Design Bold Social Posts Using Patterns & Filters in Adobe Photoshop

1. What We're Creating and Intro: In this tutorial, we're going to create this awesome social media post for wild jazz of the Blue Note. And we're going to use a very simple photograph to get the saxophone. We're going to use patterns, which we're going to go wild with. You can see that pattern is not the traditional pattern I've shown you so far. And then we're going to put them together with a number of layers and include things like adjustment layers and gradient maps. Anyway, this one is fantastic. I hope you really enjoy it. Let's start. 2. Make Your Pattern with Text: I'm going to go to a new file, and I'm going to make a square 2000 by 2000 document for my pattern. I'm going to click on Create in there. And what we're going to do here is we're going to put in some text. So we're going to do this the other way around now. We're going to go, first of all, up to view and show the pattern preview. So we're going to build our pattern inside the preview area. So I've done that. Now, you could see if I went to my layers, I can just add a brand new layer in there. If I wanted to, I could just paint and you can see how it actually goes into the pattern in this. You can just paint directly into a pattern to create your interesting design. I'm going to just get rid of that layer like so. But I'm going to use text. So I'm going to go in here to the I'm going to type in wild jazz. You can do any other text that you like. Now, I can't see it because my text is white on a white background. So I'm going to hide the background so I can just about see the text. There it is there. It doesn't actually say wild jazz. Let's do a W now. Wild jazz in there, and I'm going to make it a lot bigger. So as I'm changing the size, you can see the pattern is changing, as well. So if I keep going, like so, I can get my bit of text in there. Now, the next I want to do is I want quite a few of these. So I'm going to hold down the Alt or the option key and click and drag a copy of that. And let's offset this one, like so. I'm going to do it again. Hold down the Alt or the option key, click and drag. We've got another one offset over there, maybe a few more alter option key. Let's do that one, say like that. We've just got room for one more alter option key, and that's going to go somewhere along there. Like that. And then I'm going to switch on auto select or make sure it's switched on, so I can just move them around. And if I zoom out, I can kind of see what the pattern is going to look like. You can see some of them look too close together, like those two are just a little bit too close together. So I'm going to move this one down just a fraction in there until I'm happy with the result. Now that I've done that, I'm going to go to, you know, Edit down to define pattern. And we'll call this WJ Wild jazz pattern. Click Okay. And that's done. My wild jazz background text is ready to go. So if you'd like to get to that point there, then we'll start to add more bits and pieces to this. 3. Add the Instrument and Make a Groovy Background: I found this picture in the free Adobe Stock library, and I'm going to go along and get my cropping tool and just crop this to a square. Now, I'm looking for something like that, so I'm gonna hold down the Shift key so I get a perfect square. The, um, saxophone is not quite in the middle, but that's going to be fine because we're actually going to cut it out from the background. So I'm happy with that. I will click on the tick to crop that down. Now I need to go and cut the saxophone out. And we can try different tools, but I really like the object selection tool. And I'm going to go over here to the drop down menu and I'm going to say, do it on the Cloud for detailed results. So the better results over there. And then I've got a lasso option there. I can then just lasso the object to select it. Now, it's mostly selected. There are a few little bits and pieces that we can deal with, but because we're actually going to put a filter on this, which is going to knock out a lot of details, I'm not really worried about getting rid of these little in between areas. If you wanted something to look very accurate, you'd have to go in and remove those bits as well. I'm kind of happy with the way that it looks, though. I will just make a little mask on that, and there is my saxophone. I'm going to actually go over here to the move tool and just move it roughly to the middle. Now, I want to background on there. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to make a new layer over here, drag that down, and I'm going to take the rectangular marquee tool and just make a rectangular marquee. I'm going to use edit and fill and I'm going to fill that with a color. And I want to use this bright sort of yellow that I've got over here of yellowy orange. Click Okay. Make sure preserved transparency is switched off. Click Okay. Now I want to do the opposite side, so I'll go to select, inverse the selection, and then do the same again. Edit, fill, go into color, choose the more orange color that I'd like. Click Okay. Okay, that, and then deselect. And let's bring in the text now as well. So I'm going to go down to the bottom. I'm going to add the text in as a pattern. I'll find my text. There it is over there. And then, of course, I can just go and scale it up or down depending on what I want from that. So I want quite a lot of text in there. Maybe something along that line over there. I'm going to angle it a little bit, as well to give that interesting feel and the first bit is done. Anyway, get yourself up to that stage over there so make sure you cut out the saxophone. If you want to use another instrument, that's absolutely fine. Make a background over there on a new layer. Also then bring in your pattern or your text pattern as a new adjustment layer, and then we'll move on. 4. How to Warp the Text: What I like to do now is to adjust the text a little bit and mess around with it a bit, so it's not quite so perfect. I want it to be a little bit more wild and jazzy. So to do that, I'm going to be going to edit, transform, and using warp, but it won't allow me to use warp on that particular adjustment layer. So what we have to do is take the adjustment layer, go to layer, Smart Object, and convert to Smart Object. And then I can go to Edit, Transform. And warp. Now, you can choose what sort of grid you want over there three by three, five by five, four by four, et cetera. And then I'm going to just pull these around so you can see I can get an interesting look to my text. There's no right or wrong here. I'm just pulling this around to see what I can do. Just so it's not to the same all the way along. I'm sure there's another word for that, but I can't think of it at the moment. We're just looking for something that looks really interesting in there. I think that's, uh, that's okay, actually. Let's just pull those bits out a little bit. Over there. Click on the tick, and it's done. Have a go with that. 5. Using a Smart Filter to Add a Filter Gallery Effect: Let's make the saxophone look interesting. I'm going to try some filters on it, but I'm going to convert it for smart filters first, and this will enable me to sort of add the filter and then change it later on. I'm going to go down to the filter gallery and just experiment with a few of these bits and pieces that we have here. You can just play with these and see what interesting results you get. That one is quite interesting there, but I like the cutout and you can change the number of levels on a cut out as well, so I can have something which looks a lot more well, limited color because that's gone down to two colors in there. I think I'll go three colors on that and then just play with these to see what happens to the edges as you're affecting the filter. Remember, once you've clicked Okay, if you don't like it, you can just switch it off and try again. If you'd like to learn more Photoshop or see more of these type of effect videos, don't forget to click on my name right at the bottom and go to my profile and have a look at all the courses I do. The next thing I want to do is I also want to change the colors of the saxophone to mirror the orange in the background. So I'm going to do that by adding an adjustment layer, and the adjustment layer I'm going to use is called a gradient map. I do know, I do realize it's slightly off the screen from what you're seeing, but it's under threshold. It's called gradient map in there. Now, the gradient map, when you go to the properties, you'll find it's got a gradient in here, and mine happens to have the two oranges that I've been working with. But you'll find that if you go to any sort of of these, it will just put that gradient map colors onto your document. Now, what I want to do is I want one that goes from an interesting orange or yellow. There may be quite a light yellow like that through to a darker orange. So it's got orange over there. Maybe darken it down, something like that. And I'll just click Okay for the moment. Now, it is kind of the wrong way around. I don't know whether you notice, but the saxophone looks almost like it's a negative. Switch on reverse in your properties to get those two colors to go the opposite way round. That's looking a whole lot better. I only want this to affect the saxophone, so I'm going to hold down the Alt or the option key, move up between the two, and click. So now, this is only affecting the layer below itself. You can still play with the other settings in here. We can go into sort of multiply color burns, screens, overlays in there. The overlay actually looks quite nice on there. The colors are looking great. We can go down to color where it'll just use the colors. I think I'm going to choose overlay in there. In once again, try that out, have a bit of a go with a filter, but make that a smart object first and then try a adjustment layer, which is going to be the gradient map to just effect that layer below it. 6. More Text, Save it for Social Media & Outro: This text that I've got is well, it makes your eyes go funny, really, so I'm going to take the opacity right down over there and then put some more text over the top. So I'll just take my text tool over here, pop in some text. Like so. And I'm going to rotate the text around. I'm using the shortcut, which is command or Control And let's just pull that up, like so. I think I'd like it over the top of everything, so I'll move it right to the top. I don't know. I suppose that kind of looks quite good. And then I'm going to hold down the old key, make a copy of that. This one is going to go to the top because I want to see the whole thing, and this will be where it's going to be the wild jazz. So at the blue note. I'm going to change that text and take the size down a bit over there and maybe just change the typeface to something a bit simpler. If you want to give it any depth, you could always go to your text. I'll go to the wild jazz here. Put on a subtle drop shadow, and I mean very, very subtle in there. You can even use something like the orange or one of these colors here to get the shadow so it's not pure black in there. But I'm just going very, very subtle like that. We'll switch this on an offer. You can see the difference before and after, very, very subtle. That's it. Save it out as a PSD. If you want to post it somewhere, you can use File, Export, and Export as and just save it out as a JPEG once you've done your PSD. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. If you'd like to learn more Photoshop or see more of these type of effect videos, don't forget to click on my name right at the bottom and go to my profile and have a look at all the courses I do in Photoshop, Affinity, and Canva. And also click the Follow button. That way, you'll be notified of any new courses that I put out. Have so much fun with that. It's a brilliant, brilliant technique.