Transcripts
1. Make Custom Color Scheme Graphics in Photoshop - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class: Create a Color Scheme Graphic in Adobe Photoshop. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're looking at making color scheme graphics, such as you might find on Pinterest or elsewhere on the web. We'll start by finding an image to use, and then we'll create the reusable lab and sample our colors. We're going to see how we can choose pleasing colors to make our color scheme, how to give them names, and how to make a logo for our illustration. As you're working through these videos, you might see a prompt which let you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, give it a thumbs up. These recommendations help me get my classes in front of more people who just like you, want to learn more about Photoshop. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read all of your comments and respond to them, and I look at all of your class projects and respond to those too. If you're ready now, let's get started making color scheme graphics in Photoshop.
2. Make Custom Color Scheme Images - Part 1: The first thing to do when you're creating color scheme graphics is to find something that you'd like to work with, an image that you'd like to work with. I've gone to unsplash.com, and I found this particular image. I'm going to give you the download link for it. So I'm just going to click on the image to open it up in a new window, and I'm going to click the download button, right-click and choose Save Image as, and I can save it away into a folder of my choice. Now I'm just going to drop it in my downloads folder for now and click "Save". Once you've found an image to use, you're ready to get started in photoshop. So I'm just going to close chrome down for now. Let's go to Photoshop and let's create a new document with file and new. It's going to be 100 pixels wide by 750 pixels tall. We're just going to give it a white background. It's important to set up these values because that's going to ensure that all your boxes are going to be a nice size when you get to make them, I'll click "Okay". Before we start creating the lab, we need some guides to work with. So I'm going to choose view, and then new Guide. The first guide is going to be 10 pixels down from the top of the document. So I'm going to type 10 px, make sure I have horizontal selected and click "Okay". The next one is going to be 10 pixels in vertically. View, New Guide, and again it's going to be 10 px, and it's going to be vertical. The next one's going to be a 185 pixels down from the top. So I'm going choose "View", "New guide", horizontal, and it's going to be 185 pixels. We'll click "Okay". So that's going to be the top of the next box that we're going to create. The next one's going to be 370 pixels down. View, New guide, horizontal 370, and click "Okay". The next one's going to be at 555. View, New Guide, 555 pixels, and click "Okay". The last one's going to be 10 pixels in from the bottom of the document. As the document is 750 pixels long, that's going to be at 740. View, New Guide, and it's going to be horizontal 740. We wanted guide at the very edge of where this main image is going. The main image will be 720 pixels wide, but we've already got a 10 pixel inset here. So we need a guide at 730. View, New Guide. This time it's going to be vertical and it's going to be 730 px. There's going to be a gaffer here of another 10 pixels. So we're going to put one in it 740. View, New Guide, and this is going to be 740 pixels. Again, it'll be vertical. We want one at the very end, which is going to be 10 pixels in from the very edge of the document. The document is 1000 pixels wide. So this one is going to be at 990. View, New Guide, and we're going to type 990 pixels, and it's going to be a vertical guide. So I click "Okay". Now, we're going to align the small boxes to here, and we're going to allow our own 10 pixel border. So I haven't actually made a guide for those 10 pixel borders. This is probably enough guides for us. So now we're ready to go and put the pieces together for our template. So I'm going to open up the layers palette, click to add a new layer. I'm going to select on that new layer. I'm going to the rectangular marquee tool. I'm going to make sure that the style is set to normal here, then choose "View", and then make sure that snap is turned on, and then snap to guides is also turned on. It's going to be really important for this process. So with the rectangular marquee tool selected, I'm now going to drag out a rectangle that is just inside these guides around the top, left, and bottom of the image, and along the left-most of this gutter here. Black is my foreground color. I'm going to all backspace option delete to fill that with black. I'm going to press Control or Command D to deselect the selection. I'm going to add a new layer, and we're going to start with these boxes here. Now these boxes are fixed size, and I'm going to show you a way of doing this that anybody in any version of Photoshop can do. So I'm going to the rectangular marquee tool and this time I'm going to choose fixed size. The width is going to be 250 px for pixels, and the height is going to be 175 px for pixels. You're just going to click once in the document to create a shape that is that exact size. Then we'll choose "Select", and then transform selection. This allows us to take this fixed size selection and to position it where we want it to. Because we've got our snap turned on, we can align it into the bottom corner of the document here. It needs a 10 pixel gap down the side and across the bottom. So you want to line it up to those guides that you have. Click the check mark because that stops the transformation of that shape. Now we want to fill it. Alt, backspace, option delete. From here, we can make a copy of the shapes. I'm just going to press Control or Command D to deselect the selection. I'm going to drag the shape onto the New Layer icon. I'm going to the Move Tool. I'm going to move the top most shape up, and I'm going to line it up to these three guides. There shouldn't be a guide at the top, there's not one there. But we're making our own 10 pixel space just by the size of the rectangle that we're working with. Control or Command D to deselect the selection. Now we want to go and make a copy of this again. Again we're going to move this one up into position, and we're going to make one final copy, and move this shape into position. Now we have all the elements in place. So we've got our re-usable grid, if you like, that we can now assemble our pieces into. At this point, you will probably want to save this document. We'll come back in the next video and start filling it.
3. Make Custom Color Scheme Images - Part 2: I've saved this layout as color scheme template.psd, I want psd as the format, so I want to save all my layers. I'm going to go and open the image that I'm going to use for my color scheme, I'm going to choose File, Open, I'm going to my downloads folder, and let's go and pick up this image. This is the image I'm going to use, I'm going to duplicate it into my template, I'm going to right click the background layer, choose Duplicate Layer. From the Document drop down list here, I'm going to choose color scheme template, and click "okay". Now it will be in position in my color scheme template. Problem it's really big, so I'm just going to click on the Move tool, and with this layer selected, I'm going to press two keys, Control or Command T, and then Control or Command 0. What that does, is it sets the transform handles on, and it also resizes the entire project so that I can see the handles, because there's nothing worse than not being able to see your handles. Now I'm going to hold the Shift key as I drag this down, to make it a more appropriate size, and then I'm just going to move it into position. I can determine how much of this image I want in this box over here, and it can be as big or as small as I like. I'm just going to click the check mark, and now I'm going to press Control or Command 0 to re size the image. Now I need to crop this because you can see it's bled over here into the gutters, and it's also fallen off the edge of the image. Well, that was why we kept this black shape down here. I'm going to bring this layer all the way down to sit just above my black shape, and I'm going to clip it. I'm going to click on the top layer, hold Alt and Control, that's option command on the Mac, and just click once. What that does is it crops this shape to this shape. You can also do the same thing, I'm just going to undo that. If you don't like using all those fingers, you can go to the Background copy layer here, just select it and choose Layer, Create Clipping Mask. You can see Alt Control G or option command G is the shortcut key for that. Now we've got our image in place and we're ready to go and put the first of our colors in. We're going to start at the top here, and what I want to do with my colors, is I want to put eight of them in a group. I'm just going to click on the top layer, and I'm going to click the group icon, because I want this to be in a group all by itself, but it hasn't actually appeared in the groups. I'm just going to drag and drop it in there, so I make sure that it is in this group. What I want to do here is to use this shape, but to create a solid fill color layout filled in this area. The way we're going to do this is by Control or Command clicking on the layer thumbnail here, so that we've got the marching ants around this shape, that's critical. Now we're going to choose Layer, New Fill Layer, and we're going to choose Solid Color, and we're going to click "okay". But you can say that the Solid Color is going to be limited to just this area, If you hadn't chosen this shape first, if you hadn't had the marching ants, the whole of this document would be, covered in black, so you wouldn't see anything, you just have to undo it and start over again. But because I had the matching ants around here, the color is going to be isolated to just this area here, and this is where the fun starts, this is where you can start sampling and playing with the colors in your image. All I'm doing is just dragging over the image with the eye dropper, and looking in here to say the color that I've got. You can see that as I selected, it's appearing in this swatch here. I want to select the best color that I can from the image as my first color, you can just sample away and just find something that you really like, I've started going for this dusky pinks. If you find something you like but it's a little bit dark, you can just drag up here, It's still in the same color area, it's still going to look like it's come from that rose, you can drag up or down if you need to just get a different tint or shade of that color, when you're happy, click "okay". We don't need this shape anymore because it's actually a clipping mask for this particular object, we can just trash this. Next one, we're just going to close that group down, let's click on this Layer, let's add a new group, doesn't go in this and I'm going to put it in there. We're going to Control or Command, click on the layer thumbnail, we see the marching, as we're going to choose Layer, New Fill Layer, Solid Color, click "okay". We're going to sample another color from the image, which is going in here. You don't have to get this perfectly right in a minute, I'm going to show you how you can edit these colors. All you're looking for at this stage is the beginnings of your color scheme, which you can tweak later on, click "okay". Again, we've got a nice fill color layer that is clipped perfectly so we don't need this any longer, we're going to trash it. We're going to do this for the last two. Click on the Layer, add a group, put it in the group, Command or Control, click on it. Layer, New Fill Layer, Solid Color. Click "okay", sample a color from the image, this time I'm going for a green. Click "okay", we don't need this any longer, trash it. We can close down our group so that's all buried inside this, or each color is in its own group and we'll do the last one. Making sure to control, click on the thumbnail so that we get the marching ends, Layer, New Fill Layer, Solid Color. Click "okay". This time I'm going to sample a brown color, but I want to be able to see it against the other colors in the color scheme here. We'll click "okay" and again, I can trash this, and I can close down my group. There we have the elements of the color scheme. We've got all the big paces in place, now we need to go and put it in the little details, the text, and we're going to make a logo that we can use.
4. Make Custom Color Scheme Images - Part 3: Now at this point we'll probably want to do a couple of things. One of them is to name these groups, so they're going to be easier to find later on. I'm just going to call this first color and then continue to name each of these groups second color, third color, etc. After naming the groups, I'm going to look at each of these colors and determine if they are the actual colors I want in these swatches. If I need to make changes now is the time to do it. I'm actually going to look at this second color, this pink and see if I could find a better color to use. I'll double click on this icon here, which opens the color picker and now I can go ahead and sample a different color in the image. So I'm looking around for something that is a lighter pink to use. If I find something I like, but I want to adjust it a little bit, then I can drag on this circle here to make it lighter or darker, or more pink or less saturated. So I can just choose a color I like. As soon as I choose a color, it appears here, so I can see it in terms of the swatches that I've created. I'm just going to click Okay. Now when I'm choosing colors, I'll generally look for a couple of colors that are the same, like two pinks or two greens at the top here, one dark, one light. Then I'll go opposite this color and the color wheel to something that is pretty much an opposite colors. Pink and green are pretty close to being opposite each other on the color wheel. But I'm going to use the same value, so these are going to be equally light or dark. Now I'm just going to choose a third color that goes with the others. Once I've made those selections, once I'm happy with everything that I have here, I'm going to start putting the text paces in. Let's go to the first color and I'm going to add a new layer here, because we're going to put text in here. But to begin with, we need to know what the color number is. So I'm going to go ahead now and I'm going to click on the foreground color swatch here and I'm going to sample this color. This is the color I want, so I'm going to drag over it and copy it. Now I'm going to the Internet, to the web and I've got a couple of sites that I like to use. One of them is named that color and the other one is Colblindor. What I'll do is I'm going to paste my color number in here and it's going to give me a name, this one's tosca. I'm just going to paste it in here. It's an approximate match to a color that has a name. Now, you can ignore all of this and just call things your own color, it doesn't matter, but I'm going to call this one tosca. I'm going back to my Photoshop document, I'm going to cancel out of here. I'm going to select my font face. I'm going to use NewsGoth BT Roman, but you can use another font if you prefer. I'm just going to set this to about 38 points. I've determined that's a pretty good size for the font that I am going to use. I'm going to click here. I want to type in white, so I'm just going to make sure I select white here. Because I have the color number already in the windows clipboard, I'm going to press Shift to put in my hash symbol and I'm just going to press Control or Command V to paste in the number, and I'll click the check mark. Now I can move this type into position, I want to center it in the document and place it about here in the box. I'm going to add a new type layer, click on this here, go back to the type tool. I'm going to reduce the font size this time to 28, but still use NewsGothic. I'm going to click in here and type tosca. Click the check mark, go to the Move tool. Now I'm just going to move this into position, centering it nicely, just placing it inside the box. We want this to be down a little bit here. Then I'm going to do the next piece of text. So I'm going to the second color and click here and add a new layer. I'm going to click on the foreground color here and sample this color so I know what its number is. I'm going to copy it to the clipboard and go and paste it into my two web pages to say what the color is. Well, one calls it lilly and this one agrees with the word lilly, so I'm going to call this lilly. I'm going back in here, I'm going to cancel out of here. I'm going to my Text tool and make sure that I'm working in my 38 point type white color. I'm going to click here, press the hash symbol, and then press paste. I'm going to move my text into position, want it centered here. Then I'm going to add another layer again with the Text tool, this time 28 point type, and call it lilly. I'm going to move that into position. I'm going to continue now and I'm going to give names to the next two colors. This one says mantle, this one says sage, I prefer sage, so I'm going to call it sage. I get donkey brown, and mongoose, I'm going to call my mongoose. Now that I finished up my colors and my color names, I'm ready to go ahead and give the color scheme itself a name. I'm going to call this, Mother's Day. I'm going to add a new texts layer just above the image itself. Just a new layer will do because it gets converted to a takes layer as soon as I choose the Text tool, so I'm going to click on the Text tool. I'm going to use a font that I've downloaded. It's called Snell Roundhand Script Bold Italic. I'll give you a download link for that in case you want to use it. I'm just going to call this Mother's Day. The font is too small, so I'm just going to increase it to a reasonable size. Now to finish off this illustration, I think it would be really nice if you were going to create a lot of this that you have some logo. What I want to do is to show you how you can create a logo with some transparency built in that you can place over the top of any of these shapes. It involves a really interesting effect in Photoshop. So one that you'll probably want to learn anyway, even if you don't plan to use a logo here. In the next video, we're going to go and look and see how we do that.
5. Make Custom Color Scheme Images - Part 4: For our logo, we're going to need a new document. I'm going to choose "File" and then "New" and my document's going to be 500 pixels by 500 pixels. Just a nice little square document but I want it to be transparent and click "Okay". Now, I want to make a white filled shape here. I'm going to the Ellipse tool. I'm going to make sure that I have white as my foreground color cause that's going to be the fill color because I have pixels selected up here. In other versions of Photoshop, you might have three icons here instead of the drop-down list, but I want pixels. We'll start in the top corner here. Drag, holding "Shift", as I do to make a circle and it's just going to be a filled circle, doesn't matter if it's not totally filling this image, it just needs to be near too. Next up, I'm going to add a type elements so I'm going to add a new layer. I'm going to my Type Tool and I'm actually going to still use this Snell Roundhand script cause I like it, but I want to type in a color that I can see. I'm just going to type in red for now. I'm just going to type my initials in lowercase and I'm going to enlarge this so its really quite big inside the shape because of the effect that we're trying to create, you want to have some type that's relatively large because it's just going to appear as a cutout inside the shape. Once I've got this in position, I'm ready to go. Now, I want this to remain editable because if I don't like the type, I want to be able to come back and create a different type effect. It's important that you're working on a layer that is allowed, not the background layer. If you have a background layer here, you'll need to double-click it and just make sure it is a layout whenever you are trying to achieve this particular effect. When I click on the "Type Layer" and we're going to click on the "fx" icon and we're going to choose "Blending Options" and what we're going to do is we're going to, from this Blending Options area here in the knockout area, we're going to click on "Shallow", and then we're going to reduce the fill opacity of this top layer. Reducing the fill actually removes the fill from it, but the knockout shallow actually pokes a hole in the object below that is the shape of this text. But the text lands still here, so it's still fully editable. If you don't like the typeface you've used, for example, you can just come in here with a text tool and just change it. Selectable text and we could choose a different type face. For example, let's just go and do something. There's a different type face. You can see how it's immediately being applied to this effect. This is a editable effect that pokes a hole in something, but I want to go back to my Snell Roundhand because it looks better to me so I'm going to click that. Now, I'm going to select everything with Select All and I'm going to choose "Edit", "Copy", "Merge" because I want to copy the entire object as if it were all merged down to a single layer with this transparency. Now let's go back to our color scheme. I'm going to make sure that I'm on a regular layer. I'm going to add a new layer for it and then I'll choose "Edit" and then "Paste" and here is my shape on the new layer, I can click the "Move Tool", hold the "Shift key" and just size it down and place it in position, and so this could be the branding element for my color swatch. I'd probably, if it was going to be a branding element and I wanted it in that place on all of them. I would create a new group. I would put it in there, and I would call this branding and I'd probably lock it down as well. It's not going to move, it's just going to be stable and in position in every single one of these images that I create. Now that I've completed this, I can hide the guides. I may not want to remove them, but I can hide them. I'm going to choose "View" and I'm going to choose "Show", and I'm going to disable guides. We can see what the illustrations going to look like without the guides visible and now if we're ready to save it. We would go ahead and save it not only as a PSD file because this is our template file that we want to use over and over again, but also we could save it as a JPEG so that we could distribute it, for example, on the web. In the next video, we're just going to look quickly at how we would re-use this templates and what we're going to get rid off and what we're going to change to make a different color scheme.
6. Make Custom Color Scheme Images - Part 5: Before we can create another color scheme, of course, we're going to need an image to use. I found another image here, unsplash.com. I'm just going to save this into my downloads folder. I'm going back to Photoshop. We're going back to this image. This is the image that I need to replace, first of all. I'm going to click just on that image layer, because that's where I want the image to be replaced. I'm just going to go and open the image that I downloaded. Here it is. I'm going to duplicate it to my main image. I'm going to right-click, choose Duplicate Layer, and I'm going to put it into my template. I'm going back to my template image. Because I clicked on the flower layer before I started this process, this image has gone immediately above it, which is just a really handy position for it. I'm going to press Control or Command T and Control or Command 0, so I can see my sizing handles. Again, holding the Shift key I'm just going to scale this down, and just move it into position so I can see how it's going to look in my color scheme. Click the check mark. I'm going to zoom in. Now I want to get rid of this layer here because I don't need it. I'm just going to drag and drop it onto the trash can. But I'm going to remember that this needs to be clipped. I'm going to click on this layer and Control Alt, click on the layer between to clip it to this shape. I could also have chosen, of course, layer create clipping mask. Now I'll just go to each of these colors. I'm going to go to my first color, I'm going to double-click on that. Now I need to choose something to replace this color swatch. I'm thinking probably a blue. Well, it's probably a bit dark. Let's see if we can find something a little less dark. Then I'll go to my second color. Because this was a blue, I want another blue. But I want to lighter one this time. Then I want something roughly opposite on the color wheel for my third color. The gimmick color here is going to be that yellow. Then I want a fourth color. I'll click "OK". Now, of course, I'll need to go and sample my color so I know what I'm working with. Well, since we're down here anyway, let's go and do that. I'm going to click on this to open the color picker. I'm going to sample my color. This is its number. I'm going to make sure that I copy the number. Cancel out of that dialogue. Well, this is no longer going to be mongoose. This is going to be our new color here. I'm going to go and get the text tool. The type face is already in there so far as color and size is concerned, and also that hashtag. Really, I just want to replace these digits. I'm going to press Control or Command V to paste in my color. Then of course, I want to go to the web and find out what the color name is for that. I'll go and do that with all these other colors. Then of course, I'll need to change Mother's Day, because that's not going to be appropriate. I need another name for this color scheme. I'm going to call this old car. Then as soon as I've changed the hexadecimal values and given new names to these colors, I'm ready. I've got a second color scheme created and ready to go. Your project for this class is going to be to create your own color scheme. Go and get an image that you like, and go and sample four colors from it to create a color scheme. Write down their hexadecimal values, give them color names, or the ones that you've found with those websites that I've given you, or just make up names. This is a fun thing to do. Give the entire color scheme and name, create your own logo, and post your finished color scheme as your class project. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've learned a bit about creating custom color scheme images in Photoshop. If you did enjoy this class and if you see a prompt to recommend it to others, please give it a thumbs-up. This helps other people to identify this as a class that they might want to take. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
