Transcripts
1. Trailer: Hi. I'm Meg Louis. This class is my absolute favorite of the Photoshop series. Together, we'll learn how to master the incredibly challenging yet very misunderstood pen tool. We will learn how to cut apart an ultra photographs as well as dive into the exciting arts of working with type fonts and loads of text. At the end of the class, we'll put it all together and design a greeting card for a friend or relative. Trust me, you'll get your money's worth with ohs and ahs from the person you give this card to.
2. Intro to Pen Tool: The pen tool is an incredibly valuable thing to master, and it can be pretty frustrating at times. I'll take the headache out of the pen tool by showing you a lot of easy-to-learn techniques. We'll trace images and use the pen tool as a cut of part of an image. I'll even show you some advanced techniques and tools to use as well.
3. Making Shapes: Hello, and welcome to class three of the Photoshop Skillshare series. This is the third class of series, and perhaps you took the first two before this one, perhaps you're brand new and you just want to hop in for the pen tool in typography, that's absolutely fine. I'll try to do my best to make you guys feel comfortable along the way and not repeat too many things that I did in the other classes. Okay, let's start by creating a new document here. By default, I'm just going to go let's say, 800 by 800 pixels in size. Okay. So, we need to have a resolution at 72 because we're just designing something for the screen. Color mode is RGB again, and then we need to make sure that we don't have any of these advanced settings checked, they're all okay for now. All right. So, I'm going to name this, let's just name it "PenToolExploration" Okay, and then click all right. So, I pressed "F" to go into this full-screen mode. I'm going to make sure my graphic is at, or my canvas is 100 percent, which I did by clicking that 100 percent button up there, with my zoom tool selected that's important to know. All right. So, the thing you need to know about the Pen Tool is basically, it's very finicky and it takes a lot of work to get the hang of. So, this first exercise I just really, really want you to be able to feel comfortable using the Pen Tool and understanding its interactions and limitations. So, let's go first by finding the Pen Tool over here in our toolbar. It looks just like this, just like a little pen nib here. The shortcut for a pen tool is P. So, if I click on here or press P, we have the pen tool right ready to go. Okay. So, as I mentioned in the first class, when I went through the tools briefly, there are two things that the Pen Tool does. It makes paths and it makes shapes. So, I'd like to start out by making shapes first and then we'll move on to paths. This shape exercise is really just to get you familiar with the Pen Tool and understanding how the Pen Tool works. Then later on, we'll get on to something a little bit more advanced and make those shapes. All right. So, the first thing you want to do is get a color selected. So, this is the time when you want to grab your favorite color in the fill section here. You can do it this way, by clicking in here and bringing up the color picker. You can pick a swatch here. I prefer the Color Picker as I mentioned before, because it's a little bit larger of a view and I can really see what I'm doing here, because this is much larger. So, I think I will go with nice teal color, just like this. You can pick whatever color you'd like. Okay. So, I have this color selected as myself fill for a shape and as you see, if I create a new layer first, I title this new layer, just for now. As I'm clicking around with my Pen Tool, it's making this shape. Okay, very easy. But let me just do command Z to go back in time, could draw our history pallet, go further back. You can see, I'm going back in time. Again, we'll cover this on another lesson later. So, you don't need to know that, if you wanted to you could just delete your layer whenever you're frustrated with your Pen Tool progress. So, start over by creating a new layer, and then let's just draw this way. So again, points, points, points. As I've mentioned before, once you want to complete your shape you'll always need to click back onto where you originally started. So, I'm going to want to click onto this original point here and I'll see that little circle, it's an unfilled circle that is connected to my Pen Tool there. That is the icon that indicates that you are about to close your shape. Okay. So, I've closed my shape now but I'm still on the Pen tool, so I can't movement shape around just quite yet. To go back to the Move Tool, I press V or just click up here on the Move Tool and I can move my shape around. I can do command T to bring up that transforming box, and then I can resize my shape just as any other shape. Okay. But what about shapes that we don't want to just be straight jagged lines, what about curves? Now, here's where the Pen Tool gets really complicated. So, let's create a new layer, title it curved shape. Okay. So, I beg you to stay with me here because this is where it gets tricky. Making curves. Okay. To start on making curves, I will make one point. I'll make another point, but once I make the other point, I have to hold down my mouse and then drag. Okay? So, to make the next point, I click my mouse, I'm holding it down still, and now I'm dragging down or dragging up any direction. You can see how my shape is about to change and curve as I'm doing that. So, I'm still holding down and dragging. They give you this helpful little line to show you where you are with your shape and what it will look like, what that curve's going to look like, which is very helpful, thank you Photoshop. So, once you're satisfied with this curve you just let go, and now I have my curve. All right. So, the extra, extra tricky part here is the next curve. So, Photoshop does this really really kind and generous thing, bless it's heart. Where it tries to make your shape look as natural as possible by continuing the curve for you. So, if I just clicked over here, let's click over here for instance, watch what happens when I click. See when it did there, it made a natural curve for me that flowed seamlessly from the last curve, which is really nice of Photoshop to do that. If I click and drag, my mouse is still clicked on there. It's still giving me that curve hasn't natural edge to it, which is really nice to Photoshop. That's so kind of it. But what happens if, say I wanted to make a sharp edge here rather than curve, I just want it to be a straight line. If I click here, it does the natural curve again, so that's a problem. I'm going to press command Z to undo. All right. So, if you have a curve and you don't want Photoshop to give you that natural curve, here's what you do you. your last point, you put your mouse on top of it, so where you get that little slash, and then you hold down alt or option, same key on a Mac keyboard, until you get that little arrow. Do you see that little arrow? It was the dash and now you get the arrow. So, once I have the arrow, I can now click and then click and make my straight line. See what happened there? So now, I want to complete my shape, so I go back to the original point and click to complete. Okay. Let's do that again. Bringing my pen tool by pressing P or clicking on the Pen Tool. My first point I can do whatever I want with. Second point if I want it to be curved, I click to the second point and then hold my mouse down and drag. See? Click, hold and drag, and then find the perfect curve for whatever you're doing. Let's do it this way. My third point, say I want to make this not a curve, I just want to do a straight line. I would hold my mouse over the last point I made until I get that slash, then press and hold alt or option, and then click. Now, I can make my straight edge. See what happened? If I want to make another curved point after this, I will click where I want and then hold and drag, make the curved point. If I wanted to make yet another curved point, I'll click and look, Photoshop's doing that natural curve which is great really helpful. So, I continue that, let go. But now, if I want to make a straight point again what do I do? I go to this last point, hold my mouse over, it stirs that slash. So now, I press "alt, option" until I get that little arrow, and now I click. Now, I can make my straight line. Now, I can keep just making any kind of thing I want by holding down, if I want to make a straight line, press that and here's my weird very strange shape. Lots of curved edges and whatnot. So, say I wanted to edit something about my shape along the way. Maybe I'm not happy with this curve here, maybe I'm not happy with this curve. That's okay, we can actually edit this and change the shape later on. So, I'm going to use my Move Tool to move it down.Do you remember our Direct Selection Tool from before? We're going to use that again for this. That's really where you can take those path points and you can manipulate them a little bit. Okay. So, if I click on my Direct Selection Tool, you can see that I have all of these path points ready to go, they're all lined up waiting for me. So, if I click one, I can move it around like so. If I click a curved path point, saying this one for instance, I get these lines here and you probably remember these lines from when we were making the shape together. These lines show you where your curve is at. So, if I grab and hold the lines, I can change the actual curve itself, quite nice and this really comes in handy as you move along. If you move it down the curve gets a little shorter and fatter and so on. Again, I can just move the point itself and that's fine too. So, I can really do a lot to edit the shape once it's finished. So, whenever you have your shape to where you think it's closed and done, it's not actually, you can go back and edit these curves and these points at anytime you'd like. Again, I can select by pressing shift the holding another point, I can select more than one point and I can move them all like so. I've never really found an actual application to do that, but I challenge you to find one, and it's a good thing to know how to do. All right. So, I highly encourage that you play around with the Pen Tool, making shapes just to get yourself familiar with the interactions, and because it's really something that you really do have to get the hang of. It's not something that comes natural to most people. So, please just work a little bit with the Pen Tool making shapes and then we'll move on to actually using the Pen Tool to make paths and we're going to cut someone out of a photo. All right.
4. Making Paths: The other wonderful thing that the Pen Tool does is make paths, and in order to make paths, that's what you need to know to cut someone out of a photo and I think that's a thing that a lot of people need to know and will come in handy pretty frequently for you as you use Photoshop. So I've started here with an image of my friend, Laura. I just opened it up into Photoshop so you can see we just have a background of Laura's photo. So first of all, to start working with the Pen Tool, I'm going to cut Laura out of the photo. Now, what we need to do first, I like to do is to make the area around Laura a little bit tighter so that my canvas is smaller, and I'm really working just on Laura. So I like to use the Crop Tool, and just crop. I'm dragging, clicking and dragging around Laura so that this area is just a little tighter and perfect. So I press enter and now I can really see Laura a little bit better. I compress Z to open the Zoom Tool click on in, and really get a good look at Laura, and now I'm pressing space, and clicking and dragging the hand around to move my canvas. All right. What we need to do next is click points around Laura's body, to just trace along Laura, go all the way around her, and then we'll make that path, and then we'll delete the background, and we'll mask it out. Again, I'm using masks rather than just deleting the background from Laura because I might want to go up and touch up later on. All right. So let's start off by copying Laura here, dragging her down to new layer to copy Laura's layers. So I'm going to call this Laura Copy. Next step is to bring up the Pen Tool. So let's press P or click the Pen Tool over in our toolbar. Then as you see from before, we have two options, we can do a shape or a path, and now we've done shape before. We don't want to actually make a sheep around Laura. That would be bad. Let's just make a path. All right. So I like to really zoom on in when I'm tracing around people because it's really a detail oriented thing you're doing and you really need to be able to see what you're doing really well. So I'm going to press Z to bring up that Zoom Tool and I'm going to zoom on in. I think this might be too far because I actually like to be able to see up here a little bit while I'm doing my working and see more of her arm. So I'm going to press alt option and zoom out a little bit. That's perfect. Now, I need to grab my Pen Tool and just start doing it. I like to start in the bottom left-hand corner and then go clockwise around the person that I'm coming out in the photo. But it's really up to you if you'd rather start at any other point, that's absolutely fine. I will be starting down here though at the very bottom left. I need to bring up my Pen Tool first. So I'm going to go over to my Pen Tool on the toolbar or press P, to go to the Pen Tool and select that. As you remember from before, the Pen Tool does shape and it does paths. We did shape last time and we don't really want to make shapes again. So let's go to path, and that's all we need to have for making this path around Laura to begin with. Let's just start, all right? So I'm going to start again at this bottom left hand corner, and there's a slight curve here. So I'm going to click onto the next part of the end of the curve and then just make a very slight curve and I kind of can't see because this is too small. So I'm just going to hope for the best, and if we need to edit this later, we can. All right. So there's my curve. Now, this is not a curve. This is more of a straight line. So as we decided before, I need to click on this last point, hover over, wait until I see that slash. Now press alt option and then click on that point. So, now, I can make either my own curve or I can make a straight line depending on the shape than I'm tracing over. All right. So I just didn't want that Photoshop natural curve that it gives me. I want my own curve. So this is just slightly, ever so slightly curved. All right. So I actually like to press alt option and stop the natural curve on everything because it's very seldom when I need to use that natural curve. So I just have it as a habit of always pressing alt option on my last point. It's up to you on whether you like the natural curve. I personally never use it up to you again. So I pressed it here on my last point and so now I'm going to make my own curve. It's just never that you're dealing with something that's as natural as Photoshop's natural curve is. So I don't ever use it. I like to do that every time and then make my own curves. Again, this is a huge practicing thing that you need to do to know that how to use the Pen Tool. It takes a lot of practice to understand how this intuitively works. At anytime after you've made your last point, you can move your canvas around by just pressing space bar which temporarily brings up the handle and then click and drag. So it will go automatically back to your Pen Tool once you stop pressing space as you can see that I'm doing, and then you can continue. So I clicked on my last point. Now, I'm going up to here on her arm. There's no curve here, and then I'll click and drag to make a curve. Let go, and now I need to go over this t-shirt sleeve a little bit. So, again, I'll hover over my last point, press down alt option until I get that little arrow, click, and then I'll go around. This is too small for me to actually tell what's going on. So I'm just going to click here, just a straight line, and now I'll go up to the top of the t-shirt sleeve, click, drag to make my curve, let go, hold it over, press alt option click. Then this is really tiny again, so I'm just going to click the straight line and so on. Click hold and drag to find the curve, just a slight curve. Hover my mouse over that, press alt option and click. Again over this little curve, click and drag, hold alt option and click. Now, I can see that it's messed up there a little bit. I was a bit off right here. So I'm going to go through and edit that later. Click. I'm going to press space bar to move the canvas around. Now, the trickiest part to deal with cutting someone out of a photo is absolutely the hair. I recommend going around the hair as much as you can if you have flyways, depending on the size of the fly away if it's a small hair. Cut it out, just don't pretend it exists. Laura's hair is pretty smooth. There's this area over here which I will not be going around. I'll just cut right through it, and we'll just pretend that it was never there. There are a lot of advanced tricks you need to know with hair, and dealing with hair and I'll try to upload some tutorials for you later on. For now, let's just keep on tracking. We're in double down alt option and click. You're just going to make this curve here by clicking and holding and dragging. Hold my mouse over, press alt option, and then just keep on going around the hair, and this is so intricate and difficult. For me even still, I have a hard time with this, and again, we can edit this later because we'll be using masks. So no big deal if you mess up along the way. It's absolutely fine. Do you guys think you have hang of with Pen Tool yet? Obviously, it's going to take some practice, but I hope that by now you get the fundamental challenges here of just holding your mouse over, pressing alt option every time, and then just keep on clicking, holding and dragging to make more curves. It's really very challenging to learn, and I apologize if I'm going too quickly. Hopefully, I'm not. You are just watching me do this. I'm sure it is really helpful for a lot of you. Okay. So, I am going to continue to trace around Laura, and I will be back once I finished with that. All right, I just made my final point down here in the lower right hand corner of Laura. So, I need to reconnect the shape and finish the entire path, all right? So, to do that, I need to hold down "alt, option" on my final point click, just to make sure that doesn't give me a natural curve down here. That wouldn't be good. Then I just go as I would with a shape back to my original point, until I see that circle and click. Now, we have a finished finalized path around Laura. All right. So, I'm going to zoom out now. Go to the zoom tool, and then hold down "alt, option" and zoom on out, just so that I can see everything I've done. Now, I can see all of these wonderful points, and make note of the progress that I've made. Good job me, and good job you guys. All right. So, we need to make that marching ants line that goes around Laura. We do that by going over to our paths window which we haven't really dealt with yet. Click on "Paths". Now, we see this work path. The path is these little points that we've made all around Laura as you remember when we selected up here, either shape or path. Now, we have our path right here. So, in order to turn these path lines into marching ants, we go down in the paths window and click on this dotted circle line down here. Just click on that, and now we have those marching ants, quite simple. All right. So, whenever we have those marching ants, we go back over to layers, we make sure that our Laura copy layer is selected and then we just simply click on the mask icon. It's that easy. Alright. So, I'm sure you're wondering what happened because it looks like nothing happened. That's just because we have the copy of Laura on top of the background layer that's the same thing. So, let's just make a fill layer right in between the two. In order to do that, I'm going to click on the background, go to our black and white cookie icon down here, click on it, and do a solid color. Let's just choose whatever color you like. I'm going to go with maybe a light pink for now. Up to you which color you choose. Obviously, let's go back into the color picker. If I go a darker color, you can kind of see where I've messed up, and not quite meet it as much, and you can see the white around Laura. So, I think it's a little smarter if you choose something that blends in better with your subject and makes your work look a little bit better. But again, we can perfect this later on. So, it's okay, you can choose a darker color if you'd like. I'm pretty happy with this color for now. I'll press okay, and go back to Laura copy. I'm going to proceed "Z" to zoom, and click on in zoom in, and I'm going to try to fix up some of these imperfections in my pen tool skills. Okay. So, I'm noticing right here for instance, needs some help. If I click and drag down, I never made it to this, so I need to do this as well, and I think I'll start off right here. We might as well show you another way of using selections and making paths with Photoshop that's different from the pen tool, and that's using these lasso tools. So, I can make the same kind of pass that I made with the pen tool using lassos. But we're not actually editing Laura's photo anymore actually using this mask. So, I need to make sure that the mask is selected rather than Laura's beautiful face, okay? So, my mask is selected, and I'll go over to these tools over here. We have a few that we can use, the lasso tool, the polygonal lasso tool, and the magnetic lasso tool. Since I have a pretty high contrast area of white and dark, I can actually use this magnetic Lasso tool to my advantage this time. So, I'm going to click on that and you're about to see something magical happened. So, I click on my top point, and watch. I'm not clicking or holding anything, I'm literally just tracing, moving my mouse down Laura's arm here, and it's making those points for me. It's so easy and fast. I'm noticing that is not really latching on and anything down here, so if it doesn't- oops, there it goes. If it doesn't latch on to anything, you can just click and it will make a point for you, okay? So, I'm tracing and tracing and tracing around this area. Here, it's not really making a point, so I'm going to click. There, I made my own point for me, and I'm just tracing and tracing and tracing. Okay. So, I've made it back to the beginning, have that little circle there. Now, I just click, and I have my marching ants ready to go. Okay. So now, I'm sure you're wondering how do we get rid of this Laura bit here and show the pink behind it. Since we have our mask selected, I just need to bring up my paintbrush by pressing "B" for boy or just clicking the brush tool, and It's pretty big. So, if you remember, we can change the size of our brush by going up here into our tool options, and sizing it down quite a bit. I'm sorry, that was hardness. Hardness makes it harder or softer around the edge, but I want to size it down. Okay. So now, it's quite a bit smaller. All right, I can get out of there. Now, I want to make sure that black is selected because I'm erasing Laura's background but not really. I'm not really erasing it, I'm just erasing it in the mask. So, in order to make something not appear on our mask, I paint it with black. If I wanted to make it appear, I would paint it white. Okay? So, I have my black selected, my brushes is up. Now, I'm just going to paint over that area. Now, that area of Laura is gone and we can see our pink background behind it, beautiful. Okay. So, we still have our marching ants though and I want to get rid of those. In order to do that, I just do command D. Now, our marching ants are gone. So, I'll press "Z", hold down "alt option" to zoom out. Although my hand to moved around my canvas, and I can really see what I just did there, and I think it looks quite nice. Same goes for if I was editing out some of these areas over here, zoom on in. I could just have free form, use the brush if I wanted to since these shapes are a little abstract. So, if I go and make sure my mask is selected, grab my brush over here, size the brush down considerably. Even more, maybe just a pixel or two. Let's go, two pixels. Now that I have my black color selected down here, I could just kind of free paint, and then erasing Laura's hair and showing the pink ground behind it. That pink background is really showing through now, so I can kind of go through some of these areas and free brush around here and get really meticulous, which is really a very important part about using and understanding the pen tool. So, I'm noticing some areas around the edge that I didn't quite get, which is fine and dandy. Now, if you want something to just subtly show through but not quite all the way, you can always move down your opacity on your brush to where it's a little bit transparent. That way, you have a little bit more freedom with what you're doing. Okay? So, I'm going to click the "Z" to zoom. Press "alt option" to zoom out, and then zoom out and take a look at what I did. You'll notice these areas are pretty harsh around Laura in the background. It's quite a high contrast between the sharp line of Laura's hair and the background. There's something we can do about this. We can go up into our properties window that we always have ready to go, and we can up the feather. That just makes the pixels kind of blur around Laura, around our mask, so that we can kind of see it a little softer rather than having those harsh edges. As you see, as I'm bringing feather up, she's getting blurrier and it looks pretty bad. But if we do this subtly, I think it looks quite natural and nice. So, if I bring this to maybe two pixels or so, it's just as nice subtle soft edge that we have on Laura, which looks a little bit more gentle to the eye than anything else. I think I liked two pixels, okay? So then, that's good. I pressed enter to submit that. Now I can exit out of my properties. But in order to do that feathering, I need to make sure that I still have that mask selected, okay? It looks like we have Laura cut out of our image now. Now, that we have our mask here, at anytime, we could delete our mask completely, and we would still have the entirety of Laura's photo intact. Or if you want to add more of the background in, you could simply just make sure your mask is selected, bring up your white color here and then use your B brush, size it up a little bit more, and we can literally bring the background back by painting over here. This is so faint because I have my opacity down to 33 percent, but I bumped it up. I can really just paint through my whole background and bring Laura's photo back. See how the background is showing up again? It's really that easy. Everything is quite nice in that regard with using masks. All right. Let's move on to typography, fun part.
5. Intro to Typography: Working with typography is one of my favorite things to do inside of Photoshop. Adding type to your composition is so important, and using the right technique is key to perfecting your design. I'll show you guys the ins and outs of the type features in Photoshop, and give you some advanced techniques while I'm at it.
6. Typography: It's finally time to start talking about typography which I really love working with in Photoshop. To work with typography, we need to go and bring up some of our type layer windows. So if we go to window, we need to find the one that says character. Okay. So there's character and there's paragraph. If you just click on character, it's going to bring up both. You'll get character and paragraph. Now, and just to show you a little bit around this window. We have over here are all of our fonts, and you'll notice that I have quite a few more fonts than maybe you do by default, and that's okay because I'm a professional designer and I'm buying fonts and finding new fonts daily and weekly. Okay. So, that's okay. I'll show you where I get my fonts most of the time right now. So, if we open up my browser here, we have two sites that I would highly recommend and I'll put them into your resources. First of all, it's Font Squirrel, and these fonts are all free, which is really nice. But the thing about free fonts is that they're usually not crafted as well as the fonts that you have to pay for. Sometimes they are, but usually they're not. I would highly recommend that you get better quality fonts that you're actually paying for, and to do so, I always go to myfonts.com, and you can search by what are the hot fonts are right now. They have popular tags down here for you to search for fonts, and whenever you find a font, you can simply just purchase and download it right here in my fonts, and you'll see some fonts are more expensive than others. I usually buy fonts by weight. So, I just buy one weight that I like the most at a time which is this one's about $35. It's not too unreasonable. But if you bought the whole package, it gets kind of pricey, it's $494. Up to you what you want to do. If you'd rather just purchase some free fonts for this class especially, go right ahead. All right, let's go back to Photoshop, and start working with some type. So, I'm going to pick one of my favorite fonts. Doesn't matter which one. You can use whatever you'd like. I personally really like the font Brandon Grotesque. That's my favorite font. It's quite nice. Highly recommend it. But you probably don't have that font on your computer, and that's okay, you can use whatever font you like. So, to bring on my type tool which is over here in my toolbar. I just click it or press T easy as that, just press T, and I can just click anywhere on my canvas and start typing something. I'm sure you're wondering why it's not showing up and that's simply because I have a color of white selected by default and I want to change that. Now, if I click the color and change it now, my font's not actually going to change because I have the cursor at the end. So, what it would be trying to do is change anything I type from now on into red, which we don't want. We want to do the whole thing. So I can either select it all by clicking and dragging like I would with text on a page paragraph, or I can just click away, go back to my move tool. Move it around. I'm sure you can't see them moving around, and then change the color to red that way. All right. So, by default, let's just show you what some of these things do. I'm going to type a little bit more though. Okay. So, I'm going to press return Enter and then type something else. Enter. Type something else. A little typo there, sorry. Perfect. Okay. So, I go back to my move tool and I can move this type around, and as you'll notice, I have some other settings over here in my character window. I have size which is simply just the size of my type, I can resize it. This here is how big the spacing between each of these lines of rows of text R. So if I do auto, it gives you a nice arrangement here of how they Photoshopped things it will look nicest. I can up that or down it. My type is 60 points, so you always want it to be at least that or higher. So, 60 or higher. So, if I do 100 point, you can see that's really spaced out. But if I do 60 point, it's pretty tight and it's just too where it's touching. Because that number matches the number of the size of my font. Okay. This one over here is letter spacing. So, if I do 100, you can see that the letters are each spaced out pretty far apart. If I do a negative number, you can see that they're smashed up together. Pretty nice. Okay. If I click this, it takes it to bold, makes the text bold. But it's faux bold. It's just adding some extra color around it. It's not actually the bold version of the font. Okay. Just so you know. This is italic and again, this is faux italic. So, if you didn't buy an italic version of a font, you can just do faux italic, and if you didn't buy the bold version of a font, you can just do faux bold. But a lot of times, this really doesn't look very good so be very careful when using this. Next up, we have all caps which if you type something and you want to turn it into caps, you could do that. Thing that I like to do is to make it really small. So if I did like 24, and then I like to space it out apart at about a 100, and I think that looks kind of nice sometimes for headlines for designs. All right. So, that's it for just typing. We can underline, we can cross through. Clicking these on applies all of those things which is helpful. Okay. So as we move on, let's make some paragraphs. I'm going to delete this first. In order to make paragraphs, I need to go back to my type tool by pressing T or selecting it over here in the toolbar, and I just click and drag, and now I can type something inside this box. Okay. Something else. All right. So that's just how we make paragraphs. Now, if I click and drag this box around, I can resize and the text will format automatically. If I go over to my paragraph window, you can see there are a few formatting things. But first, in order to format, I need to go back to the move tool and then I can format to do a centered aligned, right aligned, I can do justified. All sorts of things. By default, Photoshop turns things on the hyphenate. So, if something's running off the line, it has to move on to the next. It will hyphenate that for you. I like to usually turn it off. But it depends on a case-by-case basis. By default, it looks like it's on, so you can keep it on if you want. Now, if we're dealing with larger bodies of text, I'm going to make my paragraph box a little larger. Click away. Make my text just a little bit smaller. That's way too small, let's go 24. All right. So, I'm going to highlight this and delete it. Now, something that's Creative Cloud has, also I believe CS6 has, but earlier versions of Photoshop do not have is this type Paste Lorem Ipsum. So, I'm going to do that now, and then it just paste in a lot of Greek and Latin text called Lorem Ipsum, and this is just text that looks like English but isn't actually because it really looks nice for designs that you don't necessarily have text or copy for. It's great. As you can see, it's hyphenating a little bit there. So, if I turned hyphenate off, it will stop doing that for me. Up to you again if you want an on, and then I can change my paragraph styles this way, and make it look quite nice. Again, I can move this around. I could go back over to character, I could change the size, make it plenty bigger. Make the spacing in between the rows higher. Let's go 200 even. Can make it really high, or we could just do auto which is where it would look quite nice. We could go back over to paragraph, we could uncheck hyphenate, go over to character, make everything caps, make everything not caps. All kinds of stuff that you can do with the character and the paragraph window in Photoshop. Something else that you might need to know in Photoshop with dealing with type is if we have more type tools locked in. You can see up here again that we have a lot of tool options. Okay, and these are really important because they do a lot of interesting things. Again, we have quick paragraph things which we can change how our text is aligned, left, centered, or right. We have something over here called anti-aliasing, and this is just how our letters appear solely in Photoshop. So, if I was wanting to make them look stronger or smoother, I could do that and there are these presets, and you'll see that if you're using different fonts this really really looks different on different fonts. So, I always like to make sure that I have this set on whatever looks best. You can see if I put none, it does look a little strange. So I think I would really like to the original setting which was sharp. But again, each font is different and behaves different with this anti-aliasing feature. So, it's up to you to kind of select the one that you think looks best for whatever font you're using. Again, I can use this font size up here as well which is helpful. I can change the font that I'm using specifically. Here, we have kind of a funny feature which is toggling the orientation of the text, so if I click it, you can see that the text is going this way randomly which I never need my text to go this way but you do have that option if you need to, and you can quickly toggle back and forth with this or texts toggle orientation button. Lastly, we have this warp text button and which creates warped text. So, in order to show you that, I'm just going to do one simple line of text. I will delete this text I have here and just type something here. Go back to my move tool and kind of move this into the center of my window with Photoshop canvas here. Okay. So, if I just need to go back to the type tool and then go to create warp text. So now, I get this warp text window, and I'm just going to kind of slide it over here, and I can select all of these funny thing so I can do a text. I specifically like arc or arch because I think it can be used subtly. If you see it just by default goes to 50. But if you do something a little subtle like 6 or 10 even, it just as a nice a little bit of an arc. Again, there are other things that we can do here and these are really fun to play around with. But they generally kind of make things look like Microsoft Office in the '90s. So be very, very careful with what you do with warping texts and proceed with caution for sure. But that is how you do the warp text trick. I think that's it for creating texts in Photoshop. It's all really easy and fun to do. I really highly encourage that you play along with changing your fonts, changing your sizes, and doing some warping tricks and seeing what happens. I can't wait to see what you do with your final project.
7. Final Greeting Card Project: It is now time to put everything we just learned together into a greeting card for a friend or relative. All right. So I think I would like to start with the Photoshop file that I have from earlier of Laura that I cut out. I'm really just going to create my greeting card around this file. Okay, first of all, this isn't really the shape of a greeting card. I realized some greeting cards are probably square, but I think that I want to make mine a little bit more rectangular and taller. In order to do that, I need to go to image, canvas size, and make my canvas size just a little bit differently shaped. All right. Change from inches to pixels is important, because I am a pixel minded person, and always thinking in pixels since we're designing for the screen. If you want to print your card, I would recommend designing in inches, and designing in a format of actual inches, you who really want your card printed in. But since I will just be showing this to Laura on the screen, this is all good. All right. So I want the width to be about 800 pixels and the height to be I'd say a 1,000 pixels. You'll see that that's actually smaller than what I already had because my image sides for Laura was pretty big, and that's okay. I'll press okay. Photoshop gives me a little warning that says, "The new canvas size is smaller and some clipping will occur." That's okay. I'll just say proceed. So, as you can see, it's clipping Laura, and I don't want that. So, I just need to resize Laura a little bit. Do you remember how to do that? We go Command T to bring up that transforming box. Now, I can resize her, but I need to make sure that I hold down shift, because that keeps her proportions while I'm moving, and it makes sure that she's not going to be worked or funny-looking. Okay. So I just need to keep holding down shift and drag, and transform Laura into a size I think is nice for this project. I think this is good. So, I'm going to double-click in here or press enter and, now we're golden. So, we can zoom on in, and start adding some other elements to this with Laura. The next step is to add some type onto the card, that just says, "Happy birthday." You can write whatever message you'd like. I'm going to go up to the top of my card by pressing and holding space bar, so that my hand appears, and then clicking and dragging. Okay, so let's add some text. Let's just say, "Happy Birthday Laura." So, I kind of want the text to format nicely within this card. So, I'm going to start off by doing T for type, and then clicking and dragging this little box here. Then I can type right in here, I can say, "Happy birthday." You can see that the text is way too big. So, I typed it all, but I can't quite see it. So, I need to click away from my Type Tool, go back to move. Then go over to my character, and my paragraph window, and kind of make some adjustments here. So, if I go to character, I can change the size, and I definitely need to make it smaller. That looks a little too small, let's go a little larger, maybe 30. That looks nice. I think that's good for now. I think I want to change the color from red to let's go white. So, I would just click here on the color and select white. That looks nice. If I wanted to, I could make it go over her face. I could also apply some things to the image to make Laura look a little lighter, but I think that all is really good right now. I'm pretty happy with it. Now, I think I actually wanted to just say, happy birthday and have Laura going up and down on the side here. So, let's erase by pressing T back to our Type Tool. Let's erase Laura, and we'll just do, "Happy birthday." Okay, now I can kind of drag this up, it doesn't really matter, but I just like things to be nice and clean. I'll go back to my Move Tool. Now, I have a little bit more room to make my font size larger. So, I will go back to character, and runs this up to 36. That's good. It's going across her face, which is just a personal preference thing. You might not like that, but I think it looks okay. All right. So now I need to do some texts that goes all the way up to the top and the bottom of the card. In order to do that, I kind of would rather like to see the actual entire card at once. So, I will go to Z or press Zoom Tool over here, and do Fit Screen, which fits the card to the screen exactly. See that, really nice. So, what I need to do now is type Laura's name. So, I'm just going to press the T for Type Tool, and I click over here. Click, type Laura. Perfect, but I actually want this to be larger, and in all caps. So, what I'm going to do first is go to my character window, and do the all caps button. Beautiful, and then I wanted to be quite larger, and I wanted to be going down the side. So, I need to rotate it a bit. There are a couple ways I can do that. I can just have Laura selected in my layers. Press Command T, and then rotate this, while holding shift to get it to go that direction. Or, if I just go backwards, I can go to Edit, Transform, Rotate 90 Degrees clockwise, and that will do the same thing. Up to you which way you prefer. So, it's kind of blending in with this white color. So, I think I'm just going to change the color of Laura, so that I can see it better. In order to do that, I go back to my character window, select Color. Now, first I'll sample this pink color, so that I can make sure it's like a pink color, but darker. Now, I'm just going to grab a darker pink. That's nice. I think that works well. So, now I just want it to be filling this entire height of the card. In order to do that, I can either change the font size here or I can go back to command T to bring up the transform box. Then press shift, click and drag, and do it that way. Really up to you how you prefer. I like it this way. I think I kind of want it to be a little down here. So, I'm gonna just resize it. I think that looks nice, and so I will press enter. Great. Okay, last but not least, there are a couple of more things I want to do. I want the text to just have an outline of this dark pink color, rather than actually being filled with the dark pink color. So, the first thing I need to do is save my pink color. I can do that in one or two ways. I can either go over here, and select this color here. Use the color picker, and press OK. Then, stay with me. Go to my swatches window, and create a new swatch of that color. I can name it Laura Pink, and there it is in my swatches saved for later. Or, I can simply just bring up this color picker, and copy the color value here, and just do Command C, and copy it for later, so that I can paste it in. Up to you which one you'd prefer to use. Okay, so in order to get that stroke around Laura, the border that is around each letter, I just need to first of all take the fill down to zero percent. So, right now the fill, which is what we have filling our letters, it's at 100 percent, because we can see it at 100 percent on the way. I just need it to be completely transparent, to take it down to zero because we are going to be adding a stroke. The opposite of a fill is a stroke. The fill is the inside and the stroke is what you see on the outside. We don't have a stroke yet, but we will be applying one. In order to apply one, you just double-click on Laura's text layer, and go to Stroke. Make sure it's checked, and already you can see that I have a stroke applied. This is where we need our pink color back. So, I can grab the color, change the color from black. I can either paste in the value here, because I copied it, or I can go over to my swatches, and select it there, and press OK. All right. So it's looking a little bubbly now, because the stroke went on the outside, and has made things look a little bit more rounded than they are. So, I just want to change it to inside instead. Now, you can see it's a little less bubbly than it was before. It is set on three pixels for our stroke size. I can bump that up to five, or I could take it down. It's up to me, up to you. I like it at five, so I'll press OK. That looks really nice. I'm pretty happy with that. Now, I can rearrange my layers, by dragging them around. I could put Laura behind Laura herself. I can put it in front of Laura, but behind birthday. It really doesn't matter, but that's how you kind of orient things on top of one another. So, if I want to add like a natural looking shadow to Laura herself, to where it looks like she's actually sitting in front of the background, I can do that by double-clicking on this Laura layer, and bringing up the layer styles again. Now, I can do a drop shadow. As you can see, the drop shadow is actually going off of Laura over here, which I don't want. I kind of want it filling up this white space on the right hand side. So, let's just move our layer style over, and then change the angle of our actual shadow. As you notice, when I'm changing the angle, it's kind of moving the shadow around. So, I just have to find an angle that I like. I think I really like, just about this angle, 142 works fine. So, now I just need to play with the distance of the shadow and then the size of the shadow. I think I quite like something a little bit like that may be, but it's a little too harsh. It looks really fake right now. So, let's just bump down the opacity to something much lower, let's go 15, to where the shadow is just very subtle. Not very noticeable, but I think that it's a nice subtle attribute to the card. That just shows that we're paying attention to detail. Perfect. Okay, so I think my card is done, and I'm pretty happy with how it looks. I encourage you guys to go and make your own cards. Cut your own friends and family out of photos, and make a card for them. They are going to be so happy with the card, and they're just going to love you forever for it. But I'm going to check back, and look at all the projects are very frequently, and look at your progress. If you have any questions, be sure to put them into the class discussion Q and A feed, and I will take a look. If I can't answer your questions, which I'm not technically supposed to, but I will have a look every now and again. If I can't answer your questions, please pop in and answer your classmates questions and give feedback on your classmates projects because it's really great to have such a fostering community of creators, making these cards, and giving positive and critical feedback on each other's cards. Okay, but I will be taking a look at all of your projects, and I can't wait to see what you do. Thanks for taking this class, and hopefully I'll see you in the next class.
8. More Creative Classes on Skillshare:
Meg Lewis, Designer, comedian, performer
