Edit Your Own Envelope Photos in Adobe Photoshop

1. Introduction: Hey there and welcome to another class. In today's course, I am going to over how to edit your own envelope photos using Adobe Photoshop. Before we jump in, I want to start with an introduction and give you a good idea of what you might learn in this class. In addition to a little bit about me and why I feel like this is an important skill to know. My name is Allie. I am an illustrator, surface pattern designer, educator with a history and architecture and teaching. However, I now run my own brand, quite creative full-time, creating eco-friendly products and licensing patterns and illustrations to several different companies. I also have, and you might see this behind me, over 200 different eco-friendly greeting cards that I sell. And this has really started the spurred I, and the reason I wanted to teach this class and why I wanted to show you how you can easily build your own business, whether you are selling cards for wholesale or for retail. Some of these tools and skills might help you move forward. So perhaps you're wondering, why would it even be helpful to learn how to photograph simple greeting card and edit it in a professional style. You might have several different cards that you're placing over an envelope and maybe you're taking photos of it. You're trying to edit it nicely and professionally. However, sometimes you don't want to bother with taking photos of every single new card you might create, having over 200 skews. I can tell you from experience that it's really nice to have in five to ten beautifully styled shots. But for the everyday listing that might be in something like a wholesale catalog or that might be on your website or on an Etsy shop. For wholesale. Maybe you're selling on an online platform like fair and a bonus. You might be able to send these to retailers. It's nice to have some really simple professional images that you can easily replicate as you add new card designs into your own catalog. In this class, we are going to talk about best practices and taking photos, but you don't have to worry too much. You can use an iPhone, maybe apply a simple overview like the grid on the iPhone. Take a photo, send it to your computer, and then we'll be using Adobe Photoshop for everything. So you can see here on this image I have a photograph of this craft envelope on the left. And what I'm going to do is talk about all the steps to turn that into a beautifully edited, professional-looking photo that you can then use in creating your own mockups. I am going to be using this craft A2 envelope through my example, however, you may use any size envelope, and any color that you might use in your own business. This course is really made for beginners. You might be new to Adobe Photoshop. Maybe you're just new to photo editing. You're not quite sure how to get rid of that background in any kind of photograph in a professional manner. Or maybe if you're like myself, you're of course junkie and just love to learn from everybody and see all the different styles and want to pick up a new tip for future course certifications. I am releasing several new courses this year. And you can find out everything at quite creative.com slash Course Info. Not only can you sign up to be notified when new taxes go live and will only get notifications when new classes. But you will also see a bunch of different babies. Some other free content that might be helpful no matter where you are in your creative journey. So join me in pulling out an envelope and opening up Photoshop. And we're going to jump right in and learn some great Photoshop tips. 2. Class Project: So for the class project, you might desk what it already is, but I would love to see your original photo of your envelope. In addition to the edited version, which I'm going to walk through exporting out a PNG file in particular to preserve that transparent background. It's going to be pretty simple and pretty straightforward. But I think it's always great to see the before and after and loved to see how you have edited your own photograph. 3. Taking a Photograph: Hello and welcome back. In the first lesson, I am going to cover how to take a photo of your envelope at home. Now, I've got an A2 craft envelope here. But it doesn't matter what size or what color envelope you're using. I would just recommend grabbing something from your inventory and making sure to take several photos of the envelope. And if you're doing this for many different items, go ahead and take photos of all of the different envelopes you might mean something to note here. One, I want to take a photo of the envelope with the enclosure side facing up to. I want to be sure that my background has a contrast to the envelopes because I'm using a craft brown envelope. It's on an off-white background just to make sure I have contrast, but don't worry too much. We are going to crop out the background. It'll just make it easier that there's contrast and there's nothing on the surface here. I'm not laying this on top of magazines or other items on a table. It's best to clear away the surface directly around your envelope. Now, you can use your iPhone or a camera, any kind of smart phone, your iPad, to take a photo, use what you have. If you have a tripod, great. If you don't, don't worry so much, I am going to be showing you with my iPad. If I zoom in here, It's a little tough to see, but I've got the nine square grid turned on and that just helps me try to align it and get it to be as even above the envelope as I possibly can. When you go to take a photo, I recommend trying to take this in the middle of the day. Or at some point where you have a nice even natural light, maybe open all your Windows, go to a north-facing room or if you're like me, In face, only one direction, try to pick a time of day where the sun is not glaring, but you have some nice natural light. Then go ahead and take several photos. My iPad might come off the screen here because the camera is in the far corner. But go ahead and just take as many photos as you can. I recommend taking at least four or five. And then you can pick the best one when we move into Adobe Photoshop. In the next lesson. 4. Image Adjustments: In this lesson, I am going to talk about setting up your file, setting up the layers, and then adding some simple layer adjustments performed. Get started. Now that you have a couple of photos. Go ahead and open up Adobe Photoshop, file open. Navigate to one of the photos you would like to use. As soon as you open up one of the images, you can see here I've got just a random IMG file, it's a JPEG, and on the far-right in my layers panel, it's coming in locked as the background. If you don't see this, go ahead up to window and go down to layers. We're going to set up our file so we're all ready to go and apply some basic layer adjustments. The first thing I want to do is go to File save, As you might have the option here, this is just an updated version of Photoshop. I am going to save it on my computer instead of the Cloud. This is up to you. I'm going to navigate to a folder or create a folder, envelope images. And then I'm going to call this one envelope craft because it's a craft envelope. And then the format before I hit Save, I want to make sure I go to Photoshop and click Save. Now we can start to edit it and save it if we need to come back here. Coming back to my layers panel, I'm going to right-click Layer from background or double-click, and I can name this envelope. Now, I am going to duplicate this layer by right-clicking. Going to duplicate, I'm going to call this original ref for reference. You don't have to do this. I just want to turn off that layer. Maybe lock it, and come back to show you the very end what the original photo looked like compared to our edits. Now that we have our layer, it's renamed just to organize. This is really helpful when you get to larger files. This file, we're not going to have too many layers over here, but I find it to be a good habit just to get used to naming them. So when you do go to use large files, it's easier to navigate. What we want to do is I'm basically are adjustments. Going down to the very bottom of the Layers panel over here. There's a circle that is half-filled in half naught. That's the layer adjustment icon. And if I click on it, I get a lot of different examples. Because this is a photograph of an envelope. What I'm going to do is go to brightness and contrast. First, I'm going to brighten mine up just a little bit because my envelope looks pretty dark. You can see as I brightened, if I go too far, it's going to be overexposed. And the bottom left is a little bit more shadowy, but don't worry about that right now. We're gonna come back to that. I just want to get this to something that looks a little bit better that we can work with. I'm only paying attention to the envelope. I don't want to pay attention to the background because we are going to get rid of that. Back down here. I am going to add another layer adjustment. And this time I might go into hue and saturation. Now, it depends how well an environment you took that original photo and how realistic it looks if I oversaturated, my envelope begins to look orange. And if I look next to me at a reference envelope, it actually looks pretty close to what was there and maybe even, even a bit more saturated. I'm going with a plus ten, but I'm really just sliding that toggle to make it look more realistic. I'm going to leave just those two masks over it or the, sorry, the layer adjustments, they are masked but their mask to the entire image. So you can see if I turn these off, you can see a very, very slight adjustment there and then the brightness is fairly considerable. Take your time, go through some adjustments. Maybe you want to play with levels and curves. I typically don't use those when you're using an envelope photo. But I will get into those different adjustments for other different imagery and image editing. But I find the bike brightness contrast or even exposure in the hue and saturation to be the simple adjustments that can start to really help your envelope standout. And then in the next lesson we're going to talk about getting rid of the background. 5. Deleting the Background: In this video, I am going to go over how to get rid of the background. You're not fiddling with a white or almost white background that maybe looks a little too yellow or blue or gray or uneven. I went to get rid of this entirely. So we end up with just the envelope that we can then place and use when we create our greeting card mockups. The first thing I want to do opening up Adobe Photoshop is going into my envelope layer. I'm making sure I'm in that dot PSD file so I can edit it. I'm going to use the magic wand tool. Now there are two tools that I really prefer to use when editing out something as simple as an envelope that's rectangular, that has a blank background. I'm going to use the magic one tool in the Polygonal Lasso. Selecting the magic wand tool, I want to notice everything on my top ribbon. And if you don't see this, you can go into Window Workspace and reset your essentials workspace. And you might see some of these options. Now, note here the contiguous checkbox. If I click somewhere on my screen, it's going to select anything in that color if it's not checked and then recheck it. It's going to select everything that I clicked. Sometimes I like to play around with that. In this case, I want an unchecked when I'm getting rid of a somewhat white background. The other thing I want to pay attention to is the tolerance. So the lower I go, the more particular the magic wand is going to be in selecting pixels. If I zoom in, I've got all these dashing ants or the line that's selecting. And it's only selecting a certain range. Whereas if I go up to 100, it's selecting a lot. It, and if I zoom in here, it's actually selecting up pieces in my envelope. Photoshops default is to start at 30. I usually recommend starting around there. But you can see it's not selecting quite everything. I can try to select contiguous to see if it grabs anymore, but it most likely won't because it's my tolerance. I'm gonna bump it up a little bit and go up to 50. I think that's a pretty good starting point. It's not getting everything on the left side. There's a lot here, but that's okay. I'd rather the magic one tool, not grab everything when grab too much, it's easier to fine tune and take away more than it is to add in things once that's selected and I'm on my envelope layer, making sure that's actually selected. I'm going to click Delete or the backspace button. Now, my selection is still there. Command or Control D should de-select that, or you can right-click and select, de-select. This gray and white background is actually Photoshop and Adobe's way of showing a transparent background. So that's great news. But if I zoom in here, there's still a little bit of envelope space and background that I don't really want as part of my design. Instead of going through the Magic Wand tool again, I'm going to go up and select the Polygonal Lasso. Now, you might have to right-click the normal Lasso to find that in your toolbar. Then zooming in. What I want to do is I want to go around the whole perimeter of the envelope. I might even crop off, this will make it a nice rectangle. I'm going to go through and click along the edge. Now, say that X and we clicked over here on the inside. I can just click the backspace button to go back to the last point I had selected. Now instead of just clicking multiple clicks, I'm going to scroll all the way to the top. Maybe zooming in a little bit and click up here. And then I'm going to continue to do that all around my envelope to select the edge. Now, you could have done this in the very beginning. Sometimes the magic wand tool will select everything depending again, on the original photo. I wanted to show you both ways because sometimes I'll try to get rid of huge swaths of color at first. And then I'll come back through and fine tune with the polygonal lasso. Now once you click there, it should complete the selection. My computer is lagging just a bit. There we go. I've got the dashed line. If I click Delete, it's going to delete everything on the inside of that. So I'm going to Command or Control Z to undo and go up to Select Inverse. And you can see the keyboard shortcut up here. You can also use that. And then I'm going to click Delete. And then Command or Control D, another keyboard shortcut to de-select that envelope. Now I've actually got just a free envelope here that I can move around if I like. What I want to do eventually is expert that as a PNG. In the next tutorial, I'm going to talk about the last fine-tune edits before we go to Export PNG files. And then we're almost there. We're gonna have our own custom envelope photo already to go to use for your own mockups. 6. Last Minute Edits: In this video, I'm going to go over some last minute edits that you might need to make to your envelope image before we go to export the file back into Photoshop, I have all my layers pulled up over here. What I want to do is actually pull up that envelope layer. We're going to play around with a few things. One of my favorite tools in Photoshop is the Dodge and Burn Tool. There on the far left. It might look like a little lollipop. The Dodge tool and the burn tool looks like a hand. The Dodge Tool basically adds highlights. And you can see I've got a large circle here. I can change some of the settings on the very top. For example, I might select one of the brushes that has kind of a blurred edge because I don't want it to be too harsh of a line. I can change the size of that. I might actually bump it up to more like 2 thousand, maybe even higher. And you can type in a value if you would like to hear. In pixels. Range, I like to default at mid tones, but you can play with what happens if you go to shadows or highlights. Exposure. Again, I like the middle of the road there at 50%. And that is all the different adjustments I might change with, with the dodge tool. Now if I click once, you can see it's brightening up the space. And if I do this a lot, It's overexposing this. So I'm gonna go back and undo using my keyboard shortcut many times until I'm somewhere around here. I'm going to gently click through and do the best I can. It's okay if there's a few shadows, It's a real envelope, so I want to keep that look. I just want to try to make it a little more even. Now. That is if you need to brighten up spots, the burn tool, you may have guessed is the opposite. I'm going to change this to something much larger again, maybe closer to that 3 thousand range. I'm going to keep it at the mid tones and exposure. If I add the burn and see you darkening, now, don't really want to darken my image anymore than it already is. I think I'm going to go ahead and save my file. Use this when we go to export. So take some time playing around with the Dodge and Burn tool. In the next lesson, we are going to go over x, pointing out your file and making sure everything is executed correctly. 7. Exporting the File: We're onto the final lesson where I'm going to talk about exporting out the envelope as an image with this transparent background. And what to keep in mind when you're exporting out the image. I've got everything in Photoshop. You can see I've got quite a bit of extra space around the envelope. Now that's not a huge deal, but I typically like to bring it a little closer to the envelope itself. So there's many different ways to crop an image in Photoshop, you can use the actual Crop tool. You can type in ratios. Or alternatively, I really prefer the rectangular marquee tool, where I'll select that from all the different mark keys on the left of the toolbar. And then clicking and dragging over the envelope to leave a little bit of a margin or a space on the edges. Then I'm gonna go up to Image Crop. And it's going to crop everything. You can see here my Layers panel. Everything has cropped down to the envelope, even my reference image. This is something that you only want to do if you're absolutely sure. If you're not entirely sure, you can save a different file or you can keep it as it were. But I like to kind of bring it down and right-click Deselect. Again, the keyboard shortcut is command D if you're on a Mac or Control D if you're on a PC. Okay, so I've got everything here. I forgot my envelope. It's cleaned up. If I look at the edges, it's even a crisp straight line because I use that polygonal lasso tool after I using the magic wand. The right margin or gap is a little different than the left. That's not a big deal. I just wanted to get rid of some of that excess space in the back, but I'm going to export this as a PNG, so it won't matter before we export. I actually want to show you the old envelope so it's cropped out a significant byte at the background. But you can see here the new version is much lighter and brighter. I'm able to get rid of that background and it looks like a craft envelope. Turning off that original reference layer. I don't want to export that. I just wanted to show you the difference. I am going to file, save my file. Then I'm going to go up to File Export. And then let me talk about these for just a minute. So I never really use the Quick Export as PNG. I typically go to Export. As Of course, you can set your preferences. But Export As is the easiest way to just export out different kinds of files from your, your original dot PSD or that Photoshop file where you can edit all the layers. Now, Save for Web can be handy for a quick smaller file, but let's go to Export As and see what comes up. This panel has a bunch of different options here. You can see right now, this is set to a PNG. On the left. It's 2314 by 2949 pixels, which is about 12.7 megabytes. That's a fairly large file. But that's okay for now. I want this to be pretty large in clear, because when I'm setting up my different layouts of the greeting card above this and creating my own mockup for that card, I want to make sure this is clear, crisp, and not blurry or pixelated. We've got width and height here. I might change it down to 2 thousand wide. That is as small as I would go, then the height is more around 2500. This is going to depend on where you might have cropped around your envelope. Then the format I want to make sure I'm set to PNG with the transparency box checked. And this is the most critical part to make sure you maintain that blank background. Png files are the only image types or the preferred image type that has a transparent background. We're going to save it as the default 20 forfeit as opposed to the 8-bit. Just again, because I want to have the highest resolution possible. Alright, so the expert as panel has popped up, There's a few things I want to note here. On the left you can see the size in pixels and it's 9.9 megabytes. I would recommend changing the shortest side, in this case the width to 2 thousand pixels. I wouldn't go below that just because we want to make sure to have a high resolution image to use for a mock-up. And then it's critical to make sure the format is set to PNG. With the transparency box checked. We maintain this blank background so there's no color in the back. And click Export. Now navigating to a folder. Might go into my envelope images and save it in here. And then making sure to save my Photoshop file once I've done that. Now the last thing I want to check is opening up that image, opening up the envelope. So you can see here it's got kind of a charcoal gray background and that's just my preview on my computer. But I've got my envelope. So you can apply this to any kind of envelope, any size envelope, any color. Maybe you offer a couple of different colors and go through the same process. Once you do this over and over, you will get the hang of it and should be able to go through it, it really quickly. Typically, one of these images takes me less than ten minutes to edit. If you take good photos at the beginning or good enough photo, you should be able to go through and edit and use your own image to make your own mockup. 8. The End & What's Next: Thank you so much for watching. That is the end of this class on editing your own envelope photo and Adobe Photoshop. But before you go, there's a few extra things I want to show you. First is future course notifications. I am creating a course on creating your own mockups for greeting cards that is following this course and connected to it. So once you have the envelope photo, you can jump right in and learn how to create your own greeting card mockups. As always, you can sign up at quite creative.com slash course dash info for future course notifications. There are also several different free resources on that page as well. Lastly, I am offering a new design service for wholesale catalog design, creating digital wholesale catalogs. If you are someone who sells things like greeting cards or stickers or prints or tea towels. Other small products for creatives. You can learn more at quick creative.com on my new design service and look at some of the packages I offer to put together a professional layout. Now, you already learned how to create your own greeting cards so you can take the next class to learn how to create your mockup or create your own mockups. Now that you have the ability to make your own professional photos, I would love it if you wouldn't mind reading and reviewing the class. Thank you so much for watching. It really means a lot. I can't wait to see all of your projects and your before and after photos. Happy editing.