take RGB, light, and put it together at 100%, you get pure white in there. So whenever you see white on a screen, because the pixels that make up the screen are displaying 100% of red, green and blue. So if we're creating something that's going to go on screen, whether it's a presentation, a PowerPoint presentation which is going to be projected or put on a big television, or whether it is just something to be emailed around, which is going to be viewed on screen, we always use red, green, and blue color modes. If you're sending anything for commercial printing, we usually use CMYK. I don't know if you notice the difference in my language there. I said, we always use that for screen, but we usually use this for printing. Occasionally, you might come across printers that can print extra colors. I had a photographic printer once that had ten or 12 different cartridges. So if I actually did an image in CMYK, I wouldn't get as many colors as I would have got if I'd printed from an RGB file. Talk to your printer first. Just check that they do want CMYK. Now, what about the color difference in these? Well, the thing is that with RGB, you can get much brighter colors. I can get really vivid greens and really vivid blues. You cannot create those two vivid colors using cimagena and yellow ink. It just it doesn't happen. You know, blues are never going to be that bright using those two colors. So the problem is that if you make something in RGB or you've got an RGB photo, what happens when you send it over to be printed and you convert it into CMYK. Well, have a look. I've got these two photos. This is, I think, this paper over there in textures, and this is from a painting, which is really bright. If I go to the document setup over here at the top, and I'm going to convert this document because it's an RGB document from RGB into CMYK, use CMYK eight in there and click Okay, don't worry about the color profiles for now. Can you see how dull that is? That was really bright? These ones, the greens are not as bright anymore, and even these images here, the RGB, that's not as vivid as it was. I'll just zoom out. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to undo that so you can see the difference. So I'll use Control Z or Command Z to undo. Look at the difference. That's how it was. But the moment you convert it to CMYK, we lose those colors. Does anything happen to CMYK? Shouldn't should stay exactly the same. Well, I don't know whether you noticed it did a slight change in there, only because this is trying to demonstrate CMYK colors using an RGB document, so it's not quite perfectly true. Anyway, the main thing about this is if you use RGB, be aware your very vivid colors, the bright bright blues and the very vivid greens will change significantly. Reds slightly, but not as much. Any cyans, magentas, and yellows? Well, you shouldn't notice any change at all, and if you do, it'll be very, very minimal. The great thing is skin tones, and it doesn't matter what color skin tone you are or your subject is, they pretty much remain perfect. So skin tones, whether they are from light pink through to browns, they're all colors that are in this sort of CMYK range. So that's the good news. Bad news is that blue skies, which are very vivid on screen, might not print out quite so well. Now, one of the things you'll start to think about is, hang on a second. When I go into the shop that sells magazines, and I look at the magazines, and there's some really beautiful colors on there, and the covers have got these lovely images with blue skies, why don't they look dull? Well, chances are it's because you've got nothing to compare them to. I reckon if you took those and you looked at the original image which was in RGB, you'd find that the printed version is not as bright. The second reason is sometimes magazines, particularly for colors for covers, as well as certain brochures will use an extra color ink in here, so they'll print with cimagento yellow and black. Plus, they'll have another color in there as well or two colors. The downside of this is it can be done, but it's very, very expensive. So they might have a bright fluorescent green if they wanted that green on the cover of the magazine. Or for a brochure, you might have a specific color which is your brand color that just got to be absolutely perfect. So these extra colors are made by different companies. These different companies create the color inks, and the most popular one is called Pantone. So if you ever hear about pantone colors, that's what they mean. They're extra colors that you can print with all the printers can print with, and they should look exactly as you saw on your Pantone swatch. I'm going to stop talking there. The thing to take away from this is be careful. If you work in RGB, your colors might change when you convert to CMYK for printing. I 90. Text Frames - Intro: Et's have a look at text frames. Text frames are not just a little frame where you can put your text in. There's so much more to them. We can move them around. We can change the size of them. We can get the text to flow. We can get the text to go from one frame to another. So many things to do. I'd like to show you now. 91. Using Frame Text vs Artistic Text: Let's bring in some text. Now, so far, we've been using this artistic text tool where you click and drag to decide the size of your text, and then you can put your text in. So I've just popped in a bit of text in there. I can then get my move tool. I can grab a corner and I can resize it around to any size that I want. So what about this other text tool? Because we don't want to do that when we've got lots of text to put on a document. Well, with this, what I can do is I can click and I can drag to make a frame and you can see now that it's just a little eye beam over there flashing in the corner. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go along, and I've got word and I've got a document over here in Word, and I want to bring in some of this text from word. So I'm going to select it. I'll just take it down to there. And I'm going to copy it. So that is Command C or Control C if you're on a PC, and you could also go to edit and copy in there as well. Anyway, I've copied the text back into here again, and I'm going to paste. So once again, command V on a Mac, Control V on a PC to bring that in. And the text has come in over there. Now, I've got the text. It looks pretty much the same as it did when it was in word. But what about if I wanted to change it now and move it around? Well, I'm going to go along and I'm going to get my move tool and I can move the text around, but I can also go to the corner here and you'll see that there are two dots in the corner. There's one on the square itself and one just outside. If I go to the one on the square itself, this will allow me to change the frame and the text will just flow inside that frame over there. If I go to the outer one, the dot on the outside, this will allow me to scale the text and the frame together. So the inner one changes the box that the text is in, and the outer one changes the size of the text and the box in there. And what about these ones here? Well, these are pretty much the same as that inner one over there. You can grab them and you can change the box to any size that you like. Now, do be careful because once you brought in your text and you do this, now you're hiding some of the text away. And you can tell that it's being hidden away because this little red eye pops up over here to say there's something being hidden. If I pull that out, you see the eye disappears, go back in there, and we've got text which is hidden in there. We'll talk in a moment how we can deal with that. Try that out. Have a bit of a go. I have provided this document for you with some text about train photography in it, and you can use that, or you can use any other text from a word document that you want to copy and paste across. Have a go. 92. Why the Gray Background & Text Frame Color: You might notice that my text seems to have a gray background on it. If I move it over there, you can see it's definitely gray in there. So, this is not always something that happens, but occasionally, it can happen. You think, Well, where is it? How do I get rid of it? What we need to do is we need to go up to the window menu. We're going to go down to text. And we're going to find the text frame panel over here because at the moment, we've got characters and stuff. What we need is the text frame. That works with the frame itself. And in there, you can see there's a fill, and the fill happens to be light gray. If I click on there, if I made that red, it's the fill color over there. So what I can do is I can click the nun button, and that's now transparent. If I move that over the word trains, you can see it through there. Let me do the same with the trains. I'll click on trains, go to the fill over there, and I'm going to just choose none for the fill color. Now, we've got the same sort of thing with a stroke around the outside. If I click on the stroke and choose a stroke color, you can't actually see it until I increase the width over there, and there you can see the line around the outside. I could do the same with this bit of text as well. Instead of none, I'll just increase the width or the weight around the outside. If you've got that problem, have fix it. If you don't have that problem, open up the text frame so that you remember where it is. So it is window, text, and text frame in there, and then just try changing the fill and the stroke on the frame. I'm also, by the way, on the move tool up here rather than the text tool, I don't have sort of text or any sort of text selected at the time. I'm just on the move tool. Try it out. 93. Typeface, Font Families & Font Basics: Now, when it comes to changing some of the character options, I can go in with the text Tool, and I can either click and drag over a whole lot of text or to select text, you can click a few times. So if I just double click, it selects a word. If I triple click, it selects a line. Four clicks, we'll select paragraph. And if I want to select everything, then it's five clicks to select all my text. And I want to go up here and change the typeface. Now, when you hear people talk about these things, sometimes they'll refer to them as fonts. Sometimes they'll refer to them as typefaces and sometimes they're called font families. It actually doesn't really matter what you call them. However, just to be clear, these over here are typeface. If I go along and choose this one here, this is a typeface or a font family. It's a family because it might have more than one particular type because it's got different sizes. Go back in there again, let's find something else over here. Once again, this is a type family, but Apple Gothic, regular. And if I made it, I don't know, 13 points, that is a font. So a font is a subset of the font family or the typeface. As I said, Dorry, if you want to call them fonts, it's absolutely fine. Only the very hard core designers will maybe look at you a bit funny if you do that. Anyway, you can select more. You can select individual words. Once again, I just double click very quickly to get in and do some changes to the text. Let's go and get some more text in there. We've got more options along here, and I'm going to take you through those later on in this whole course. But for the moment, you can change the options in there. You can get your character panel up over here. This changes the individual characters. And you've also got a paragraph panel over here to change the whole of the paragraph. Try them out. By all means, just click on things, see what they do, and we'll go through them properly at a later stage. But just make sure you know where they are. And if you want to change the text color, well, you just go to your color. You know how to do that, I'm sure, by now. 94. Text Flow: I've got some panels up here, so I'm going to go to the window menu, panels, and just reset all my panels back to default so that you can see everything. Now, uh, I've clicked on this text, and I'm going to move the bottom of the text up. Now, having done that, I can still see this text over here and you might not. And it's to do this little I. If we zoom in a bit over there, you can see that I there hides or shows the text which overflows from the box. So if I click on that I there, now it's hiding that text, and I can choose to edit the text and just say, Well, I don't want to see the rest of it, or I can say, it doesn't matter about what size the box is, I do want to see all of that text in there. Now, what about if you wanted to get your text to flow? And by that, I mean, I've got this little bit of text up here, and then I want the story to get to there, and then I wanted to continue on down here. Well, what I can do is I can go along to the little arrow. You see, there's a little red arrow over there. And if I just click once on that arrow, it gives me my text frame tool, and I can just go down here and click and drag to put in some more text in there. So the text flows from here into there. You'll see if I do that? The text is going from there into here. If I push this up here, the last line says, find your unique angle. I'm going to push that over and then find your unique angle is down over here. Now, what will happen if I took this bit of text and I deleted it? Well, all the text will then flow into this frame over here. So I can pull that out. I'm just going to select all the text and make it a bit smaller. Over here. Let's just take that down to ten points. So it's easier for you to see. And I'll pull that back up again. So with these frames, you can then get one to flow from one into the next into the next. I'm going to pull this frame up over here. I'm going to click on the little arrow. I'm going to say, I want that bit of text to flow down here. And then I want it to flow from here over to there. And there's still some text left. I'm going to click on there again and continue on down here. So all of my text will flow from there into there into there and into there. If I change the size of this, the text then continue to flow from there into there and into that one there. You notice that because I've got a frame which is going from there into there, that little I has disappeared from there, so you can't kind of show the extra text because the extra text comes in over here. If I take this one up, this is the last one, I can then get the I and I can show the extra text coming through at the bottom. Try that out. You can make as many of these as you want. You can get it to go from one page to another. You can delete them. You'll never lose your text because it'll always be in one of the frames that you've got left. Get rid of that one there. There we go. There's all my text back there again. Try it out and play with it and have some fun with it. 95. Text Columns: I now, if you want to divide your text up into columns, there's two ways to go about it. One way is you can actually make your frames the size that you want, and then you can go and you can click on a little arrow and go up to the next bit and click and drag down to get your things into a column like that. Or, and this is so much easier. I'm going to get rid of that. I'm just going to take this and pull this across. What we could do is we can go up to the Window menu, go down to text and remember the text frames, find the text frame panel. And over here, under columns, if you can't see it, by the way, just click on the little arrow over there, you can choose how many columns you want. So I'll click on that, and it's given me two columns. And you can see as I pull this up, I can get it to just go if I can get it to go up there we go to flow from one into the other like that. And you can choose how many you want, so I can go in here and I can choose three should I wish. We've also got the ability here to be a bit more specific about the numbers. So I can go in and I can change the numbers in here and you can see as I'm adjusting them, that one's adjusting, that one's getting smaller. Once again, we'll just pull that back. We've got a gutter, as well. The gutter is the distance between the columns, so I can increase the gutter, or I can decrease the gutter in there. Take that down a little bit like that. My favorite part of the columns is actually this little button here that says balance text and columns because you can see at the moment, we've got the two bits of text and then third one there. And I could actually go in here and try and pull that up to try and get it to balance much quicker to just switch that on it'll automatically balance for you. It doesn't matter what you do over here, making this bigger or smaller. It will just keep that balanced. Anyway, once again, as always, try it out, it's the text frame option or the text ring panel in the window menu under text, and you want the columns area. 96. Picture Frames - Intro: So now that you've added your text frame, let's add pictures into frames as well. And the great thing about pictures is if you come from pixel and you come across to layout, you'll find that your layers are still there. But we're going to be working within a picture frame, and there's a little bit of a difference between just popping a picture in and putting it into a frame, and I want to show you the differences and how they all work together. 97. Place Photos into Picture Frames: Let's bring some frames to put our pictures in. I'm going to go over here to the frames. These ones over here, you can see they've kind of got a cross through the middle. And I'm going to click and drag a little frame like that. And let's do a circular one as well. We have another one down here. Now, I can see these and they've got to cross through the middle. But that's because in the view menu, I've got preview mode switched off. If you switch preview mode on, they disappear. They're still there. If you click on them like that, you can still kind of see them. But I'm going to suggest that you go to the view menu and just switch preview mode off so you can see the actual shapes themselves. Now I want to bring in a picture into here, and I can either do that by clicking on the one that I want, or if I deselect them both, I can then just bring the picture in and click the frame I want to put it into. I'm going to use that method for now. So I'm going to go to File and I'm going to use place. We use place in Affinity rather than import. So I'm going to go to place over here and I'm going to go and find an image. Now, you can use absolutely any image that you like. For this, I'm just going to pick an arbitary one over here. And you can see it's actually my curses changed. And when I go over that one, it shows me what it looked like in that place. I haven't clicked yet. I'm just moving over them. I want to bring that in so I'm going to click once and it comes right in. Now, the picture itself is inside a frame. So if I move the whole picture and frame, let's say, up to the top, I can grab the side of the frame and I can pull it out like so. Now, you can see as I'm pulling this around, the picture is kind of well, it's scaling up and down. If I go to this bottom one, once again, that picture is scaling as I'm dragging this around. So I'm going to pull that out to the side like so. If I then want to zoom into the family over there, I can go to this little Zoom button down here and I can actually choose to zoom into the picture like that. If you want to move the image around, go to the middle to this little well, fork or arrows, and you can just click and drag to move it around. You can also go up to this little circular arrow and click to rotate the picture inside that frame. Let's do that again. What I'm going to do is I'm going to select it this time, so as opposed to not selecting it last time. I'm going to go to File and Place, find the picture that I want to bring in. I don't know what this is. Let's have a look. Oh, it's a house. Perfect. I'm going to click on open, and it should come straight into there. Now, all I've got to do is go and zoom in a bit like that. Let's move over the picture, click in that middle bit and move it around. If I want to move the whole thing around, I can just put it around like so. Now, if you actually go down to the bottom on this one here, you can see there are two little circles. The inner circle allows me to change the size of the frame. The outer circle changes the frame and the picture size, so I can do both of them like that. So do watch out for that. I'm just going to pop that over the corner like so. But do watch out for that. When you click over there, if you do see those little double dots, you can then just use them to either change the shape or the size of the frame or the outer one with the frame and the picture. And you can use the slider to zoom in and out of the picture itself and lastly move around. In there. I'm just going to move this up a little bit, so the land is just about on the bottom of that picture. Like so. I think that'll look quite interesting like that. Anyway, do try that out. Have a bit of a play with some picture frames and changing the zoom, moving them around in there and generally getting to know them. 98. Working With the Stock Libraries: Let's bring in some more pictures. If I go over here, you'll see that we've got pages assets. We've got something else called stock. Now, stock are stock libraries, and there are two libraries that are actually included in Affinity. And you might have to click on the I understand button to get into them so that you've read the fine print. But these give you images which are royalty free. Now, these are very similar to the Unsplash library that I was getting the pictures for that you've been using so far. So in stock, we can choose either Pixel B or pixels. I'm going to go back to Pixel Bay over here, and as you see, you can actually even look for vector files so you could use them in your vector area. Now, if I go over to Pixels or the Pixel Studio, you can actually get to the stock in there as well. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go across here and search for something. I have clicked on the Inderstand button over there. I'm going to go and search for something, so I'm going to say forest. So maybe this is a brochure about holidays in a small cavern, in the forest somewhere. So forest over there, I'll press Return or Enter to have a look, and we've got some lovely pictures here inside the forest. So I'm going to find something. Oh, that looks amazing, like that. Now, if I were to click on this picture, you can see it selects it. If you double click it, it actually opens it up in the website, so you can have a really good look at this in here as well. And this is in the Pixabay website. But you can also drag your picture straight in. Now, if you do this, look what happens. I'll drag and drop It's taking time. There we go. It is huge. If I zoom out, you can see the pictures so big, and I'm going to have to actually come in and try and get it down to the right size. We'll zoom in a bit over here. I'm just using Command and plus to zoom in or Control and plus on the PC. So I've got it to the right size, and if I want to crop down a bit, because I don't want to see so much of this foreground, I'm sort of interested in that bit there. Grab a corner and try and crop it. It won't allow me to crop this picture. It just keeps the whole picture there and scales it up and down. So how can we get around that problem? Well, if you go along to your picture frames, and before you start, put in a picture frame. I'm just going to draw a picture frame over here like that. Let's go right up to there. And then take my forest and drag and drop it into the picture frame. Takes a moment to just come over. It is coming over. Now the pictures in a picture frame. So I can go over here and I can scale it up and down. In there. I can go to the corner and I can scale it and I can scale the frame independently. I want to push this up a little bit like that and then maybe scale or zoom in onto the picture to just see part of it over there. So instead of just dragging it in over there, why not make a frame first, and then you can just drag the picture into the frame and then you've got all the control that we had before. Don't forget with these images here, as well as the text, it's like when we were working in vectors. We've also got layers so I can go to my layers here, and I'll be able to see that picture is above that one, so I can drag that over there so we can bring the other one on top of it. Try it out. So go along. Have a look at the libraries in there, search for something, any picture you like, and either drag it in or better still, put it into a frame. So make the little frame in there. If you want a perfect square or circle, hold down the Shift key while you're doing it, and then drag that straight in. I'm just going to bring a little toatstool over here, drop it in and wait while it pops in. Try that out. 99. Add an Image Stroke: Now, this picture that I brought in down here, I can barely see it. If I click on it, what I can do is I can go along and I can find my stroke. Here's my stroke panel. If you can't see it, window menu and go down to your studio options, your panels for your studios. And I'm going to increase the stroke width around the outside of that. Then just so that it blends in a little bit better, but I can still see it as a separate picture. I'm going to go over here to my color. Make sure I'm on the stroke, not the fill. So the stroke there, click on the little eyedropper, and I'm going to go and sample a color from the picture somewhere. So let's just choose a bit of a brown maybe in there. Let me do this one again. I'll click on this picture over here. Once again, go over to the stroke, increase the stroke to whatever size I want. Over there. And let's go back to the color. Once again, I'm on the stroke, choose the eyedropper and sample a color from the picture. 100. Adjust Your Images in Pixel Studio: Now, firstly, if you want to replace a picture, you can just go along and drag it straight in. So over here, I'm thinking I want to get rid of that one and bring in a different forest. I like that, so I'm just going to drag it, drop it in there, and it will replace it for me straight away. That's rather nice over there. Now, the other thing is, if we want to go and adjust any of these pictures, we are in Layout mode. All we've got to do is go over to Pixel mode over here, and you can see I've got my layers up in here. Remember, if you can't find your layers, go to the Window menu, go down to General, and the layers are in there. So what I want to do is I want to adjust this picture of the family and just make it look a little bit warmer. So I'm going to go to the picture of the family. Now, I don't know whether you've noticed, but this is very different to when we were here before. When we just opened up a picture, and I'm going to do it now, I'm just going to go and open up a picture over here, so not specifically to do with that particular one, but we just open up in a separate window. Your picture looks like that, and the little icon on the left hand side is kind of like a pixel. Over there. Now that we actually have been working in Layout mode and we've been putting our pictures into frames, you can see the little icon actually is across, so it shows that it's in the frame. If you click on the little arrow, then you can actually see your picture which is inside the frame. There's the little frame icon over there. Now, I'm going to click on that picture there because I want to warm it up, and I'm going to go to my adjustment layers. I'm going to go down. I'm going to find color balance. Remember color balance? It was a while ago, I know. Color balance there. And instead of correcting the color, I'm going to just add color. So I'm going to say, I want this to be warmer. Now, warmth would be orange, so orange would be a combination of red and yellow. And I'll just pull those up to make it really nice and warm because the bottom picture is lovely and warm, so I'm just trying to match that. Now, if I switch this on and off, you can see the difference. Oh, it's a bit cold. There we go. It looks so much warmer, and it just fits with the picture underneath it, as well. Now, what about if I wanted to adjust this ittle one over here? I go over there, and I'm going to go down, and I'm going to adjust it using, I think, black and white. I want it to be a black and white picture, so I click on there, and you can see the problem straightaway is that everything goes black and white. But we can get an adjustment layer to just effect one object. And I'm going to do that by dragging this little icon here and dropping it on the icon of the picture. Now you can see that what's happened is the adjustment layer is clipped. It's only affecting this picture in here. I can double click on the adjustment layer. I can go and make my changes, and I think I'll just mess around with a few of these bits until I get this look that I'm after, maybe something, something like that. Close that down. So at the moment we have got the adjustment layers, only affecting that layer. If I open up, you can see, there's the adjustment layer and I can still switch it on and switch it off if I don't like it. So do try that out from layout. You can just go to Pixel and you can just work with these layers with adjustment layers. But don't forget if you only want to effect one layer, drag and drop it on the little icon itself. I'll do one more just to show you. I'm hesitant to effect that picture because it's such a beautiful picture, but I'm going to do it anyway. So let's go over here and I'm going to go HSL, and I'm going to make the colors go a little bit weird. Oh, let's use those sort of blues in there. Now, it's affected absolutely everything, so I'm going to drag it and drop it onto the icon, so I move until I see the icon is highlighted, drop it on there, so it's now only affecting that one. But the great thing is, nothing is set in stone. I can still see the adjustment layer. If I double click, I can go and make any changes that I like now that I can see what it's doing. And I think I will just intensify the color a little bit like that. Try it out. We'll then go back to Lout mode and continue working on this. But 101. Add a Shape to Show Text: Let's clean up all these panels, so I'm going to go to Window. I'm going down to panels, and I'm going to say reset to reset them all back again to the default. And we'll pull that out over there. And by default, I mean the default position. So one last thing. If I want to add some text to this document, text is going to be very difficult to read if I were to put some text on there or down over here. So what I tend to do is if I'm going to put text onto a picture, I tend to put it onto a shape. Now, I'm going to go across to Vctor over here. Can you see what I'm doing with this example? I'm showing you some stuff when you work in loud, then you go to Pixel, then you go to Vector Studio, and you just jump around between the studios. That's really what I'm trying to get here to help you to understand. So I'm in the Vector Studio, I'm going to go over to my shapes over here, and I'm just going to draw in a little shape over there where I want to put my text in maybe down like that. Now, I'm going to go back to out mode. And over here, we've got the color, and I can change the color to anything I like. I'm going to change the opacity, so I'm just going to pull that down like so. So we've now got a shape over there. And we can then put our text on top, and the black text will be readable. You can adjust that as much as you want. Whoops. Let's make sure that we're adjusting it correctly to whatever sort of level you want. Now, sometimes you might want the opposite. You might want to have white text on there. Well, just change the color to black. And same again, you can affect the little rectangle sapacity and then put your white text on top of that. So let me go and just get some white text over here, and I'm just going to click and drag over there and find some text, and we just paste that bit of text straight in there. Copy that pasting. I can't see my text because it's black on a black background, but I'm going to select it. Go up to here and choose white for my text like that. If you want multiples of these, hold down the option or the old key, and you can just make a copy. Once again, we'll just pull that down a bit and maybe this is going to go along the bottom. Alright, so. And then I will just for ease of use because I don't want you to watch me do the whole thing. Again, you know how to do this. I'm going to just make a copy of that bit of text in there and get it to go over to there and just hide the bottom bit of text from view. Right. Although you can see these little bits now, if you want to go to the view menu, go to preview mode, and you can just switch preview mode on, and they will disappear. Now, I'm sure yours looks nothing like mine because I haven't said, do this, do that. I just wanted you to experiment with it. But try it out. If you want to start again and do another one with some pictures in here, don't copy mine. Just think of your own things that you can do with this particular example. And don't forget you're working between layout, pixel and vector mode in there. I 102. Text Wrap: I brought in a picture, and it's in this frame. I just brought in from the Stock library. I just searched for steam trains. And what I want to do is I want to get it to fit into that frame quickly. Now, if you go up to the top, you'll find that there are some properties here, and I could just say scale to Max fit, and very, very fast, I can get it to fit in there. Can try some of these other ones out, as well. If I say none, it will go back to that size there. I could scale it to a minimum fit so it'll scale at the top and the bottom or fit at the top and the bottom. But I'm going to scale to Max fit. I don't like using stretch to fit because that distorts the picture. Now, let's go down to this one over here. So I've put an image inside this circle, and we'll just move it up just a little bit, like that. Actually, maybe I'll just move the train inside the circle over there. And what I want to do now is I want to get the text to wrap around that picture. So to use text wrap, you click on the picture, not the text. I know that it sort of seems strange because you'd think it's a text wrap, but you click on the picture, the object you wanted to wrap around. Go up to the text menu down to text wrap, and you'll see it says Show text wrap settings. Now, we're going to click on that. And these are all the different things that you can do for text wrap. So jump means that if your text is kind of in the middle there, it'll stop above it and then start below it. If you've got square, I can click on the square, and you'll see it'll actually wrap around the square shape over there. The one I'm interested in is this one over here called tight. If I click on that, then it actually wraps around the picture itself rather nicely, I think. You got an inside so you can get it to just appear on the inside. You've got an edge, so it'll go on the outside and the inside. But this is the one that most people use this tight over here. Now, it's quite tight to the picture. So I'm going to go down to the distance from text. I'm going to switch on the link, and I'm going to increase that distance so it'll move away from the picture as well. Now, I'm going to go to the view menu and just switch my preview mode on so I can see the whole thing like that. And, of course, if I move the picture, the text will move as well. Now, this leads us to another problem. Let me go and get my preview switched off again. I'm going to make the train smaller over there, and I'm going to actually, I'm going to use this over here to just scale it over there. Now it's not fitting properly, so let's use one of these buttons here to just force it to go into the middle. There we go. I went to the second one, we forced it into the middle, right, so now, I'm going to move it around and put it in the middle of my text. So it's going right in the middle, and the text goes around it, which initially, when you look and you think, Wow, that looks pretty good, except try and read it. The incredible steam beast on that side, blah, blah, blah, you just can't. So do be careful of doing that. If you want to do this, go to your text, and what we want to do with the text is to get it to go into two columns. So I'm going to go to the Window menu down to text in the text frame, and we'll open up this one here, and I'm going to choose two columns over there. Now, it still looks just as impressive. But the difference here, and I'll just hide my preview is that now we can read down one side and then read down the second side over there as well. Anyway, do try that out. Remember, the text wrap goes on the photo or the picture or the object, not on to the text itself. You find the text wrap in text, text wrap, and show text wrap settings. And don't forget if you want to get things into two columns, go to window down to text, and it's the text frame, and these are your columns over here. 103. The BIG Project Using Everything You Have Learned Plus Some New Stuff - Intro: I this is the big project, and we're going to be using things that we've done throughout the course so far. We're going to be putting together a multi page document, and we're going to have so many cool things in there. We're going to be using pictures that we're going to edit in Pixel. We're going to make our own logo to go in there. You can see on the side there's so many things that we're going to be creating in here, as well as some new stuff that I haven't shown you yet. Anyway, I do hope you enjoy this. If you don't like the subject that I'm using, you feel free to actually create your own subject or find pictures for your own subject in there. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it. Let's get started. 104. Get Brand Colors from ChatGPT: I'm going to go over to my vector mode over here, go to the winter menu, and I'm going to my panels, and I'm just going to reset all of my panels so it looks a little bit neater. I'm also going to go to the panels here and just click between them and drag them over a little bit. So you can see, as I'm moving across, you get that little line that appears, and I can just click and drag to get a bit more space in the middle. Now, what we're going to do is we're going to be creating our logo. We're also going to look for brand colors that we want to use for this, and we're going to maybe have a look at some typefaces or font families that we want to use as well for the whole of this brochure. Now, of course, if you're doing this for an existing company, you'll probably have brand colors, and you'll probably have the fonts, and you might even have the logo as well. But this is the kind of thing that we can set up right from the beginning should we wish. Now, to do this, we're actually going to use not Affinity, but we're going to use ChatGPT and get it to give us some colors. So we've got the colors ready to go, and then we'll do the logo after that. But first of all, I'm going to start off. I'm just going to do a new document over here. Now, remember my logo might be used on screen, it might be used on printing. So I'm just going to do an A four page over here and I'm going to make sure that this is in RGB mode as well. Now, once we get to the screen side, sorry, once we get to the print side of things, then we'll have to talk about CMYK. But for now, let's just create that little document. Now, I'm going to go in and find some colors, and I've already done this so you don't have to wait. But obviously, you can try it on your own. I've gone to ChatGPT. And what I did was I told Chachi GPT that I was creating a brochure called Cello in the Modern World. You can see this is what it's written back to me over here, and I want some brand colors for it. And it's come back with lots and lots of options in here. You can see palette option one, palette option two over there. So I said, can you give me visuals of the colors I misspelled give me. Anyway, over here, I've got palettes, palette one, palette two, palette three. And then it said, Would you like to create a single branded palette image like a storyboard? So I put yes in there, and then I've asked it to give me a visual of that. Finally, this is what I was looking for. So really, I've just asked it for a palette of colors for Cello in the modern world. It's given me variations, and I went for this modern variation over there, number one. So I've got some colors that work together, finally. And we've got some numbers underneath over here, and those are the numbers that I want to use in Affinity. So those, if you don't know about those, those are called hex numbers, and they will give us the exact color that we need. Now, I can take them from there, or I can just go up over here because it was this one over here, deep mahogany warm gold. You can see we've got deep mahogany warm gold. That's the one that I chose. And I'm going to take these numbers here. Now, the easiest way to do it is just copy the number I'm using my keyboard shortcut command C or control C to copy it. Go back to Affinity, and I'm going to just put these into some little rectangles over here. So the great thing about this is I can actually then see all the colors right in front of me. So I've made a rectangle. Over here, we have got our fill color, which is white, and that's where I can paste that in. So I'll just paste in that number, press Enter, and there's the first number that I've got or the first color that I've got in there. Go back to my move tool and then I can hold down the alter the option key to make a copy of that. Let's jump back. Over here to ChatGPT and take the next one. Copy that. You can now see how fast this is going to be because I can just put that in, press enter, and once again, let's make another one over here. These don't have to be perfect, all lined up. It's just that I can see them really and have a good idea of how they look. We can put them into a swatch later on. But I'll make sure that they work for me first. Slate blue. Let's copy that one back into here again. Pasted in the press return. Those three colors look so, so nice together. Let's find the last one over here, soft Ivory. So I'll copy that. I don't have to use all these colors in my final document, if I don't want to. Paste that in. Psston. And those are my colors in there. Now, to get a better idea of how this would actually look, I'm going to be building this document. It's going to be a very dark document on a dark background, as you've seen in the intro. So I'm just going to take another shape and just put that over the top, fill that shape with black. Over there, and take it down, so I'm going to drag it down below those layers over there. So all the way down to the bottom. Remember, don't drop it inside, drop it below so you see the line. So I can see how those will actually work against the black background, and they work very well. Not sure about the mahogany, but it is there if I want it. But these two colors really, really love. Anyway, I'm going to stop over there so you can try this out. So make yourself a new document in the vector area, make some squares. Go along to ChatGPT and just tell it what you want in plain English. I'm doing a brochure. It's for a Cello. Give me some colors for my branding, and then you can take those colors and copy them across, if you like. If you want to use the colors that I've used, just stop the video at this point and copy down those numbers over there, so you'll be able to use them. Anyway, have a go with that and then we'll take it on a little bit further. Y. 105. Add Colors to Swatch: I before we go any further, let's put these colors into our brand or into our swatches so we can have access to those brand colors in any document. I'm going to go over to the swatches over here, and I'm going to you remember this from earlier in the course, I'm going to make a new swatch, so I'm going to click at the top there, and I'm going to say Add now is it a document or an application palette that I want to add? Well, it's the application one. The document would only be for this document. I want this to be available in other documents as well. So I'll say Add application palette in there. I'm going to call this Cello. And click OK. And now I've got my colors in here. So let's just click on this one over here, and I can go over there and I can just add that color in. I clicked it. It's added in over there. Let's choose this one. Once again, I can just add that color in, and I can work my way through the colors, adding them into my Cello swatch in there. I think I'd also like to have black as one of those colors. I'll add that into the mix as well while I'm there. I don't actually need these now, but I do find it's really useful to have them up, so I'm just going to move them to the side over there. It just helps me to sort of keep on brand and think about the colors and the style and the feel that I'm going to be going for. Have a bit of a go with the swatches in there, pop them into a new swatch so you'll have a new swatch over there called Cello and that'll be available for any document. But don't forget when you're doing this, make sure it's an application palette, not a document palette. Try it out. 106. Find Your Font Pairs with ChatGPT: I've chosen a typeface that I really like. You can choose anything that you want. And the one I've chosen is something called All Round Gothic. I rather like the rounded feel that I've got for this, and I think it could work really well with my design because Cello are very, very big and they're rounded. So I'm thinking that that might work. This is also about modern cello rather than too much of this oldie worldy stuff. So I don't want to use anything too classical. However, this is for my main headings. For the actual body of the text, I might like something a little bit more classical or less obvious or less rounded than that. What I've done is I've gone to ask, once again, a language model for some help. So remember, I chose this and it's called All Round Gothic. When you do this, you could try something else completely different. I'm going to go back to ChatGPT, and over here, I've actually said to chat there. If I use all Round Gothic for the main heading, what font will pair well with it for the above brand. And it's come back with some different variations. So all round Gothic, Minion Pro, all round Gothic and Laura. I don't actually have Laura on my machine, although I could probably go and search for it. I could also ask her to make sure that these fonts that I could actually get them, you know, it might be available as Google fonts or finding them for free on something like Defont. But at the moment, I'm actually going to choose Minion Pro because I think Minion Pro could work quite well with that. So I'm going to test this one out. So I'm going to go back here. Now, remember, I want to use this for my main headings. So I'm going to use the text tool. I'm going to use the frame text tool and just draw a little frame over here, so I can see how that would work with this. And I need some text in there now, I could copy and paste text from some or I can go to the text menu down to insert and just say, add filler text to that, so it'll just fill it with some sort of oramEpsen style text. Gobbledegook ready. And I'm going to go and choose Minion Pro over here. Minion, minion Minion Pro. There it is over there. That seems to work really nicely with that. Those two typefaces work well together. Now, if you've watched any of my other courses, you will know that I've got this thing about fonts and how close they are to well, to comedian double acts. So if you've got a comedian on their own, that's great. They can look however they want. If you put two comedians together, you need to have one that is a bit more traditional like this and one that is slightly less traditional. And I don't mean off the wall completely bonkers, but just maybe not quite as traditional. And they work together really, really well, and one works off the other one. It's the same with fonts. If you choose one that's more traditional and one which is a little bit quirky, they'll work together beautifully. Like comedians, if you add a third one in, you're going to find that they all mess each other up. It's exactly the same with fonts. When you add a third different font in there, the whole thing just falls apart and it looks awful. So try to stick to two. Now, by two, it doesn't mean that we can only ever use those. We could have a bold version of this or maybe italic. We could have a bolder version of that one or an italic version. So you can still work within those two frames as well. Anyway, have a bit of a go, find your text. And once you've done that, try some different sizes on this and see if it'll work over there. So if that was sort of a subheading, over there, maybe a little bit bigger. Would that look okay? Those two together. This would work great as sort of a huge title. That might work okay, but maybe we might have to try something like I'm just going to make a copy of that over there, and we'll just take that down. So we just got one word in there. And maybe this could be a title, as well. We had that, but we used a bold version of that. Personally, I prefer it with that one there, but there's no reason why you can't just experiment with these and see what you get from them. Anyway, get yourself some type, and once you're happy with that, just move it up a little bit over there, so we've got the colors, we've got the type in there, and then we're going to design our logo down here. Try it out. 107. White on Black Optical Illusion: And I have done another version of my text. So I've put in a black background, and I've copied that across onto there, and I've made the text white. Now, why have I done that as two different ways? Well, I want to see what it would look like on black. Now, I know you think, well, obviously it's just reversed, but there's a little bit more subtlety to it. When you look at text like this, the text white on black tends to look thicker than the text which is black on white. Look at the word Cello down there and the word Cello there. These characters seem to be almost bold. Where those don't. And it's not that they are. These are exactly the same characters. That is all round Gothic there, and that is all round Gothic there. They're both exactly the same. But the eye tends to see white on black being slightly thicker in there, same with this text, same with that text over there, but they're not. So I always like to check the reverse because I'm going to be using some white on black text for the final project. So check yours out as well and have a look and see if you still feel happy with it. 108. Draw the Logo from Reference: To do the logo, I need a bit of a reference because I want to do the head of the Cello as a little logo. So I'm going to go and find some reference, and I'm going to do that by first of all, going along to find an image using the stock images. So if I go along to the window menu and I'm looking for stock now if you can't see it in general, it's definitely in the layout over there, so I'll choose stock over here, and I'm going to type in Cello Oops. Then have a little bit of a look. And what I'm looking for is just something with the head of the Cello in it so that I can kind of get an idea of what it sort of looks like. If you can't see anything in Pixel Bay, try going to Pixels and once again, have a look in there and see if you can see what you're after. Back. I found a picture over here, and I'm just going to drag this picture in and drop it in. Now, it is really, really big, and I find that a bit annoying. So I'm going to just undo that, make a little frame for it. So let's go quickly to layout, pop in a quick frame over there, and then when I drop it in, I'll just drop it into that frame like so. I'm going to zoom in so I can see the image right at the top over there. That's what I'm really interested in. Let's see if we can go in any further. There we go. So, I want to use that as my reference. I can close down my stock now. So the head of a Cello it's kind of got a sort of a square section here. I'm just making this into really simple shapes. There's kind of a squarish section there. There's a round section over there, and then we've got the four pegs over here. Now, I am going to simplify this, and I'll just draw it over here to show you. I've got my pencil. I'm just going to put a color in for the pencil over there. So really, we've got this sort of round section at the top over there, which is that section there. And then we've got, let's see, sort of a squarish section which kind of goes down like that. Over there. That's roughly that bit. And we've got some pegs goes there, not the ones up there, and then there's two more down here. You can see this is incredibly rough, but it's just enough so I can see the basic shapes over there. Right, let me get rid of that. And I'm going to make it with shapes. So I'm going to start off with a circle or an ellipse. I'll draw my elliptical shape in I'm holding down the Shift key, so it's a perfect circle. Doesn't matter what color you do. I'm then going to take a rectangle, and I'm going to make a rectangle. So this is the I don't know the name of these things. Once again, any of you have done my course before, you know that I like musical bits and pieces, although I've never played a Clllo, I do happen to like them quite a lot. I think they sound beautiful. But anyway, if you don't like cellos and you want to do another musical instrument that's absolutely fine. No problem. Just find something with an interesting head. You know, it could be a guitar head. The fender, strato casts got beautiful heads that you could try and use. So I've got those two shapes there. I'm going to take them and I'm going to put them together using this little button at the top to just unite them together into one shape. Now, this bit over here really should be straight across. So I'm going to take another little shape over there and use that to cut off the bottom, remember, I'm stylizing this whole thing. I don't want to be accurate. I just want to be stylized, which really is, you know, most logos are stylized graphics. So this is a really nice simple shape. It's just round at the top and it's long over there. Don't have anything too complex. Let's get the pegs in so I'll draw in a little peg over here. Now, I could try doing these as circles. I know they were elliptical shapes like that, but I want to keep it as simple as possible, so I'm going to do a little shape like that over there, and we need four of them. So we'll have one, I think, one up there. Hold down the old key and make another copy of that. And I'm looking at the gaps over here. So we're not being too accurate about this, but I'm looking to kind of keep that gap the same as that gap, the same as that gap, and then I can select those to hold down the to the option key again and drag them over here. I'll have those going further down. Once again, I don't think the gaps are quite right on there. Oh, let's put that right at the bottom over there. I'm just using the arrows to move this down, so the bottom of that circles kind of touching the bottom of that. This might have to move across a little bit, and likewise, this one would have to come in a little bit. Over there. Needs a little bit of tweaking still, maybe those two need to move out just a little bit. And then finally, let's just move these up a little bit over there. I need to put in. You can use the rotate as well if you need. I need to put in the little lines that'll go across. So this is just going to be a rectangle. We have a little rectangle which you go there. So that's the first one. Hold down the alter the option key. There's the second one, third one. And fourth one over here. Now, remember this is not about it's not a logo creation class at the moment. I just want to give you some ideas as to how you could go about creating some simple shapes with this. Let's take all of those, and we'll go up to the top and we'll unite them together into one interesting shape like that. And I'll just scale that down. I'm holding down the Shift key so I can scale it down and make sure that it actually looks right when it's really small. A lot of logos, which are too complex, look a bit strange when they are that small. Quite honestly, it looks like it's falling over a little bit. If this was a proper logo, I'd have to tweak that around a bit more. But for now, I'm just going to go back. I'm using Command Z or Control Z to keep undoing until I get back to these shapes here, and I can say, Well, actually, let's take those and shift click on that one and see what it looks like if I move that down to over there. Would that look any better? I think that's actually a more pleasing shape, so I'll just unite them together like that. And once again, take that down. You can sit and play for ages until you get this shape that you want right. I will then sit and fiddle with this while you try that out and get some sort of sort of shape in there. Remember, it doesn't have to be perfect. You're just looking for something which gives the feeling of the item, in this case, the instrument. 109. Use Text as Logo: Et's add a little bit of text to this. I'm just going to take this word Cello here, hold down the alter the option key to make a copy of that, and see how we could work with these two over there. So if I made this a little bit smaller, I'm hold down the Shift key to make it smaller. Maybe that would go on the top of the O over there or on the top of the Ls. Um, like that. I don't like that. It doesn't look really good at all. Maybe I just keep the logo on its own, or, and let's make this bigger again so I can show you the next, but maybe I just want to have a C in there for Cello. So if I take this and what I'm going to do is just double click, remove the low. Let's get rid of yellow. Take my C, make the C white there, make it a bit smaller. It's just popped out on top. Now, it's underneath, so it needs to go on top, so I need to drag it up in my layers. Let's pull the layers out over here so you can see them all. Quite a few in there. I'm going to drag it all the way out and above the logo. And then maybe I can just resize that a little bit like that, and we could have a C in there as well. So this is another possibility that I could have something along that line for a logo as well. Let's try some other versions. I'll just make a copy of that and get rid of the little C in there. How about if we took the word Cello, and we made these two Ls angular, so it looked like that was the neck, and this is the head of the Cello. Now, I need to just angle those two around. So I want to show you how we can do that. And I'm showing this so I can show you another technique. I'm going to go along to vector over here. And what I want to do is I want to convert this text into curves. So I say convert to curves, and now this text, instead of being editable text is actually editable shapes. You see if I get my tool over here, at the moment, I can scale it around. I can do the usual things that I do. But if I go to this Node Tool, the Node Tool allows me to click on the shape and then select the individual parts of that shape. I'm just going to zoom in a little bit like that. I'll click on this and you can see I can now select those two points there, or I can click on this one, and I can select those two points there and pull them around and move them as I want them to go. If I click on both of them, it won't allow me to select both at the same time. The reason for that is because what we have here is actually a group. If I click on the word Cello, you can see they all select at the same time. If we look in the layers, and I know it's very dark in there, but that does say it's a group of items. So I'm going to go up to the little word ungroup there, click Ungroup. And now, if I use this node tool, I can select both of those, and I can just select the little points that I want to adjust. And I think I want to pull them over. So I'm going to select all of those, grab one of them, and move them over kind of to the same angle that that's at. We can be a little bit more accurate with that if I brought this down a bit. Actually, that wasn't a bad guess at all. I'm going to make this a bit smaller. I'm holding down the shift key to make sure it scales properly. So it'll go something like that, and we can have that at the top. That was a very good guess on my part, actually. I'm going to move that across and down. Now, this one can be moved across as well, so we can just move that into the right position. We can select those and move them individually as well over there. Of course, you don't see the two Ls there now, so I might have to just move it up just a fraction, so it just sits just above that over there, so you can actually still read the word Cello in there. Anyway, there's just so many things that you can do with these shapes, experiment with them, try them out, mix them with some text, take two shapes and mix them together, so I can take another shape like that. I could rotate this one all the way round. I'm holding down the Shift key, so when it rotates, it rotates in small increments. I could put them together like that and do something interesting. Honestly, that looks like a centipede, so I'm not going to go with that one in there. But, you know, you can do things like that. You could have one, which was a pale gray, so it looks like a reflection. The list is just endless. As it happens, I prefer this one just by itself or the little C in the top. Try it out. Have lots of fun with that shape and use it with the text, and don't forget when you bring your text in let me just make a copy of that. When you bring your text in, go to Vector and convert to curves. And then when you click on it to select it with the move tool, you can then ungroup it so you can get to those individual items on their own in there. Try it out. 110. Check Size & Save: As you can see, I've done a few variations over here. I took this, made it a bit smaller. I extended that, made it a little bit bigger, moved the characters around. And then I tried it on white sorry, white on black, as well. Once again, just to see if it works okay. The other thing that one should be doing with any sort of logo icon is to make it really small. And if you make it small, can people still recognize the shape? Yes, they can recognize those. Actually, they can probably recognize almost all of them. But sometimes if things are too tiny, they're very, very difficult to see, especially if you've got it on a smartphone. Anyway, once you've done that, and you've done some variations on it, what'd like you to do? It's got a file and we're going to save as, we're going to save this as Cello and this is going to be our brands. Cello branding over there. Just save it where you can find it again later on. Oh, let's try spelling it correctly. Click on Save, and that's done. Now. If you close this down, it will still be there. Get that all saved up. Go and have your cup of tea, come back, and we'll then move on to the next stage of this project. 111. Set Up Brochure Document: Let's start our new document. I'm going to go to File and New, and we're going to create a document for print, but we can also use this for just emailing around if we wish. But we're going to do it using CMYK. So I'm going to click on the A for reset, and let's have a look at the settings in here. We've got the size in there. It's vertical. That's absolutely perfect. We've got the color format which is CMYK. Now, the color profile with the color profile, if I click over there, you've got all sorts of different color profiles, and it depends on where you are in the world as to which ones you might probably use. For example, this US web swap is widely used in the States, whereas in Europe, we generally tend to work with FOGRA 39. There's all sorts of different profiles in here. If you're not sure of which one to choose, talk to your printer, if you really don't know, and your printer won't tell you just use a generic CMYK profile. It's not nearly as important as making sure that the color format is correct and you're actually CMYK in there. Now, moving down a little bit over here, we're going to go to multi page. I've clicked on multipage in there, and we're arranging these horizontally starting on the right, and the number of pages we want in here is going to be four. So I'm going to put in my four pages in there. Now, we won't get into masters until later on in the course, so I'm going to leave that switched off. Down here, I've got the margins and my margins, I can choose any size that I like. In fact, I'm going to change these. I think I'm going to just lock them together. I'm going to change them all to 15 millimeters because I think that'll be a better size. And the bleed. We do want to bleed in here because this is potentially going for commercial printing. So that's going to be 3 millimeters in there that's switched on. By the way, I forgot to mention up here in the multi pages, we are having facing pages switched on, so the pages will be facing each other so we can do double page spreads. I'm happy with that. I'll click on Create document, and here it is. You can see the pages down here. We're in layout. I can see all the pages in there for the front page, the inner two, and the back page over there. So if you'd like to get that far and make the document, if you can't see these little lines around, just make sure that you don't have preview mode switched on. If you have preview modes switched on, you won't see them. So once again, go in there and switch preview mode off. 112. Place the Cover Photo and Add Text Under Cutout: Now, I'm going to go to the first page, which is this one over here, and the quickest way is to double click it in the page's panel. So double click in there and I'm on the first page. I want to put a picture in here, which is going to go from bleed to bleed, and the easiest way to do that is to make a frame for it. So I'm going to go over here, draw a frame from one bleed right the way through to the other bleed. Over there, and then I'm going to go to file and place that image inside there. Now, the images are with the rest of your assets, so I'll just find mine over there. And the one I'm looking for is this one over here. So I'm going to click Open and place it in there. Now, it's not badly placed. I might want to tweak it a little bit, so I'm going to go to the Zoom and maybe just zoom in a little bit over there, not too much, and then just move it across to the side. I think, just be careful that you don't move all the way over and move out of the bleed area in there. I think that's almost it. Let's just have another look here. If I just pull this over, just a fraction. Okay, I'm just looking at these sort of edges there, so they're pretty pretty much matched in there. Now that I've got that, I want to go to the pixel side because I want to cut these Cello heads, I think they're called heads, the tops of the Cello out. So I'm going to go over to Pixel in there, and I'm going to go across to the Object Selection Tool. Now the Object Selection Tool will allow me to move over this and select it. But the thing is, why is it not working? Why why aren't things selecting when I'm clicking on it? Well, it's because it's actually in that picture frame. You see, if I go to the layers and click in that layer, I can then see the picture in there. This is just the frame. There's a tiny icon of a frame there, and that's the image icon. So I'll click on that. And now when I move onto this, you can see how it sort of all of a sudden shows me the little lines going across. Now, we don't have to do a perfect selection for this at all, something pretty rough, to be honest. So I'm going to go over here, I'm going to say I want to select that bit there. And then I'm going to go to the add option, and I'm going to add in this bit and that bit over there. Well, I think that's pretty perfect. I'm not worried about any of this down here at all. Now that I've done that, I'm going to copy and paste, so command C or control C to copy and Command V and control V to paste. And what I've done is I've copied the pixels into this layer here. If I hide the underneath layer, you can see, I've just got those. I can deselect those. Remember, Command D or Control D to deselect. And there's the top one there. So why have I done that? Well, it's so that when we go back into out mode, I've got two versions of this, and I can put the text underneath the top one and above the bottom one, so it looks like the text is actually behind the heads of the Cello. Let me show you. By the way, the easiest thing now that you've got your branding is you can just go in there. I can select the bit of text in there, copy that, go back in here, and paste it in over there. And I'm just going to make this a little bit bigger. Over there. And you can see now that if I move that below the top one, it looks like it's actually between the two of them. Now, having done that, I'm thinking, You know what? That just says cell at the moment, and I can't actually see the whole thing. So I'm going to move these two down. So I'm going to select this one. Hold down the now, if you're on a Mac, it's command, if you're on a PC, it's control, and select that one. So when I drag them down, now, making sure that you're on your move tool, by the way, it will just be moving those to it. Won't be moving the text between them. I can go back to my text now. Maybe we zoom in a bit, maybe we can take this and make it a little bit larger. Let's see how that looks. Okay, well, I think we can pretty much read the word Cello in right, I'm going to stop there, so you can have a bit of a go and get to this stage. So remember, when you bring in your picture, do a frame for it first, so it goes into the frame. I'll make your life easier. Once you've done that, you can then go into Pixel mode. Use one of the selection tools to select the area you want. I've done mine very quickly. Just using the Object Selection Tool. If you want to do it, with more delicacy, using the freehand selection tool, that's absolutely fine. You know, you can go in there with the freehand selection tool. You can go to magnetic and you go around that edge as well. But do remember if you're using these tools, make sure that you don't just click on the layer that you can see in there. Open up that layer and make sure you click on the image in there. And once you've selected, copy and paste it, so it comes in a new layer, go back into layout, and then you can put your text and drag your text below those two layers to get this kind of effect in here. Have a bit of a go with that and get that far. 113. Try Blending Text Copy: I've moved my two Cello heads over a little bit, so they're slightly offset. I thought it looked a little bit better that way. You can do whatever you want with yours. But to do that, I'd select one and then hold down command and select the other one, and I can then just move them around in there. I want to make sure that I do have the picture going right the way to the bleed, though. The great thing about this technique of putting something above other things is you can do it with all sorts of things. For example, the text, if I select the text, I'm going to copy it and paste it. So copy and paste over there using the shortcuts, Control C, Control V, Command C, Command V. And if I move this one above that layer there, let's have a little look. So what I've got is I've got that one above that one and that one above that one. If I go to this top one and change the opacity, we still see the other one coming through, but you can see how we can sort of control what it looks like on top of the other image in there. Now, I don't actually want to do that. I just wanted to show you that it's a technique because if you just did that straight on the text, it looked horrible because that would go really, really light like that, but doing it like this means you can get some sort of overlap on the text if you wish. And you can then just adjust the amount of blend that you want with those two shapes. As I said, I don't want that, so I'm going to actually bend that. You might want it on yours. It's entirely up to you. But do have a bit of a go with that, so you remember the technique. 114. Add More Text: I want to bring in another bit of text, so the fastest way, once again, is just go through here. Copy the text. And paste it into my image. Now, pasting it into the image means it's actually come in just above that picture frame in there. If you were in the picture frame and your text came into the picture frame over there, although it would still work, you'd have to juggle it around a bit, making sure that it was above the appropriate layer. But I'm going to drag it out so it's not in that picture frame. It's above the picture frame. We can then close down the picture frame over there. The picture frames got the two pictures, the two copies, and the text sandwiched between them. So it Whoops. Doesn't mean that it can't be moved. I'm actually going to go to this layer here and I'm going to change the size of that, and this is going to be my little bit of text to go between those two. It's gonna say modern. So it's going to say modern Cello, and I'm going to put in the word life over there. Let's zoom right into that over there. We'll move that out a little bit over here, and I'll have modern and I'm going to take that. I'm going to make it kind of the same width as the E over there. So I'll sort of sit on top of the E, maybe like that, and then just Whoops, didn't mean to do that. And then just move that up a little bit over to the right, I'm kind of looking at the same height ever so slightly lower than the top of the C in there. We'll talk about how you can put in guides at a later stage on the course. So I've got that. I want another version over there which says Life, so I'm going to hold down Let me make sure I'm on the right one. Hold down the alter the option key to drag a copy. Once again, let's pop that in there and change that to life. And I will zoom in. Just using my shortcut to zoom in. That's going to be the same height as the two Ls. So I popped it there so I can see where it is. Hold down the shift cue when I move it and just pull it across over there. Right, I've got those two bits of text in there, and I just want another bit of text down here. However, the problem is that if I put in some text, it will get a bit lost because of all the detail in here. So that's the next thing that we will be fixing. But anyway, get your other text in there, any text that you want, and then we'll look at what we can do with this. 115. Blend in a Shape & Add Tag Line: I'm going to go and make a shape at the bottom here and use the technique that we looked at earlier in the course. Now, we did that in vector, but you can do the same thing in layout. I'm going to take a shape, and I'm going to put a shape in from the bottom of the bleed up, well, quite a reasonable distance. And I'm going to make that shape black. So in my colors over here, I'm going to go over to the stroke, choose none for the stroke, go to the fill and pick black for that fill over there. Then we can go to this little glass, which is the transparency tool, and I can just click over here and I'm going to start nearest the bottom and drag up. Don't go too far because you'll see that you'll get a horrible line in this. Always stop before the end of the shape. So I can do that. And if I want a bit more detail down the bottom, I'll just pull this down further. So. So we can get this lovely sort of darkening effect going on at the bottom of that picture. If I just hide that for the moment, you can kind of see the before and after. It just helps to lead the eye into the details over here and obviously the word modern Cello. So I need another piece of text down there. I'm just going to take one of these bits. I'll take this modern Hold down the alter the option key and drag it. Now, I've made a city mistake. I'm going to undo that. I forgot to go off the transparency tool. Let's just go up to the move tool again and same again over here, making sure I'm on the text, hold down the alter the option key and make a copy over there. Now, the copy is unfortunately underneath this gradient. Now, I could move it manually up like that, or I can go up to the layer menu, say arrange move and bring it to the front. So you can move things to the front or to the back very, very quickly. If you choose move forward or back one, it just goes forward or back one object. But over here, I'm going to say move to the front, so it'll move right the way to the top over there. I'd like you to say move to the top because that makes more sense in here, but they use move to the front. I can then go in and change this text to anything I like really. Let's say, um, School for music. And I'll just move that into the right position. Put anything you like in over there. Right, have a bit of a go with that. Bring your other text. Don't forget to do this sort of darkening down. You can always go back to it and you can adjust it if you like. You can switch it off if you don't want it. But you can see how scof music is hardly visible. When I switch this on, I can see it really nice and clearly over there. It. 116. Add Brand Color & Lock: Now, before we move on to the next page, I want to bring in a little bit more color to this because although we've got this really dark black in there and the browns, which look really lovely, I'd like to have a bit of a complimentary color. Complimentary as being the opposite color on the color spectrum, which would be blue. So I'm going to go back to my brand guides over here, and I'm going to bring in two colors. So this one here and this one here. I'm going to very subtly just put them in the corner, and I'm going to keep those colors running throughout the different pages. So I'm going to copy those, go back in here, paste them in, and I'm actually going to make them a lot smaller. Something like that. And they're just going to sit right in the corner over there. I'm just going to line them up pretty much with my text, maybe move them over just a little bit like that. And so those two are going to create some continuity because we'll see the same thing again, not necessarily in the same place, but on the different pages, and it will just help to give a consistency throughout the document. What I'm going to do now is to lock these things down. So I'm going to go to the individual layers here and select them or you can just click and drag over all of them. You can see you can select them very quickly. And we're going to click on the padlock up here to just lock all of them, so I can't touch them and move them by mistake. Right. And we're onto the second page. Now, if you notice when I was on this page here, I could see the layers for that page. If I click on this page, my layers goes blank because there's nothing on this page at all. So don't when you go into the second page, think, Oh, my goodness, where's that other thing gone? Well, if you click on that layer, it will still sorry, on that page, the layers will still be there. Anyway, if you'd like to get those colors in, select everything, lock it down so you can't touch it, and then we'll move on to this double page spread. A 117. Add Colors to Pages 2 & 3, & Add Panoramic Photo: I let's add in the background color on these two pages. I'll use the rectangle, once again, go to my bleed. Do be careful because it's really easy to actually go to the edge of the page, not onto the bleed itself when you do these. That's going to be black, and then I'm going to be bringing in a picture which I want to go across both pages. So I'm going to use the frame tool and just draw in a frame once again from bleed to bleed that's going to go over both of those pages like that. Now I'm going to go and find the image, so I'm going to go to file and place and I've given you these pictures in the images in your images folder, and I'm looking for that one there. It is I'm sure that's artificially generated because we've got the animals in the background. I'm not too worried about that. I just like the picture. So that's the one I'm going to be using. Let's move that out the way, and I'll click Open over there, and it'll pop right in. Now, because this is a document which could be folded over, I don't want his face to be right in the middle of the fold. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to zoom in a bit using the Zoom option here. Like that. And then I'm going to move on to the picture and just drag it over a little bit like that. So we kind of get him over there. If it's too big, we can just go back a little bit. Like that. I think that'll work really nicely. We can see the Cello. We can see the animal in the background, and we can see him and he's not in the fold of the page. Now, in order to stop me from moving these again, I'm going to click on the background. I'm going to lock that. I'm going to go to the picture, and I'm going to lock that down as well just in case I move it by mistake. One last thing. I want to take these two little shapes over here and pop them in there. So I'm just going to go back. Now, these two shapes were locked, so I'm going to unlock them, select them both, so I can click on one, hold down the Shift key, and click again. And let's go and copy them, so I'll use Edit and copy over there. Lock them once again, go back to this layer over here and we're going to paste. So I'm going to go to Edit and paste over here. And you can see it pasted in exactly the same place that it was copied from. So you've got those two little colors in there, keeping the brand style going throughout the document. Try that out. Background. Panoramic picture across, two colors copied from there. Don't forget to lock everything as you go. And, I haven't locked these. I should do what I say and do what I say, not as I do sort of thing. Anyway, have a bit of a go and get that far. 118. Cut Out B&W Image: Okay I want to bring in a black and white picture in this corner. So I'm going to go and well, open it. So I'm going to go to file and open. Open up the picture that I want. So that's in with the images. And it's this black and white picture over here. So we'll open that up. Now, this opens up separately into the pixel area. I could have placed it in there if I wanted to, but I just want to work on this separately because it'll be easier to show you. What I like to do now is to go along to the Object Selection Tool. And I want to be able to select the various parts in here. By the way, make sure that if you are doing this on the image itself and it's actually in a frame that you've actually clicked on the picture inside the frame. Now, I've gone to my background or the image over there. I'm going to move over and I'm going to click to add in that little section there. And then I'm going to make sure I'm on the Add option. I'm going to add in the Cello over here as well. Add in that bit, add in that bit, add in his leg, the bow. I think that's always leg over there. We need to add that bit in as well. This bit. And honestly, sometimes it gets to the point where you just think, let's just go along to the freehand selection tool. I'll use a straight line, and I'll say, I want this bit here, and I want to add in all of these bits. By the way, make sure that you are on the add option up there. I'll just add in all those bits around there. For speed, it's much faster to do it that way sometimes. Oh, his finger there needs to be selected as well. Let's go and get that. Now, what about and more? The more you look, and the closer you look, the more you'll see in there. Now, this bit we don't want, so I'm going to go to the subtract option. That's the third button. Once again, I'm still on the same tool, and I'll just click with a straight line all the way around back to the start again to get rid of that. Looking at his bow, there's an extra area here, and I'm going to remove that once again, so go to the subtract, click over here, click next to it, and just get rid of that little section there. And if you wish, you could then start to go in really close and clean some of these bits up if you need. And I've just got one last one here. Well, I'm hoping this is the last one. No doubt I'll see something else in a moment. So I'm happy with that. And I can now just go along, select that, copy it, and go into this image here and paste it in or this document, shall I say, and paste it straight in. And there it is over there. Now, you can see the images come in. It's not actually in a frame. So I can still click on the outside and I can drag it around and resize it to the size that I want. And I'm kind of looking for something like that. I'm going to rotate it until his bow is horizontal over there. I'll just put on the line so you can sort of see as I'm dragging that, I want to be horizontal over there. I'll explain why in a moment. But I'm kind of happy with him sitting in the corner over there. If you want to do some other things to it, you could actually before you brought it across, you could go and, you know, lighten darken, et cetera. You can still do that now because that's a separate layer, so I could still go in and I could make any adjustments that I want for that. So that's one way to bring it in. The other way, as I said, is you could put into a frame, and you could do it in the frame, as well. Have a go and get to the stage where you've got him in there, and also don't forget, rotate him around with that little lollipop until that bow is absolutely horizontal. 119. Add a Image within a Circle: Let's bring in another picture. I'm going to go down to the circular til. I'm going to click and drag, and I'm going to hold down the Shift key so I get a perfect circle. And I'm just going to move this along a little bit over to there. What I want is another photograph in there to help Well, so the image itself at the top is not quite so isolated. It'll just help bring the dark area at the bottom and the light area together. So I'm going to go and find the image. I'll go to file and place. And I've got a picture of of some violin violins, cellos over there. I'm going to open them up and bring them straight in over there. That looks absolutely perfect. And what I mean by getting these two to sort of work together is we've kind of got the wood color there. So we've got the wood color down here. The black is down here, but there's some black at the top. So it helps to just make the eye feel that there's some movement between these two areas. Anyway, do have a bit of a go and bring that image in. 120. Columns & Tracking: I'm going to bring some text into here. So I'm going to go along to my frame text tool, not the artistic text tool. It's the frame text, and I'm going to draw a little frame over here. So nice big one. And then I'm going to go along to the text. Now, I provided this text for you. If you want to use your own text, that's absolutely fine. This is a little something that came from Wikipedia about Cello. I'm going to copy that. So once again, Control C, Command C to copy it. Go back in here, click inside there and paste the text in. Now, the text is there. You can't see it. You see there's a little flashing e beam in there. It's black text on a black background, so obviously you can't see it. But if you click a few times and just keep clicking until eventually you select all the text or just click and drag across it, you'll be able to pick it up and select it quickly, and then you can go over here and just change the color of the text, in my case, to white. Now, remember with my branding over here, I used, if I click on this a bit of texture, Minion Pro for the body text. So I'm going to go back there again and just select all the text. And I'm going to go over to my fonts or typefaces to be more correct about it. I'm going to find Minion Pro over there. It is a little bit on the small sites. I'm going to make it a little bit bigger. I think 13, maybe 14 14 looks absolutely perfect for that. The thing, though, is that I want this text to be in two columns. So remember to get to the two columns, you go to the window menu down to text, and you find the text frame panel. Then over here, I can just choose two columns to get it to go into two columns like that. Honestly, I think this text is still too big. I think I should actually go with 13 instead. Here we go. That looks better. And also, while I'm there going to make sure I balance the text in the columns at the same time. So there's my first bit of text. Now, let's have a look at this and see how it actually looks. If we go to the view menu, preview mode, I can see what that text is looking like. There is a little word over here, one little word which is sitting right at the bottom, that's the word type. And when you have these little words all by themselves, you have to be very, very careful with them because they do look a bit strange. Now, if that went up to that line there and were sitting up there, it would look even worse because they'd just be the word at the top. By the way, these are called widows and orphans. So just watch out for that or those little words by themselves. Once again, I hate to keep saying this, but later on in the course, a lot later, we'll be looking at how we can actually change these and change the text to move it around a little bit better. For the moment, I'm just going to select this bit of text over here. So select this paragraph. And I need to adjust that slightly. So if we go along the top, we've got lots of options along the top here. One of them, by the way, you can see is the number of columns that we've got. We've got it set to two. I showed you the menu way, but you can actually do it from here as well. I'm going to go to Window down to text, and the character options is the one that I'm looking for. There it is over there. Let's pull that out. In character in the character options, we can change an option here called tracking. I'm just going to reduce it just a little bit, and that will move all the text ever so slightly closer together. And you can then see how it jumps onto that page over there. If I went the other way, so that was minus three, let's go to zero minus one, two, three, four, five, eventually, I can keep going until it actually push more words onto that line. I think it looked better the other way with a bit of minus there, you shouldn't be able to see any difference between the characters and those characters in there because it is so minor the amount that I'm putting in. But just do be careful with that and watch out for the widows and orphans on basically words on their own. So if you want to get to it, you need to find the tracking. You select the paragraph that you want to effect. Go down. It's this one over here, the tracking, and you can change the distances between the individual characters. Right, I'm going to stop there. If you'd like to bring in your text. You might not have that problem in there, but if you do, check out tracking. 121. Text Wrap Around Bow: Let's bring in the next bit of text. So I'm going to go along to my text tool. I'm going to click and drag a text frame over here. You can see that it's actually put in two columns. Now, we can go up to window, down to text and the text frame, or if you ever look along the top, you'll find it in there, so I can actually just go one column like that. I'm going to go and find the rest of the text. I'll go back to word I'm just going to take this bit of text over here, copy that. And I'm going to paste it in there. I'm going to select all the text. And I'm going to make it white over there. And as far as the typeface goes, it's going to be exactly the same. It's going to be Myriad Pro over there. And I think I've got that to 12. Let's take that to 13 over here. Now, I don't want the text to go all the way across like that. I would just like it to be sort of maybe over to a third of the way in there. So, now that I've got that there, by the way, I'm going to put a little bit of text up on the side there, that's why I'm moving it over, not just because I'm being difficult. What I want to do now is I want to go to the picture and with a picture, I want to go as we did before up to text, text wrap, show text wrap settings, and I'm going to click on the tight version over there. So it'll just push the text away from his bow. And I'm going to make sure that all these are linked and just push it out just a little bit like that. Now, I've pushed it out, and you can see the word pianos just sitting all by itself over there. Now I could get around that by trying to rotate him a little bit and seeing if that actually helps if I do that bit of rotation until I'm happy with the way that's looking. There we go. That's absolutely perfect. So the text is now flowing around his bow over there. Let's put in some more text over here as well. But before we do that, it's your turn to try this out, click on the picture, go to text, go down to text wrap, and just get it to wrap around his bow shape. 122. Text Effects: I let's get a little bit of text in here. So I kind of want to use the same size that I've got on that school of music. So I'm going to click in there, get my layers out over here, and it was that bit of text there, so I'm going to unlock that, hold down the alter the option key, and just drag it across into there, go back to this one and lock that text again. So it's just a nice fast way of getting the same size all the way across. So this is going to say, I'm going to just take a little bit of text from there. Let's have Bach. Over there. I'm going to hold down the alter the option key to make a copy over here. By the way, when I'm copying this, I'm also holding down the Shift key that forces it to go just horizontal like that, 45 degrees or vertical as well. So I can pop that bit in, and let's have somebody else over here. So I'm just going to select that. And I'm just going to pick a name from down here, Sega SWGR. So I've got those two bits of text in. They're looking good, but I want another piece of text over here, and this bit of text is more just about the effect. So I'm going to take one of those bits, hold down the old key, and make a copy of it, and I'm going to change the text to what I want. And this is going to be for Baroque music, so I'm going to type in Baroque. I've typed all in caps because I'm going to rotate it round. I'm going to hold down the Shift key so you can see it rotates in increments of 15 degrees. I know that I get it absolutely perfect. I'm then going to use my move tool and I'm going to take that and move it right up like that. So I'm going to make this quite big over there. This is going to go right on the edge of the page. So it's almost going to be cut off, so you're not going to see all of it. It's just the effect of text in there. I might actually make it just a little bit larger. I don't want to be too big over there. Now that I've got my text in there, I'm going to go to the opacity over here in the layers and just reduce the opacity of that so we can just get the effect of a bit of text, saying Baroque like that. Let's have a little bit of a look. If I go to the view menu, I'm going to go down to preview mode, and we can see how the whole thing looks like that. I'm reasonably happy with that. Maybe my text needs to come down a little bit, but I think I can live with it as it stands. You can experiment, even in preview mode, obviously, you can just go in and try things out and say, well, what about if that was over there, and we had a Let's get rid of that one and just do return, so we've got a bit of a space in there. Maybe I'll put another space over here somewhere as well. So we have another return in there, just to break the text up a little bit. Anyway, it's entirely up to you. Have a bit of a play with that. Do whatever you like. Put in the text over there, scale it up and down, see what Whoops. See what works for you, and don't forget to rotate it, holding down the Shift key, and you can still scale it. If you want to go wild with the scaling, hold down the Shift key, and you can scale it that way as well. And then you use the opacity in the layers to just make it a lot lighter. It doesn't have to go all the way to the edge. You don't really have to read it. It's just the effect that we're looking for. Try it out. 123. Blend Photos with Transparency Tool: Okay, we're on to the last page. So let's bring in some pictures for this page. So I'm going to make a frame over here and I'm going to go and place my picture in there so file and place. And I want to bring in a picture of this busker. But there. So I'm going to make him or her a little bit larger just a little bit and maybe move them down a bit over here, something like that. And then I'm going to put another picture on top of that one. Now, I'm going to make sure that I just lock this one first, so I'm going to click on the padlock to lock it, so I can't move it by mistake. I'm going to do another frame on top of that one. So once again from the bleed through to the bleed it's a bit bigger than the bleed that I was expecting. Let's just make it a little bit smaller. And I'm going to go to file and place and place my second picture on top of that. So I'm going to use this seduction picture once again over there. And I'm going to make that a little bit larger over there and maybe pull that around a bit like so. Now, what I'd like to do is I'd like to blend these two pictures together. If I just hide that top one, I want to be able to see both parts of this image. So I'm going to go over to the transparency tool. And I'm going to click and drag on the top one to blend it. But when I do that, nothing happens. I'm sure you've figured this out already. Let me undo that. Remember, you need to go into the picture, not do it on the frame, but go into the picture itself, go to the transparency tool, and then I can blend those two together like that. So it's exactly the same as when we did that shape, but I'm doing it on a photo on top of a different photo. Let's have a little look and see if we can get those two to look quite good. Now, I'll lock the top one and just unlock the bottom one, and let's go and click on the bottom one and move them around, like so. So I'm looking for a kind of a combination of these two. And you can just keep playing with them and moving them around as much as you want. So same again, on this image here, let's just see we'll make it a bit smaller and move it across a little bit. Mustn't go too far because there is a bleed that I need to be in. Right, I'm happy with those two, so I've just blended them together into some sort of interesting shape. It's a bit of a mess down here, but don't worry, we're going to cover that up shortly. Try that out, have a bit of a go with a blend. 124. Add B&W & Levels: Now, of course, I want to make this a single color maybe black and white. So I'm going to go down over here and I'm going to add an adjustment layer to this. Let's find our black and white. And it looks okay, but you can see the blacks are not really coming through as black. So let's put something else on top of that. I'm going to put another adjustment on here and I'm going to do levels now, with levels, I'm going to go to this white level and put it over until we get some blacks coming through. I think that's looking a whole lot better. If I do the black level, you'll see it will actually take the whites up really bright. The black level, sorry, the white level will bring the blacks up a little bit works a little bit differently to when you're in RGB, doesn't it? So if I go to RGB here, now you'll see this takes the whites up, and that brings the blacks up. So in RGB mode, at the moment, it's this area that's got a gap. If I go to CMYK, it's the other side that's got a gap. Anyway, just pull it around till you get the sort of thing that you are after. I quite like that. Now, I want to put in a bit of a shape in here, as well. So there's a lot of bit of a mess going on around here, and I want to cover that up, and I want to bring in some more color. So that's the next thing that we're going to do. But before that, have a little bit of a look at these two. Do a black and white adjustment layers. Do the levels if you want, play around with them, and be aware of the difference between doing the levels in CMYK and doing them in RGB. I 125. Add Vector Shapes: Onto some shapes. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go across to vector mode over here, although, to be fair, what I'm about to do could have been done in loud mode with some shapes, but we're going to go to vector mode. I'm going to zoom out a bit over here. Now I'm going to take a rectangle, and I'm going to put a rectangle over a large part of the image like that. And then I'm going to take a circle over here in ellipse. I'm holding down the Shift key if I want a perfect circle. If I don't want it to be perfect, I can pull it out like so. I'm going to move that one across onto there. I'm going to make it a bit bigger, as well. So let's just tweak the shape of that a bit more, pull this out. So what I'm doing here is I'm trying to get a shape, and I'm getting this shape over here, so I'm not really that interested in the top section. So I'm going to pull that up a bit. Like that. It's this bit here that I want to keep. If I select them both, both the circle and the rectangle, I have to be very careful because you'll see over here, it's also selected the picture frame. So just be careful when you're using this technique. It might be an idea to actually go through and just lock some of these things first before you go any further so you don't touch them by mistake. Now, let me go back and do that again. I'll just select them in there. So those two there. And up to the top, I'm going to use the subtract, and that'll subtract the foreground object from the background object. You can see this is sort of the shape that I was after over here. So we've just got a solid color over there, and then the picture is on that side. You can still change this and you can adjust the shape in there. Now, kind of like that, but I want to give it some color. So let's try a blue on that. And then this is the bit that makes it really cool and it's really easy. Hold down the alter the option key, drag a copy of that, change the color, and then we can just pull those together. And look at that. You get this lovely effect with a line going from thick through to thin up there. All I want to do now is to go in here and bring in our logo, so I'll go back to the branding, choose one of the logos that I've created in there. I'm going to keep this really simple and use one of these sort of simplified ones over here, so I'm going to take that one. Oops, that one there, copy it, go back into here, and paste it in and just move it into the right position in the bottom. Corner. Like that. So do have a bit of a go with that crater shape. And the way that I did it was I took a rectangle first, like so, and then I took a circle or an ellipse, and I drew the ellipse over the top. So when we selected both of them, I just want to be left with this section here. Using the subtract the front, and that just keeps me a shape like that. But obviously, I did it, so we were looking at this area over here. Then made a copy and moved the copy over. Do try that out, see how you get on with that. 126. Adjust the Vectors: A Now, looking at this, it doesn't really fit in with the rest of the style. We've got a black background there. We've got a black background there. Yes, that's black and white, but it'd be really cool if I could actually have this bit black as well, maybe the logo in white. But what about if I actually did something which would match these little shapes that I had there? So if, for example, I pulled the underneath one up a little bit, and I could make it a bit bigger to pull that up, like so. And I made that one yellow. And then I made another copy of that maybe down here. And I made this one black. So we've kind of got the yellow bit there, the yellow bit there. Then I made another copy. I'm just holding down the old key all the time. And that one, maybe I made that blue. And then I did another copy, so holding down the old key again. And this one over here could be black. And we can just play with these colors. And that way, oh, we don't actually need that one. That one can go. We've got this sort of similar effect to what we've got over there. In fact, I can just go to any of these and just change them now, and I can move that one maybe up a little bit, making sure that it's on the bleed until it vaguely matches this one over here. We've got this really cool effect now going through, and it keeps it in style with all the rest of them. The other thing that you might decide is, well, we've got all these nice color pictures in here. Maybe they should be in color. And the great thing is because it's actually a adjustment layer that's on top, I can go in here and I can remove those. So I'll just click on the drop down in there because these are the two that are being adjusted, and I'm going to go along and just switch them off. Over there. And if I like that, yeah, maybe maybe I'll go with that. Or I can go in there and say, Well, you know, this one looks a little bit greener. So maybe I'll do an adjustment layer in here that is a color balance to change it. There is no right or wrong here. You can just sit and play with all of these things. I'm going to go to color balance there, and let's see what happens if we were to make it a little bit greener. Mm. It's okay. A bit of yellow to add to that might work. There we go. That's better. It's got the similar feel now all the way through. 127. Show the Logo: I I want to find my logo. So I'm going to go to the View menu into mode, and I'm going to wire frame over here. And let's have a look at this in outline mode. There's my logo over there. If I click on it, you can see I can select the individual parts. Here it is in the layers. So what I'm going to do is just select the whole thing over there. It is grouped. Mine happened to be grouped, but otherwise, you could sort of select these individually. So I'm going to select the whole thing, and I'm just going to change the fill color to white on there. Now, when I go back from view mode, instead of wireframe, I'm going to go back to Vector mode. I can then at least see the logo down the bottom. We might need to put a little bit of text in here with some contact details. That's easy for you to do you know how to do that now. You can actually then select some of these logos. You can make them bigger. If you need, you can adjust anything that you want. So everything on this document is pretty much fully editable, and you can change it however you need. Right, so get your logo, make sure your logo is up, add some text should you need. I'm going to do that while you're trying this out, and then we're going to look at saving this out in various ways. O. 128. Export the PDF for Print & Email: Let's make sure we save this. So file, save as. Hopefully, you should have been saving a bit as you've been going along. But I'm just going to save this someway that I can find it again. So there's my editable file, and I'm then also going to go along to File Export and choose Export in here. Now we've got so many different ways that we can export this out. I mean, starting from the JPEGs over here. Now, with JPEGs, I would suggest using the best quality that you have in there, if you're going to do it. You'll find with a low quality and to some degree, the medium quality, you can actually see the difference in the images. The detail seems to just completely get lost in there. But what we're looking for is something for print, which is professional commercial printing. So although I might send a JPG to a colleague, I really want to use the PDF for print. And over here, we've got PDF for print. We've got press ready, and there's a few other options as well. Now, you might find that your printer said, Oh, could you send us a PDFXA file? And then all you've got to do is go down and choose that particular type of PDF, and it will set up all the options for you. But I'm going to go over here and I'm going to say press ready in there. And then let's have a look at some of the options over here. So starting from the top, we're going to do all spreads over there, so rather than just individual pages or current pages over here, and we'll go into the advanced mode over here. Now, moving down a little bit, I'm going to say raster DPI. So when you convert a vector file into pixels, it's called rustering that. And we want to make sure that the pixel files are a good quality, are high quality. So we're going to go with 300 in there. You'll find that if the size of this file is too huge to send to people and they're not the commercial printers that you're sending it to, you could reduce that a bit as well. Now, the other thing is when we've got images in here, some of the images might be used and they might be very small. For example, this one over here, I took a very large image and made it really small in there. So the resolution of that file is actually really quite high, and we don't need that high resolution. So we're going to have downsample images. So if any images are above 375, it will downsample those images. And we've got so many other options in here. I'm going to just leave that switched on for all of the settings in here. The color space, I just want to point out the most important ones. The color space is the CMYK color space, obviously, rather than RGB. The ICC profile, these are your profiles like the web coated over here or the Fogras. By the way, when they have things like coated and uncoated, coated means glossy, uncoated means matte. So I'll just keep it as the document profile because I set that up for the document originally. Over there, we're going to keep going down a little bit over here to include the bleed. We definitely want the bleed in there, and we're going to include the printers marks in there. So all of the marks, whether they've asked for them or not, we've included all of that. And you can see it automatically. It just shows me how it's going to actually be exported. Right. Once again, all of these, I will just leave those out for now. I'm going to say export. And let's just export this out. So click on Save and it's exporting the PDF with all of those options. Let's go and have a look at this. So I exported it to my desktop, so I just need to close down a few bits and pieces over here, and there it is. So you can see we've got the printers marks, these little let's get rid of that one. These little targets here help the printer to align the various plates. We've got the crop marks over here. So this is where the Gillotin would actually cut down those marks there and across there across there. And once again, we've got our double spread over there, and you can see the little crop marks, more printers marks, same again over here, crop marks, crop marks. And I would just go through and just check that everything looks acceptable on here. Obviously, I haven't checked the spelling or anything like that at the moment. I'm just looking at the document. We'll talk about spell checks later on, but it's really easy to find in the menu. Right, so that's done. I feel quite happy with that. I think it's looking really good, and that's okay to send out to the printers. Now, if you want to send something out, but you don't want to send it to the printers, you just want to email it to a colleague. Well, once again, let's go to Export over here. And in here, we can use some of the other settings in there. So I'm just going to say digital small file size. Now, the problem with small file size, although it allows me to email it out very quickly, it takes the size of the images right down. You can see over here, we've got 72 in there, and it's downsampling the images. Anything above 90, it will downsample as well. Which if it's just a quick look that they're having to see your layout is absolutely fine. But if they start to look at the images and the quality of the images, they'll look and you know, those images don't look quite so good. So just be careful of that. You might want to use digital high quality in there instead, where it actually takes these rusa settings up quite a lot. I'm just going to do the small file size for now because I want to show you how bad it can be. And then once again, down here, we don't need the bleed and we don't need the printers marks. Let's just click on Export. And we'll call this Cello two. Click on Save and let's have a little look at that. So remember, this is the one which was a lower quality one. And we're gonna have a look over here. And we'll compare it to this one for print. Now, this is the one for print, which has got the higher quality image. And you can compare it to this one over here where it was the smaller file size, and the quality of the print or the quality of the image is so much worse. Look at the detail in his head and face and compare it to the detail on his hair, face, and hands over there. So be aware that if you use that option where you can take the file size down and make it small, you are going to lower the quality of the images in there. Either way, have fun with it, export it out in various ways, and don't forget to share your work with us. We love seeing what you've done. Have fun with it. 129. Well Done & Thank You!: Congratulations. You've reached the end of this course. I'm sure you're creating amazing work. Now, don't forget to leave us a review. It really helps us to help to build more courses for you. I also do courses in Adobe, as well as Canva and Procreate. Don't forget to follow me and have a look at my profile. There is a level two of this course, so start that right now. I'll see you in the next one. A