Transcripts
1. Introduction: Have you ever wondered how to make beautiful package mock-ups for your portfolio or maybe to show to a client if you've got a really nice design and now you want to make it look real without having to spend thousands of dollars to make a whole box, get printed up like this guy here? This is a beautiful box. It's a package that I made a long time ago, but the project was over $30,000 to print. You can bet that before we actually push print on this project, I had some mock-ups and I was able to show the client exactly what it'd look like before we went to press. Hi, my name is Derrick Mitchell and I am a creative director. I have, I think over 20 years of experience now. It's going by so fast. I've been fortunate enough to work with all kinds of brands like MTV, Netflix, Nintendo, Discovery Channel, and a handful of others. We're going to go through a few different things. First, I'm going to show you how to save time and work really fast with some premium templates. You'll be able to download these resources in the Downloads file and follow along with me. You'll be able to learn how to quickly apply different branding elements, whether that's logos or fonts or colors to this package template. Then you can use that again to show to your client or to upload to your portfolio. Then, I'm going to show you how to deconstruct those templates so you can create your own custom templates. This is helpful for a couple of ways. One, maybe you don't want to spend money buying your own templates, you just want to learn how to do it from scratch. I'm going to show you that. Two, maybe you want to sell those templates in places like in Envato Elements or Adobe Stock or other places where you can sell digital assets. That's another thing you can do with this course. Then last, what we're going to do is learn how to create 3D renders of products using Adobe Dimension. I'll show you why and the pros and cons of why you'd use Adobe Dimension over Adobe Photoshop. Most of this course, we're going to be working in Photoshop and I can't wait to get going, so please feel free to jump in. Let's get started and I can't wait to see you in the course.
2. Welcome to the Course!: Thank you so much for joining this course. I'm super pumped to welcome you here, and we have a lot of fun things to dive into. But before we get started, I'd want to remind you that there are assets for you to follow along, so be sure to check the link. There should be a link below somewhere, and you can download everything that we do in this course to follow along and create your own beautiful packaging mockup as well. Thanks again for joining. Can't wait to dive in, let's get started.
3. Understanding Mockups vs. Press Ready Files: In this video, I want to talk about the difference between a packaging mock-up and an actual press-ready or print-ready file. To be clear, in this course, we are going to be creating mock-ups. The intention of a mock-up is to show a client exactly what your project might look like in press or maybe to show off your portfolio and stuff that you've worked on. The purpose of this course again is to create a mock-up. We are not going to be starting from scratch to create a package design. Let me show you the difference just so we're clear. I'm in Illustrator right right and this is a package design that I made for a client. This is how you would set up a real press-ready file. This design has guides and it has all kinds of stuff on here. When you work on a project like this, you want to work with a printer from the very, very beginning. Before I designed anything, I reached out to a few different printers who do packaging design and I got a template from them. Once I got the files and I knew the exact dimensions, then I started laying out my design and designing everything. When it's all said and done, you get a pallet with all these cardboard boxes and they're all flat, and this is how it looks. This was a matte black project with a metallic foil overlay, really, really cool stuff. Then when it folds all up, basically just a box, nothing too crazy. This project though, because of the finishing and the size and the quantity ordered, was over $30,000 to produce. That is something where you don't want to make a mistake, you don't want to jump in and hope it looks like you want it to. You want to be very, very clear when you're working with your clients. That is packaging design. That is a very, very, very brief intro to the process. You get the template, you design some stuff, and then you get it back and ta-dah. That's obviously way beyond the scope of this course. What we're going to be doing is we are going to be creating a mock-up so that way we can show off our work. Here's another example. This would be something where we download a template, and we drop in our artwork, and we make it look real even though it hasn't been produced yet. Now lets you understand the difference between a mock-up and an actual press-ready file. We're going to dive in a little bit further and we're going to look at some different templates to get us started. The reason why I want to start with a template is because, I want to show you that in the design world, it's okay to use templates. You can use templates to quickly get projects done and to quickly share an idea. We're going to look at that but we're also going to use these templates as a way to reverse engineer how they are created. That way, you can create your own mock-up templates. Doing that is important for a couple of reasons. One, you can create anything you want at that point. In this case, this long box that I have here, there is no mock-up like this that I have seen that's this long in the marketplace, so I'm going to have to make my own. The second reason is you can create your own digital assets and resell them on places like Adobe Stock or Envato Elements. There's lots of really great online libraries filled with stock assets. You can contribute to that and use that as a way to make additional income. How to do that is a little bit beyond the scope of this course. But you'll at least know how to create your own editable mock-ups with Smart Objects for an easy way to create your own mock-ups and rinse and repeat those templates for multiple different brands. Then once we do that, we'll show you how to create your own custom assets, your own custom mock-ups. Then we're going to jump into Adobe Dimension and learn a little bit about 3D. That way, you can create packaging from any angle. We're going to talk a little bit more about how you can use Photoshop to create these realistic mock-ups, or why you'd want to jump into Dimension and do it in 3D. There's pros and cons to both, and we're going to get into that here in a little bit. If you're excited to dive in, finally, let's go ahead and take a look at some templates and get started in our packaging mock-ups.
4. Starting with and Finding Templates: Welcome back. In this video, I want to show you where I find my premium assets and why would you want to consider working with a template in the first place. After all, as a graphic designer, shouldn't you be able to start everything from scratch and shouldn't everything start from a blank Canvas? Well, maybe, maybe if you're trying to create something really high-end, but honestly, as a graphic designer or as a freelancer, this is a career, this is a business, so we want to find a way to work efficiently. I'm going to show you some of the templates that I use and once we get through that, we're also going to take a look at how to reverse and engineer these. But first things first, let's just dive in and see where we can find these mythical templates that I talk about. I'm in Envato Elements, if you go to elements.envato.com, it's a really great library filled with all digital assets. At the top, I just searched for packaging mockup, and I'm in the graphic templates category. There's lots of different categories from music to video to photos, all great stuff, I highly recommend checking out Envato Elements. I'm searching for packaging mockup and as I scroll through here, you can see there are a lot of things to choose from. I'll keep scrolling through and we're going to pick something out here in just a minute, but before we get too far, the other place I want to show you is Adobe Stock. If I go to stock.adobe.com, I can do the same thing, I can type in packaging mockup, and I can search for different templates. As I scroll through here, you can see there's also a lot of options. But before we get too far down the road, one thing I want to point out is, I don't want to have to try and recreate anything right now, I just want a quick template that I can apply my artwork too. Something to watch out for is not all of these are editable. Let's click on this one just to see, for example, if I scroll down, I can see that this is an Illustrator EPS file and a JPEG. That tells me that it is editable. If I were to buy this template, I would have the option to open this up in Illustrator and modify it. Some of these templates though, as I scroll through, let me see here. If I click on this one, you can see this one is also an Illustrator file and a JPEG, that's great. Let's keep looking a little bit more. How about these guys right here? If I click on these bottles, this is just a JPEG. It's going to be a flat image and it's going to be up to me to photoshop in and basically create a composite image with branding. If I put a label on, I need to warp it and make it look real. What we want to do is, we're going to come up here to the filters on the left-hand side, I'm going to open this up, I'm going to change this from all to just templates. Then what I'm going to do is, if I scroll down a little bit, you can see that I can choose which app. We're looking for a photoshop app granted there should be some great Illustrator and InDesign, templates as well, but I'm pretty sure that I want to be working exclusively with photoshop templates. Now that I've got those filter selected, if I scroll down, pretty much any one of these templates that I look at should be editable. Let's say I click on this one right here, and if I scroll down, you can see sure enough the file type is a PSD template file. This is for use with photoshop, this is great. That means that if I license this and I download it, I should be able to open this up in photoshop and throw in my own logo and my own colors and everything should update as I would expect. The reason why I'm taking so long to tell you this is, if you're buying templates from Adobe Stock, every license cost money is between $3-5 per download, depending on the licensing subscription level you're at. That's fine, it's a great asset and spending $3-5 to save you probably two hours of time is an amazing shortcut, so I highly recommend it. But, you don't want to download an asset and then realize that it's not editable and it's only a JPEG, so that's just something to watch for when you're downloading from Adobe Stock. Now, back into Envato Elements, we have different packaging mockups and the same thing. You might download something and it's a flat JPEG and is not editable. Well, in Envato Elements is not a big deal because you are spending a flat rate subscription every month to have unlimited downloads. If you download an asset and it doesn't quite fit your needs or you open it up and you change your mind, you can just go download another one one it doesn't really matter. That's the biggest difference between these two libraries, is your approach to downloading assets, as well as depending on the category you're in, you might find more options on one versus the other. But I always look in both of these and just pick my favorite template. Now, that you have a better understanding of what to watch out for when you're downloading template files and purchasing different stock assets, in the next video, we're going to take a look at some of these and I'll show you how easy it is to drop in your own artwork and create beautiful mockups.
5. Working Fast With Templates: In this lesson, we're going to learn how to work quickly within a template. If you want to follow along, go ahead and jump into the exercise files and grab example_1.psd. When we open that up, you can see here we have this box with a hanging tag or hang tab over the top of it here. I'm going to quickly just reset my workspace. I'm under the essentials design space. Let's go ahead and click "Reset essentials." See, you and I are seeing the same thing here. Now that I've got that reset, I'm going to get my layers window and just pull it over here so I can see everything in one place. Let's just go ahead and quickly jump in and I'll explain what I'm doing as I go. One thing to point out is that I don't think I've ever seen a template that looks the same as another as far as the layers inside of here. Every time you download a template from a different artist, they're all going to have a different workflow. They'll all function a little bit differently. Sometimes, you might have to look and see if there's any help documentation to update it, and other times, you just have to click around and see what's going on. In this case, it's pretty clear that they intend for me to place the artwork right here. Sometimes if you get lost, an easy way to try and click around and find where the layers are is to get your Move tool selected over here, and then make sure you have Auto-select selected in the Options bar and that you're selecting just the layer. Now, if I click around anywhere on this template, typically, it would jump to whatever layer, but you can see we have an adjustment layer over the top of everything. That doesn't work so good in this example, but that's one way that you could click around and try and discover what's going on. Let's go ahead and start updating this first. What I'm going to do is start with the right panel here, this guy, because I want to show you how this works. Basically we have four smart objects at the top, and they have cloned the smart objects down here as well. What happens is when I update this in one place, all of the smart objects that are linked update across the whole document. Let's just jump in and see how that looks. Let's grab this right panel here. I'm going to double-click on this little thumbnail here to open up the Smart Object. You'll notice we have our original file here and that opened up a new tab for the SmartObject. Let's just keep it simple. I can throw in the logo from my graphic design boot-camp course. Let's throw that in here, maybe scale it down a little bit. I hit "Return" and then I'll just save that, and I'll go ahead and close the SmartObject, and you can see that it brought in that artwork, but it scaled it for me. You'll also notice we clicked in here but technically this layer isn't visible, so how are we able to see that when that's unchecked? Well, again, it updated this smart object as well as the smart object down here, and some transformations were applied. We're going to learn a little bit more about that in a couple of videos. We're going to learn how to recreate all of this ourselves. But for now, let's just look at how to quickly update this. As I expose template further, I can see that I've got this layer called box color, so if I click on this, and let's say I just fill it real fast, I'm going to hit the keyboard shortcut, Option and Delete, which will fill it with my foreground color. You can also go to edit down to fill, but I've already done that, so it's not available right now. Anyway, this particular template already has a place for me to update the entire base with one keyboard shortcut. Again, not all templates are made equal. They all don't have this feature. Sometimes you have to click around and explore. For example, let's say that didn't work. I'll come back into my template here on the right. Maybe I needed to fill the color on my own. Let's just grab a different color here. Let's click back in this. Let's make a new layer just above it, and we'll fill it, save it, and I'll close it. You can see that the base color is still coming through, but because I made that smart object a solid background, now that color is overriding the template. Let's go ahead and push this a little bit further. Let's jump into the front here. Let's go ahead and we can fill it with a color, and let's bring over that layer again with my logo. If you're following along, I encourage you to create something that you could use on your own portfolio. Maybe use your name or if you have a client that you've already done stuff with and you have a color palette to work with, explore those options and play around with it, and follow along as you're doing this work, and then post this to your portfolio. I'm going to close this smart object now. I'll jump back in here and you can see that it's updated that front graphic. We can update this top part, this hang tag, let's double-click in here, same thing. I could fill it with a color or maybe I'll just drag and drop this entire vector thing that I have from some of my courses. We'll save it and close that smart object, and you can see it updates that as well. Depending on your workflow, you might want to leave the background transparent so the background from the box shows through. But once this is all done, you can export this, or in this case, maybe I want to mess around with the background color a little bit more. Right now, it's just white. Maybe I fill the background with the color as well, so my foreground color was already selected, I hit "Option Delete" real quick to fill my background color, and just like that, have a mock up that looks pretty cool. I could push this a lot further, but let's just say that we're good to go here and we're ready to export this. Well, it's really simple, we're just going to come up here to File. Well, there's a few options really, but we can go to "Save As" and I'm going to save this on my computer, and then I'm going to change my format to say JPEG, then I'll just throw this on my desktop right now. Example 1, then let's click Save. I'm just going to throw that right on my desktop. I have my JPEG options. I could crunch this down a little bit if I wanted to maybe put this on a website or make it so the file's not so big. But for now this is fine, we'll click "Okay" and it throws it as a JPEG on my desktop. If I double-click to open that up, you'll see that I have a JPEG with my mock-up looking really good. That's one way to export this. There's a lot of other ways. Maybe you're working on a website for your portfolio and you want to compress this further. We can do a few different things. I'm going to come down, File, down to Export, Export As, and you can see we have a few more options in this Export As dialog box. We can change the formatting, the quality, the image size, and even the color space over here on the left-hand side, we can change the size that it exports, whether it's scaled down smaller or larger, and then when we're all done, we can hit "Export." We're basically going to get the same thing in this case because I didn't change anything. We'll call this Example_1_V2. But again, I didn't change anything, so honestly the file should be pretty much identical in size. That's how you can quickly update a template and then export it for your portfolio or wherever you want to use it to show to a client. Here's another example if you want to continue following along. This is Example_2.psd in the exercise files. Let's just jump in here and take a look at this real quick. In this template, we have two bags, two food bags basically. This could be coffee, this could be snacks, this could be all kinds of stuff, but basically, it's a plastic or a Mylar type package. What we're going to do is the same thing, this template, we have the your design here up top. So these are smart objects. I can double-click into these smart objects and I can change anything about them. Let's go ahead and just change the color to something else for the background. What else could we do? Let's just fill the whole thing with a different color, save it, we'll close it, and you can see it updated the background of this. But let's push this even further. Let's go back into that. Again, I have this icon from my graphic design boot-camp course and I'll throw it right in there. Command A to highlight everything. Let's go ahead and center this. De-select, save it, and close that smart object. You can see that it updated the template here. Even though I dropped this graphic centered into my smart object, let's jump back over here. It looks like it's centered. When I jump back over to the example, you can see it feels like it's off to the side. Sometimes you might have to fake things a little bit. What I mean by that is I feel like this needs to move over to the right. Let's save it, and come back over here. It feels a little better, still not quite right. Let's bring this back to the tiny bit, save it. Close that tab, and then you can see, that's a little bit better. But now the next thing I notice is it's almost right up on this closure, so let's open that smart object again, bring it down a little bit, and save it. Go back to Example_2. That's much better. Now, something else that I noticed with this template that you probably wouldn't notice right away, if I open this up and then come back to this color, when I filled this color, I tried to select this darker, richer blue color and as I select these, if I look over here in my tab or my color swatch, it's not the same color, so something strange is going on in this file. This was a template that I downloaded for the very purpose of explaining this to you and showing you that sometimes you run into a really weird things when you're working in other people's files. Well, the fix around this happens to be with the color profile in the actual file. This is an issue you shouldn't ever run into, but knowing how to solve these problems is really helpful. What we're going to do is come up here to Edit. I'm going to come all the way down to Assign Profile, click on that, and we're going to change this profile from SRGB linear and we're going to switch it to SRGB with all these numbers and letters at the end of it. Click "Okay." Now, that fixed my color background. It got weird for a minute there, but I don't know why the artist had that color profile setup, and depending on if you're a Mac or PC, you might have a wildly different color representation of all these different things, which is why it's really handy to work with Pantone swatches and setup your library so that you know your colors will work across the board. That's beyond the scope of this video and I feel like we're getting onto a rabbit trail, but the biggest thing to point out is that all the templates are different and that comes back to having that ability to download as much as you want within [inaudible] elements, because if you run into issues like this, you can go download another template and it doesn't really matter. Anyway, let's go ahead and save this real quick. Let's jump back over to Example_2, and you can see that looks a lot better, the colors look more like I expected them to. Now we can modify this tiny bag here. Let's go ahead and double-click on this smart object, let's delete this, and I think we're going to run into the same problem. Let's make a new layer. Let's try and fill it with this light blue color, and you can see that the color does not match, so we're going to come back over here to Edit, come down to Assign Profile, change it from SRGB Linear down to this SRGB right here. We'll click on that. That's better. Let's go ahead and throw this logo on here again, scale it down a little bit. Command A to highlight my whole canvas, and then we're going to center it vertically and horizontally. Now, to see these options in the Options bar, I have my move tool selected, so that's how I'm able to do that. Let's deselect this, save it, close it. Again, same issue, this is off to the side again. Let's fix that and jump back in here, move to the right a little bit, save it, and close it. That looks a little better. Hopefully, two things, one is when we worked with this first example file, we worked pretty quickly and you can see how you could easily throw in your own colors if you want to work alongside this example file and create something that would work for your portfolio. Here in Example_2, you learn that sometimes it's more frustrating to work in other people's files, so what we're going to do is learn how to create your own template in the next lesson.
6. Create Your Own Template: Let's start learning how to create our very own template instead of relying on somebody else's. To do that, the very first thing we're going to need is some base, some package to design on top-up. There's a few ways you could do this. You could find a box that you already have at home somewhere, and take a picture of that. We'll bring it into Photoshop and we can put our layers on top of that. You could start with a base that you've found as an image online somewhere, that puts you back in the realm of depending on somebody else to have the right angle or the right product that you're looking for, but you could do that. You could look at Envanto Elements, or Adobe Stock, or I'm sure there's hundreds of other places you could look. Or you could create your own from scratch. If you are a subscriber to the Adobe Creative Cloud, to the full suite, you have access to an app called Adobe Dimension. If you don't have that, if you only have the Photoshop subscription, you can use the assets that I provided to follow along. But what we're going to do right now, is we're going to jump in and take a look at Adobe Dimension. It's a 3D modeling app, it's really simple, and it has some great tutorials if you'd like to learn more beyond the scope of this course. But that's what we're going to do, we're going to dive in. Go ahead and get Adobe Dimension if you don't have it already, and when you open it up for the first time, you'll probably see a screen like this. Adobe does a really good job of walking you through how to use this the very first time, so I highly recommend taking the interactive tour. I've already done that. You can click through here. It only takes a few minutes, and you'll learn most of what you need to know to use this program. But what I'm going to do right now, is we're going to jump in, and I'm just going to get you up and running so we can create some different artwork and then bring it into Photoshop to start playing around with it in there. Let's begin by clicking on the "Create New" button up here on the top left. I guess one more thing I want to show you before we do that, this banner across the top, this changes frequently, it might look different by the time you're watching this, but we have these four little dots and you can click through here and see some extra content that Adobe has provided for you. This fourth one in currently, it shows you discover content. If I click "Open in Browser, you can see that Adobe has provided a ton of free 3D models. There's all kinds of 3D models if you want to download one of these and start playing with it. Let's go ahead and create a new document back in Adobe Dimension. I'll click up here on "Create New", and it's going to open up a new canvas, or knew new art board for me. Up here I can see the pixel dimensions and that's something to pay attention to because if you're going to be making this for our print, or for your portfolio online, you're going to want to make sure that your image is big enough to use it however you want. You could come over here on the resolution and you could change this to make it maybe 300 if you wanted to print this, or keep it at 72 for web, your choice, whatever you want to do, but be be aware, this is how you would change your properties there. Then up here we have this drop-down for starter assets and libraries. Just make sure you're on starter assets for now. I'm going to scroll down a little bit. I'm going to grab this food pouch and I'm going to drag it to my canvas. While I'm in here, I'm going to go ahead and grab this coffee bag as well and bring that over. I just want to show you a couple of things before we create our own 3D model to use. I'm going to go ahead and move us around. Depending on where you click, you can move this in 3D space, either one of these. Once you click on it, you have this little XYZ tool that will let us rotate on different axes, I don't know. Anyway, you can also scale it. This is where it's really cool because let's say you have a tall skinny product or a shorter fat one, whatever, wider one, you can make it exactly what you need to do. You can even make it look like it's empty and flat, or maybe it's filled with coffee beans or something. That's where you'll have a lot more control jumping into here, versus trying to find something online. That's exactly how you want it. I've got these two in place. I'm going to grab this bag and I'm going to rotate it like this. What I want to show you real quick is the pros and cons of this software. I'm going to go fast. You can spend more time on this later if you want. I'm going to open up in my Finder window. I already downloaded a bunch of sample labels from Envanto Elements. What I'm going to do, is throw these JPEG's right on top. I'm going to go ahead and let's make this a little bit smaller, so we can see what we're working with here. Let's grab this front JPEG. I'm just going to drag and drop it right onto this coffee bag. Let's rearrange somethings here. I'll drag and drop this. Maybe we got to grab the title. There we go. Grab the title and throw it right onto this document. You can see right away how cool this is, because we can move this artwork onto any surface of this 3D model. I can scale it up if you hold down the Shift key, it'll make it scale proportionately instead of skewing the image. If we were going to make this coffee bag for a real client, you might use a label on top of this brown coffee bags. Maybe they order a stack of these from a vendor and then you can have labels made up from any printer that then they'll put on here. Well, that's pretty cool, just like this. We could almost call this done. I'm going to click off the side and click back onto the model. As I rotate this in 3D space, all of the lighting and all of the modeling come with it. That's amazing. This is probably better than working in Photoshop if we're being honest, but here's where this falls short for a little bit. If I were to scale this artwork up by double-clicking, holding down Shift, and then dragging this over, let's say I wanted to design stuff for the side of this. Well, currently at the time of this recording, there's really not a good way to do that. I could bring this over to the edge and get it close. Let's go ahead and grab the side design for this project here. I'll drag and drop this right in. Again, scaling it in place getting it close, I'm just eyeballing it here for the sake of going fast. But you can see real quick where this is going to cause problems. Where the seam is, I don't really have a way to control the overlap here. All of a sudden we're going to run into issues. I can still rotate everything and it comes with it, but you can see that the seams don't fall into place easily. Again, there might be a way to fix this in the future when you're watching this. If there is, comment below, but for now there's not. That's where this fall short, but let's play with this on this pouch model as well, where it doesn't really have a side. Let's go ahead and grab this artwork again. Let's just drag and drop right into our model. We're going to just quickly get this in place here and scale it up. You might have to scale some things differently. We're not worried about getting it exact right now. I'm mostly trying to show you the process, so you can choose what works for your needs. But let's for the sake of this, scale it up so it fills the front of this design. That looks pretty good, it's close. I could spend some time and make it perfect. But again, once I get to the backside of this, you can see it breaks. But, you know what though, being able to model this quickly is awesome. It's a huge time-saver. Let's go ahead and scroll down in my libraries. All the way down to the left Adobe has provided some default images for you. I'm going to come to my starter assets all the way down to images, and I'm going to drag and drop this table onto the background. Then over on my right-hand side, I have under Actions Match Image. I'll click once on that, and then I'll go ahead and click "OK". It brings everything down into the same scene. It makes it look like it's in this scene, it lights everything. It's amazing and you can even click on here after the fact. You can move things around and the lights will update. Again, definitely, something to be said for using Adobe dimension just to mark-up everything. Why would you use anything else? This is amazing. That's great. This is definitely fun, we are headed in the right direction. If you like this and you wanted to export it, or if you wanted to see it high res, we can click up here on this little Render button. Because 3D modeling is really graphic intensive and huge files, it might take it a minute to render out a pixel perfect design for you. Plus back to the beginning of this video when I showed you your canvas size and your resolution, depending on how large you make this and the speed of your computer, this might take a long time to render out. What we're going to do, I'm going to go ahead and turn this back off. If I was happy with the layout of this project, I'd come up here to this Render tab, click right there. Then I have some different options for how to export it. You might want to export it as a PSD file, so you can bring it back into Photoshop and do more work into it, or export as a PNG and then click "Render". Again, it will take a while because this is a in-depth 3D scene with lots of things for it to figure out, so rendering will basically export this file and you can use it in Photoshop or as a flat image. Now you know how to export this if you are happy with it, but let's go ahead and make another new document and start fresh. I'm going to go back to the homepage here. Let's click on "Create New". I'm not going to save that. Let's just drag over this coffee bag. We'll get it in place. We'll get it at three quarters because this is where I want to show you the difference between Photoshop and dimension. We are going to create a mark-up that will have a perfect seen along this edge here. Let's get this close to where we can use this, and let's go ahead and export it. I'm going to come up here to "Render", and let's go ahead and save both so you can see it Let our quality be high-quality here. I'm going to throw this on my desktop for now. Let's go ahead and give it a name. Let's just call it Coffee bag. Then let's go ahead and click "Render". Once this is all done, we can bring this into Photoshop and look at what we have to work with.
7. Adding Smart Objects - Part I: In the last video, we created your very own custom 3D package mock-up using Adobe dimension. If you weren't able to follow along, you can download the assets in the assets folder. Here's a quick overview of what we're going to do for the next steps. We already found the base, and now we need to do is add a graphic or a placeholder as a smart object so that way we can throw in any artwork we want. It will automatically wrap around to fit that mock-up that we did. We're going to add a graphic placeholder as a smart object. Then we're going to warp that smart object and we're going to make it fit on that base layer. Then we're going to mask back any of the excess artwork that might not fit exactly onto that mock-up. We're going to add shadows and highlights, and then we're going to add a background. Let's go ahead and dive in and do that now. If you want to follow along, we're going to start off with this coffee bag.psd file, and we got that by exporting our 3D model from Adobe dimension. I also have a 3D model.dn file for Adobe dimension if you want to do this yourself and create a different look or move things around a little bit. Let's begin by opening this coffee bag.psd file. I'm going to come up here to my workspace essentials. Let's reset this real quick just so it looks the same as yours. I am going to go ahead and hit "Command 0" on my keyboard to make this fit my window. You can see here, let's grab our layers panel and just make it so we can see everything at once. You'll notice we have this additional layers which are already turned off in this folder. We have our rendered image, and then we have this rendered image reduced noise. We've got a few different things to work with here, but let's go ahead and begin. I'm going to quickly talk about these extra layers, but they're a little bit beyond the scope of what we're going to be doing today. We have a Material Selection Masks, which we aren't going to be using right now. We have our Object Selection Mask, which I'm not going to be using right now. We also have a Depth Information map. What this is for, this is actually really cool because this shows if we were to apply a blur filter, which we can talk about here in a little bit. It actually shows the depth of field and it maps out the different areas that we would blur. For now, I'm going to turn all of these off and just look at what we have to work with here, which is this rendered image. You can see, if I toggle back and forth between these two, there's almost no difference, at least not on this size with this model. It doesn't seem to matter too much other than if I zoom really far in this regular image compared to this reduced noise. This reduced noise image seems to be a little softer and some of the noise has been reduced. We're going to start there. One thing we can do right away to start to make this our own is we can just change the background color if we want. I'll click on this background layer. I've got this blue color selected on my foreground. I'm just going to hit "Option Delete" to quickly fill that with blue color. You can also come up here to Edit, down to Fill, and you can fill that with any color you want. Now I've got a different background color. Let's go ahead and start mapping out our smart object. What we're going to do is there's so many ways to work here. What I'm going to do though is make a new document. I'll come up here to File, down to New, and I'm not really sure what size we're going to do with this here. Let's go ahead. If we were going to be making a print label, you'd probably grab your size from the printer and you'd have exactly the right size to work with. But I'm just going to fake it right now. Let's pretend that this is about maybe four inches wide by maybe, let's go six inches tall, at 300. We'll leave it at RGB right now even though this would be a printed file. You'd probably do CMYK, but for now I'm just going to leave it as RGB. I'll click "Create", and this could be my label. Let's go ahead and save this as label front, Command S to save it. Actually I don't have anything going on yet, so I can't save it yet. Lets just go ahead and put something in here real quick. I'll fill it with this blue color. I'll go to File, Save. Just going to throw this on my desktop right now. We'll call this coffee bag label front. I'll save it. Click "Okay". Then, let's go ahead and just close this for now. Because what I can do is I can actually take that label that we just made and I can bring it right into this document by dragging and dropping right from my desktop. If that doesn't work for you, you can also come here to File, and then come down to Place Linked. Now we can either link this or embed this. Either way works. If it's embedded, then whatever you do with this file, this artwork will follow with it. If it's linked, then if you were to, let's go ahead and try this real quick. We'll do linked, and we're going to grab that coffee bag front Photoshop file we just did. If I place this, now this you'll notice icon has little link, which means that if this link on my desktop, if this file were to be deleted or moved or renamed, this link would break. A better way to do it might be to go to File, Place Embedded. We'll grab that same front file we just made, and I'll click "Place", and we'll bring that in. They both came in. We can't see them because they're behind the bag. Let's bring them up in front, and let's change our background color to something else. How about white? Now we can see both of these files. One of them has a chain link, which means this is linked to an external file, the one on my desktop, or this one right here has this tiny little looks like a paper icon and that is an embedded smart object. If you're going to be selling this on a marketplace or using this in the future, a better way to work is to embed this so it's all in one file, so when you share this psd file, you don't have broken links all over the place. If you're working on a brand and you want to be able to update things in one place and have it linked to multiple files, then you might want to make this link. That is, if you go back here to File, down to Place Linked, you might want to link it so you can change it one place and it updates everywhere. I hope that makes sense. If it doesn't make sense, don't worry about it right now. Let's just go ahead and delete this one has the chain link, and we're just going to be working with the smart object. Hopefully that made sense. Let's go and put this over here. We're going to drag this to the top. I'm going to hit "Command Shift" and the right bracket key to throw it all the way to the top. Let's go ahead and change this name to Place Artwork Here. Now what we're going to do is duplicate this. There's a few ways to do it. I can hit Command J to jump cut this to a new layer, and you can see I have two of them, or I could right-click, and let's go down here to Duplicate Layer. If I click on that, we'll leave it in this same space. We'll click "Okay". Now I've got three of these. One more thing I want to show you, I'm going to zoom out a little bit. This time I'm going to right-click. I'm going to go to New Smart Object via Copy. Now we've got multiple versions of this thing all over the place. What I'm going to do is double-click on this original, right here on the thumbnail it looks like a piece of paper, double-click on that. Let's just make a simple change. Let's add a shape. My bad, try that again. Let's add a shape with my rectangle tool. I hit the letter "U" to get my rectangle. I'm going to swap my color so my foreground is white. I'm just going to draw a little box in here. I forgot. I need to just sample the color from up here. It will turn off my stroke. There we go. That looks better. Use my move tool to move this down, and maybe let's just throw my name on here just as something to do. We'll say Derrick. Feel free to add your own name if you want. We're just playing around a little bit, move tool, and hit "Command T" to scale this up. Nothing groundbreaking. We're just playing around. Let's go ahead and save this smart object. We'll close it, and there's a few things I want you to notice. Maybe we should have left that open for a minute. Let's just double-click on that smart object again. We notice our Photoshop or this file name is.psd up here. We have coffee bag label front.psd. When I saved this, you'll notice if I double-click on my file from my desktop, they're the exact same, but one was embedded. So that change saved to the embedded smart object, but it didn't modify the link that I started with to begin with. Let's go ahead and close that link. Let's go ahead and close the smart object. Now you'll notice three of these updated on my Canvas, but one of them didn't. The one that didn't was one that we made a copy of by right-clicking on that smart object. Make sure you click on the title, and we made a new smart object via copy. Once we made that new smart object via copy, it broke that link. The original three that we did beforehand, we actually just duplicated the layer. It duplicated the instance of the smart object and saved everything. Hope that makes sense. I know it gets a little confusing. I'm going to shift click both of these and delete them. Now we've got the Place Artwork Here layer, and then we have this copy. I can take this copy. I can turn off the Place Artwork Here. I'll put this up at the top, and I can start working with this copy. I can bring it down into my stack and we can start working with this.
8. Adding Smart Objects - Part II: I don't know if you see where we're about to go with this, but what we're going to do is start warping this instance of this Smart Object and morphing it into place. But we have this copy up top that we can always come back to, much like the templates that we saw at the beginning of this course. Let's go ahead and dive in. I'm going to scrub my opacity down just a little bit here and I'm going to go to Edit, down to Free Transform or Command+T is my shortcut there. Then I'm going to get this close in size here. Then right here in our options bar, let's click on this little warp button. Now, we are in the warp mode. There should be three grids here. Let's see, we can split this, we can do some different things by clicking this "Options" bar and telling it exactly where to be. I'm going to go ahead and hit the Escape key real quick, Command+T. Let's try this again. Click on the "Warp" button. Let's turn that off. One more time. I don't usually use the Split option up here, but now you're aware of it. Usually I just click the Warp button. By default, there's about nine zones, there's, there's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and then 7, 8, 9 across the bottom. You can click anywhere in here to start nudging this into place. I know that was a little confusing there for a minute. We're just trying to get this close. I can grab these corners and I can throw them right on the corner. We are just going to grab these handles and we're just eyeballing stuff, we're not trying to be too picky quite yet. Zoom in here so we can see what we're doing a little bit better. Now, I'm only looking at the edges. By only focusing on the edges, you can tell that my artwork in the middle does not look anywhere close. Now, I can start clicking into the middle of this and trying to make my text look like it's flowing with the artwork a little bit better here. Now, one thing is, we didn't have any artwork up top here to really pay attention to what we're doing, so we might want to do that. Let's jump back into our Smart Object here and let's maybe add a couple more stripes up top just to really get an idea for how our artwork might be being scaled right now. I'll save that, I'll close it. Now, let's come back into the Smart Object, Command+T and let's jump back into our warp. Let's just work on this a little bit, trying to get it a little bit better so it doesn't skew our artwork quite so much. I'm going to go ahead and leave this right now as good enough because you can see where we're going, I don't want us to take forever. But that's pretty close, I'm going to go ahead and hit "Return", I'm going to change my opacity back to 100 percent. You can play with different blend modes from here. Let's go ahead and change our blend mode to multiply, which would let the color of the bag shine through. If you don't want to do that, put it back to normal. We're going to mess with shadows and lighting here in a couple videos. But right now, we're getting pretty close. Let's go head and Command+click on those rendered image icon. By doing that, it's going to make a selection just around our coffee bag here. I'm going to come back to my artwork and I'm going to click on this little Mask button down below and it's going to use the shape of this bag to mask our label. That way, some of the edges that went past get cut back, get trimmed back. Now that we have the front panel done, let's go ahead and make a side panel. I'm going to go ahead and go to File, New. I'm just guessing here on the side, the last one was four inches wide by six inches tall. Width is about two inches by six inches tall. This isn't perfect, this is just guessing right now and we're going to skew things into place anyway. Let's go ahead and fill this with this blue color, I'll make a new layer. I'm going to hit Command+Delete, which will fill it with my background layer that I already have selected here. That keyboard shortcut might be different on a PC, it might be CTRL+delete or maybe best just go to Edit down to Fill. Either way we want to fill this with a color, I'm going to save it. Command+S to save. I'm just going to save this on my desktop for now, I'm going to call this coffee bag side. Click "Save." Then we're going to come back over here and we're going to do the same thing. I am going to bring this Smart Object in by dragging and dropping, grabbing it from my desktop. This coffee bag side, I could throw it right in here or back up here into Photoshop, go to File, down to Place Embedded and let's grab that coffee bag side.psd file, we'll place it, we'll stick it up here and just going to hit "Return", we'll drag it towards the top. Let's call this, Place side Artwork Here. You can name this anything you want. Let's double-click on this other one and call it, Place Front, there we go. We're going to right-click on this new layer and we're going to duplicate it. Sounds good. We'll drag it down here into place and we're going to turn off this one up here on the top left. Now, we're working with this one, they were stacked on top of each other that's why you couldn't see it. Let's turn back on, you see we have two of them here. Put that back where it belongs. There we go. We'll turn this one off, we'll grab this guy and we'll start putting this one in place as well. Let's go ahead and drag the opacity down a little bit or maybe even change it to multiply. Whatever helps us see the edges a little bit better. Same thing, Command+T to free transform. Let's get it close here in size. Then I can grab the corner here, I can hold down Command and then click, you can see my arrow changes and I can start skewing this into place without even using the Warp filter. To see this a little bit better, let's go ahead and add some stripes into this one as well. Let's just double-click on this layer, we'll get my Rectangle tool. Fill it with white, turn off my stroke. Doesn't really matter, I'm just trying to create a guide for myself here. If you already have artwork to work with, then you don't really need to do this. But this is just going to help me see where everything is going, I'll save that. I'll close it. Again, pointing out that that didn't modify my desktop image, the original psd file at all, just the Smart Object inside of this file. Let's go ahead and free transform this again, Command+T. I've got the wrong application opened, let's try it again. Click on this layer, Command+T and just starting to warp and nudge this into place. We'll put this centered at the top of my box here, this little center node, and angling this in place. Then we're going to click the Warp button. Let's zoom in here so we can really see what we're doing. We'll grab this corner, we'll grab this corner and see what we're doing down here and what that's doing to things. We'll grab our anchor points and we're just going to start getting things dialed in here. I'm going to stop talking so I can fast-forward this video, unless you want to see everything that I'm doing either way, you can also speed up this video or slow it down by clicking in the settings below. Let's get this close here. I'm just clicking inside of the grid of this side image here. You can't see the warp handles that I'm using right now, but we can just see visually what these stripes are doing and getting it close so it looks like it's following this 3D path here or this 3D image. All right, so that's pretty close. That's close enough for now. You can obviously spend more or less time getting this perfect. But now what we need to do, let's go ahead and commit that change and click up here in the Options bar on the check-mark here, or you hit the Enter key either way works. But now we've got a few problem areas to deal with, one of which is, I didn't quite make it go past this here. Let's free transform that real quick again, get my Warp tool. Make sure we're going definitely way past the edge here. Okay so, we can also see the edge that I'm going way past the edge and that it's overlapping this front panel. We've got a little bit of work to do. Let's start by command clicking on the rendered image layer to get a selection. All right, and let's go ahead and making sure that this side panel is selected. We are going to add a mask by just clicking right here on this mask icon. That fixed the back image, so that follows it perfectly. Now we just need to clean up this front panel. What we are going to do. One of a couple of ways we could work, and it depends on which panel is overlapping. If I turn this off and I cycle these layers, oh, you can see we're actually way off a little bit because we have the edge of this here. So we might need to refine this a little bit. Let's go back to our side panel command T, let's delete this mask. Command T, turn on our Warp. We need to get this to match this side a little bit better here. We're just going to drag that out. Then we can do some masking, but that way we're at least overlapping that. All right, let's hit return, command click on this layer below again, and then mask that back up. All right, that's in good shape. Now what we can do is clicking on this mask. We can use a lot of different tools for masking, we could come back in with a brush. When you're masking, when you paint with white, or paint with black, you have different results. So painting with black will hide whatever's on your layer. Painting with white will reveal. If I switch this back to white and I can bring back what I masked out. We're on the mask layer. I'm going to get a smaller brush here. I can do it by hand. Hit X to swap between my foreground and background. I want my black swatch on top, and I could by hand just go through and clean up this edge. That's one way to do it. I'm almost done. I can finish this real quick. We can get the lasso tool, we can use the pen tool. Lots of different ways to mask out what's going on here. If you want to be more precise with it, I could use my pen tool, making sure I've got my path selected up top here. I can click and drag and get a very precise selection here. Once I'm done, I can right-click and then click Make Selection. I could feather it or just let it be a hard edge. We'll click OK. Now I'm on my mask and I want to hide this. I'm going to fill this selection with black. Go to Edit, Fill, with my foreground color, which is currently black. Click OK. Command D to deselect or copy to select, deselect, and zooming out. All right, that's a perfect selection down that edge. Now we're going do the same thing to the front. All right, so we'll turn the front back on, and you can see where the overlap is, and one thing we could do is, command click on the mask we just made. Let's turn this off and we could inverse the selection. Go to Select, Inverse, which selects the opposite. When I click back on this mask, I'm going to get my brush tool, make it a little bit bigger, and I could start masking. Okay, it looks like I did the wrong thing. Let's inverse that mask again, Select, Inverse. There we go. All right, so now I can just paint right up against that and not worry about bleeding past my edge here that I just made. All right. This mask isn't perfect. If I were to go past it, you could see I'd start painting on the front of that too. Just pay attention, and if you screw up, you can also flip your mask back by hitting the X key to flip to where painting with white again, to bring back anything you might have over painted. All right, zoom in. We're going to get close, command D to deselect. Let's turn back on our side layer. On our side layer, let's change the opacity back up to a 100 percent. Let's go ahead for now. Let's turn our multiply mode to normal. Let's turn it back to multiply, just trying to get a good idea of where edges are. This gets us pretty darn close. I'm going to go ahead and keep working on this to get it perfect. But you don't need to obviously watch me just doing all this little painting, but feel free to skip ahead if you want to or fast forward. But I'm just going to clean up these edges just a little bit. That might have been too much. You can work really fast or you can work really precise. It's up to you. I love this. Sometimes I tend to take way too much time trying to get things perfect. But the better the template, the better you'll be in the long run when your artwork updates easily. Okay, so that is good enough. Good enough. We are headed in the right direction for sure. I can update this top tab as well. I'm going to go ahead and save my work. Command Shift S, Coffee Bag. Let's call this Coffee Bag 2. Save it to my desktop for now. All right, so we're headed the right direction and what we can do real quick, we have this place, our work here. We still have these over here on the top. You could jump into this top. Double-click on any of these smart objects, either these two. Let's do this one, and you could add more text. You could change anything you want. We'll save it. We'll jump back over into our mock-up and you can see that everything updated dynamically. All right, so hopefully you've been following along. If there's any parts that you got stumped at, don't forget, it's a video, you can rewind it, you can pause it. Follow along, so that way by the end of this course, you'll have your own mock-up that you can do anything you want with. In the next video, we are going to jump into this a little bit more and refine some of the shadows and the highlights, pushing this mock-up even further and making it look as real as possible.
9. Finishing The Top Tab: In this video, I didn't want to lose you. I'm going to show you how I fixed the top tab on this real quick. We'll go real quick through it and then that way, then we can get into the shadows and the highlights. But let's go ahead and do that. What we're going to do is we're going to grab our front artwork layer and then right-click, duplicate it, click "Okay", and turn that off again. Let's rename this to top tab or something like that. We'll drag it down into place and we're just going to move it over and basically the same workflow. What we're going to do is we'll change the blend mode to Multiply, maybe to scrub the opacity down a little bit, and then Command T to free transform. We're just trying to start nudging this into. I'm just worried about the top tab here. I'll hold down Command and then click and you can see it. I've got the free transform on hold down command, then click and that'll let me skew this before we even started warping it. Just to get the angles closer to the right perspective here. I'm looking at these white stripes and they're matching the line here, the vanishing points here. I'll hit Return and I'll zoom in a little bit. I almost don't need to skew this at all. If I turn this off, you can see there's a little bit of a warp going on here. Let's turn this back on. It's pretty damn close. I don't need to do much. Command T, turn on the warp. I can maybe just scrub it a little bit just to add a little bit of warping to it, I'll hit Return, and let's go ahead and mask this. I'm going to Command-click on the original shape and then make sure you're on the top tab layer and click on that Mask button. Now it's mask back. We're going to zoom in and lots of ways to work here. Fast and loose would be hit the letter L to get my lasso tool and just drag around it. Now just as is selected, I'm going to hit Command Shift I or come up here to select Inverse Shift Command I. Now it's selected everything except for the tab. If I come in here and I feel everything with black except for that tab, go to Edit. Let's just fill it with black and click "Okay". Now, it's hiding in this mask, everything but this tab, and then I can come back in here and I can clean up the selection down below. Let's just paint with black. Hit X to make sure my foreground is black and I could come through and just clean up this selection. I don't even really mind that there's some overlap here because it just makes it look like a shadow which goes even further to sell the illusion here. Once we're done with that, let's scrub this back up to full opacity, maybe make it normal for now. Now it doesn't really matter. You don't really notice because our design; if I double-click in here, our design doesn't have anything up top, but let's just say we had something. Let's just throw this in here for the sake of being able to see this a little bit better. What color do we want to use? Let's sample from this image, let's make it a little bit darker. Let's save it and jump back into our mock-up here and you can see how that rolls through. Now, this specific example breaks it. We might need to play with this a little bit further as far as how this comes through. But if we jump back in here, let's turn that off. Do something like this, and maybe we just change its color to something else. Save it. Now you can see that it rolls through and that tab looks real. I'm trying to work fast enough that you get the main ideas because you might be working on something a little bit different, but that way you have the tools to create something completely custom. This is the approach, this is how I would go through and get everything dialed up and in right place. In the next video, I promise, we're going to take a look at the highlights and the shadows and making this look even more realistic.
10. Adding Shadows and Highlights: I hope you've been having fun and you're following along. I can't wait to see what you guys make. Don't forget, post your work so I can see it and show me what you're up to. What we're going to do though, is we are going to jump in and make this look even more real by adding shadows and highlights. It's really fun, it's actually simple, so let's go ahead and jump in. If you've been following along, it should look something like this or you can open up coffee bag3.PSD in the exercise files and we're going to jump in. Here's what we're going to do, we're going to grab that base layer and we're going to hit Command J to jump-cut that to a new layer right above to make a copy or just right-click and click ''Duplicate layer'', whatever you want to do. We're going to hit Command Shift and the right bracket key or Control Shift on a PC and the right bracket key to throw this layer all the way to the top. Let's desaturate this, let us come to Image, Adjustments all the way down to Desaturate. That basically means pull out of the color, pull all the color out of it, desaturate it, make it black and white, whatever you want to say, whatever you want to call it. We're stripping all of the color information out, so it's only grayscale. It's black and white here. Now what we're going to do is hit Command L to bring up our levels Control L on a PC and let's go ahead and work with our highlights first, you can pick shadows or highlights, it doesn't really matter. We are going to play with our output levels and our input levels here by scrubbing this left and right, we can get different results here, so we don't want to blow it out completely and lose all of our pixel data. We're working on the highlights here so let's just go ahead and scrub up a tiny bit, bring down our shadows. It doesn't really matter how darker shadows are. Let me say it again, it does matter, but the shadow information is going to go away with the blend mode we put into this. We're just playing around with this a little bit. We'll click ''Okay'' and here's where the magic comes in. We're going to change our, this will be our, let's call this highlight so we don't get confused. Our highlights here and there's lots of different blend modes you might play and experiment with these but what we're going to do is we're going to change our highlight down here to, let's go to linear. No, we want Linear Burn, there it is. So if I turn that on and off, you can see that we have a different effect here. Now, this might be too strong. We might need to scrub down the opacity a little bit in here. But that's our highlights, that's adding our highlights to it. Now one thing that's being affected is if we look at the side panel, we left this blend mode as multiply. Let's click on that, put it back to normal and let's go ahead and change this color back to that lighter blue that I use, save it, close it. Now, let's go and turn these highlights back on and you can see right away by using this on top, you can see we get the wrinkle and the paper texture comes back in and already it looks a lot better. Now let's do the same thing for our shadows, let's click back on this rendered image base Command J to jump-cut it, Command Shift and the right bracket to bring it all the way to the front. It's the same as going to Layer, Arrange and then bring to front or send it back. This is what I'm doing here, if you're on a PC, use the Control key. Let's desaturate this. Let's go to the Image, Adjustments, Desaturate and then Levels, Image, Adjustment, Levels. Where is my levels? Right up here. Boom. Same thing. So this time we're working on the shadows. Let's go ahead and crunch, bring in those blacks a little bit, we can bring down the whites. We're just adding more contrast to this really. There's lots of ways to do this in Photoshop, you could use contrast and saturation adjustment layer. There's lots of ways, there's a 100 different ways to do the same thing in Photoshop. You just got to pick what works for you. There we go, we've got our contrasted layer here that we're going to use for our shadows and click on that, rename it to shadows and this one we are going to use screen. You're probably going to want to scrub down the opacity a little bit too. Because if we leave it at 100 percent you can see it blows everything out. We're going to scrub this down to where it adds that depth that we're looking for without totally blowing everything out. That looks pretty good and again, depending on what you're using for your base and what artwork you're pulling in, you might need to dial in these settings a little bit. Let's go ahead and clean up our workspace a little bit. So if we were going to use this as our own template or even try to sell it, we want to make sure that everything is cleaned up here. I'm going to go ahead and select both the shadows and highlights later, and hold down command and click both or hold on Control on a PC, Control G, or Command G on a Mac. Let's rename these shadows and highlights and then let's bring these down. Here, we have this rendered image, we can delete that. We have additional layers, this is helpful for us in the future, we'll leave it for right now, and then the other thing we want to do is let's go ahead and give these layers some color. We're going to click on these, right-click, scroll all the way to the bottom, and let's give it a green label color so that way, you know that these are the two things you are changing. We've got our shadows or highlights. Let's just go ahead and click on this Shift-click all the way to the bottom and then group it together, Command G to group, Control G on a PC. Let's call this mock-up. We have a background-color. We're pretty close to done here, I'm going to go ahead and save this. Awesome, we're almost done. Now what we're going to do in the next video is look at some different ways we can add a background and add even more visual interest to your mockup.
11. Adding Backgrounds and Variations: We're so close to done. For all practical purposes, we are done. I mean, the mock-up works, it has smart objects so you could update the artwork at anytime. But let's go ahead and push this all the way to the finish line. Let's get that background in place and make this look beautiful so we can pop it into a portfolio. If you're following along, open up Coffee Bag 4.psd or use your own artwork if you already have it ready to go. Let's go ahead and jump into our browser real quick. I want to show you Behance.net. I love this website. It's a great place to get inspiration. It's part of the Adobe portfolio so you can post your artwork here as well. I just searched for package mock-up here in the title. I'm just scrolling through. I'm actually looking at the backgrounds of these images, the light grays, the dark grays, even the colors based off of the product image. I want to recreate a few of these options and just show you how quickly dropping in a background can add so much. So here's a couple that I opened up, just to scroll through real quick, just to see if it's something that inspires me. I really like the tone on tone here with a background image or a texture that's part of the brand. We'll probably do something with that. This frosted glass look is trending a lot right now. We could play with that. Then we also have just this horizon line or a tabletop or the background where you can see like what would be a wall and the floor. So we could play some of these options. Let's go ahead and jump in. Again, I'm in Coffee Bag 4. psd, you're free to use your own thing. But let's just start playing around with this a little bit. The first thing I want to do is I'm going to just put the background color. I could change this or I could hit Command J to jump cut this to a new layer, and then I'm just going to fill it with the same blue I have been using on everything else. It's a slate blue thing and that alone is pretty cool. There's not quite enough contrast between the back of my product and we could play with this a little further. Let's add a new layer real quick. I'm going to hit the letter G to get my Gradient tool. At the top we have some different options. By default, yours probably looks like this. It's the foreground to background. Click on the second preset in and its foreground color to transparent. So whatever your foreground color is, it will be that, and then it fades to transparent. All right, so with the same color selected, I'm just going to click and drag from the edge here. You don't see anything because it's the same color. So let's change this blend mode to multiply, and just like that, you can create a vignette. That way it's not a perfect circle, but you can play with this a little bit and burn in the edges. That's one way to work. That's Command click on our Mac or control, click these two layers, and then Command G or Control G on a PC to group it. We're just going to call this bG1. I'm going to quickly create multiple versions of this background just to play around. Typically I would work in art boards and I'll have multiple art boards. But because I'm working in one layer, I'm going to explore just some different options here quickly just to see what we can come up with. That is one background. Let's go ahead and turn that off. Let's make another one. Actually, let's just call this one command J to jump cut it, Command G to group it. We'll call this BG for consistency, all caps, BG1, Okay guys, sometimes I get pretty fast. I get going too fast. Let's take a step back. I'll come down a little bit. Let's think about the purpose of this, right? If you were trying to sell this as a template, we want to make sure that we're working in a way that is easy for somebody to follow along. Let's just call this background, background one, and then we'll call this next one, background two. See where I'm going with this? Obviously background one is just the white background. Whatever, it doesn't matter. I'm going to delete that extra layer and then background two is this blue thing. Let's jump cut this, command J, so that way I already get the name in here. I can click in here and name it to background three, and we could do a few different things. There's lots of ways to work. I could add an adjustment layer down here. Let's go to hue and saturation. Let's see what we can do with that. Let's click on this colorized tab, and now just like that, we can modify the color and actually, I don't mind that at all, just like that. So I'll leave that alone. Command J to jump cut another copy of this background. I had this selected here. We'll name this background four, and this time we will click into this hue saturation layer and we can scrub our hue to be a different color. Pretty cool. Lots of ways we could go at this, that purple's kind of nice, let's go like that. Now really quickly, I've got all these different background ideas that I can play with from basically one setting. Let's push this further, command J to jump cut it and call this background five. This time, let's add basically a floor to this. So I'm going to hit, let's see. How do I want to do that? Let me think about it real quick. Let's get my Gradient tool. That's not going to do it how I want to do. Sorry, I'm thinking through multiple things real quick. The best way to do this. One way to work, I'm just going to grab these layers below it, Command E to merge them together, and then Command J to jump cut that, and now Command T to free transform it. So now I can scale this down, and depending on your settings, it might scale automatically for you like this, but play with hitting the shift key to whichever way your settings are to either let it scale or not. What we're trying to do is just smash this down and hit return and it creates a false floor almost. Okay, so that's another way to work. What else can we do with this thing? Well, let's get a little technical here real quick. Let's see what we can do with some blurring in the background. What I'm going to do is Command click on these real quick, so I've got both of them selected and then Command E to merge it, or control E on a PC. Now we're going to play with this additional layers thing that's has been hiding out up here since the beginning. Let's troll this down and we have this depth information layer. What we're going to do, we're going to jump over into our channels, and we're going to turn this on, and then we're going to right-click on this blue channel. It doesn't really matter. They're all the same. We're going to right-click. Sorry, make sure you've de-selected them all. Click on one layer, then right-click. We're going to duplicate that channel. We're going to name this alpha, and we'll click okay. Let's go ahead and turn all these channels back on. I'll go ahead and turn this off real quick, and you'll notice that it was a red thing going on that's because we had this alpha mass channel, which shows up as red. Don't worry about that right now. All we're going to do is we're going to come back to this background layer, and we're going to come up to filter, down to blur, and we're going to do a lens blur. So the idea is to blur the background using that information from our render. What we're going to do is our depth map, the source is going to be that alpha channel we just made and we can click here to set the focal point. So we click on this tab and then you click on the canvas to set where you want the focus to be. Then you can control the radius as well as the focal distance. You can actually scrub this to different places here and it's going to soften the background. It's going to do it by adding depth based on the render we pulled out of dimension. It's going to add that depth. When you're done, just click okay. So now it's going to blur that background a little bit more. Let's turn off our alpha channel. Now if we were to turn that on and off, you can see that we've got this blurred. Instead of it being a hard line now it's blurred and it adds way more depth to our product. We could do the same thing with a photo. You could bring in a photo, maybe jump into a place like TextureKing.com. All kinds of free textures, great place to find free textures, and add brushes and all kinds of cool stuff. I'm just going to jump in here, just pick a random one, right-click and copy image, come back in here. Let's go ahead and paste it, command V to paste, Control V in a PC. I'm going to scale this into place, get my free transform. Obviously, we could probably use something different like a wooden desk pattern or something. This might look a little weird with the texture but hopefully you can see better this lens blur that we did. We still have our alpha channel here. We are on this background layer. I'm going to come up to filter, back down to blur, and then back down to Lens Blur. You can see using that alpha map how it's knocking out some of this data here, so we can set our focal point here, and we can scrub our radius to get different effects. It looks like something strange is going on here so let me back out of this for a minute. If you'll notice, notice where this hard edge is, and then let's cancel. If I hit Command T, you'll notice the filter doesn't know what to do with the image that's beyond here. What I'm going to do is hit Command A to highlight everything just inside of my canvas, not what's going past, and then I'm going to hit Command J to jump cut that. So now I've got two different layers here. This one, if I were to do a free transform, you'll see the image is literally only right to the edge. This one still has all the data that was beyond the canvas. You might run into that issue when you do these filters. Let's try that again. Go to filter, blur, lens blur. There we go. Now the coffee bag, it's not blurring or it's not affecting where that would be. We can also invert that. Let's click on that. Let's grab our focal point, click in the middle. So you can see that's in focus where the coffee bag is, so it's tack sharp here and then it fades to the background. Again, we can set our focal distance and our radius for how much blur is happening, and let's click okay. Now when I zoom into this, it makes it sharp here, but it fades into the background as if it was taken with the real photo. Granted, this breaks because the texture's flat instead of angled in space, but you guys, pretty cool that we can do all this stuff so fast. The only other thing I would look at then is your shadows and your highlights and everything in whatever photo you choose. That's where you might jump back into Adobe dimension and create a rendering there. It just depends on the type of package and what you're trying to do. I'm having some fun here, so I think I'm going to push this a little bit further just because I can. Let's desaturate this, and let's duplicate this background layer here. Let's do this one, Command J. Let's change this blend mode. It's going to select this layer, with my move tool selected I can change these blend modes by holding down Shift and hitting the plus or minus key. It's an easy way to cycle through different blend modes and see what stands out to you. Pick anything you want. I don't know, I'm just playing around here. Maybe I adjust the opacity a little bit, soften it up a little bit, and just play with it that way, so lots of fun things you can do with your products. Look at that, I'm just fooling around, I have six different background options. Granted, most of these are just color changes. But if you're going to sell this as a template, it's nice to give lots of options. Now that this is done in the next layer, we're going to look at exporting all of this and packaging everything up.
12. Exporting Your Final Mockup: We're pretty much done. If you've been following along, again, don't forget to share what you've been working on so I can see what you guys are up to. We'd love to check out your work. Also, congratulations if you've been able to follow through and do all the work. Congratulations, that's awesome. Give yourself a nice pat on the back here and let's talk about how to get this exported so you can actually share it with me and post it to your portfolio, and maybe even sell it on a place like Envato Elements or Adobe Stock or wherever you want to sell it. To wrap this up here, either use the artwork you've been working with and we're going to export it so I can see what you're up to. Or just grab this Coffee Bag Final.psd files so you can follow along and learn how to export your artwork. Pretty straightforward. Lots of different file formats we can export this in, but basically, we're just going to be sharing a JPEG either on your social media channel or on your website or whatever. We're going to come down to go to File and Export, and export as right here. Again, there's lots of things to export, but right now this is just one of the ways that I do this, lots of different options to do the same thing. Basically, with this window open, you have the option to change your format to whatever you want. JPEG is great. The quality 100 percent is fine. I look over here, I can see this is 121 kilobytes. It's pretty small. It's going to be great for a website. But if you wanted to compress it a little bit more, you could scale this down a little bit, and that's going to allow you to make sure it loads fast on your website and still looks pretty good, so compressing it down. If I'm doing a website image, I typically compress it down to 75 percent, again, just to make sure that my users' experience is as good as possible so my website loads fast. If you wanted to, you could change your image size and we can do some other things as well. One thing that is important is make sure you're using this sRGB workspace. You may or may not have that checkbox clicked. But what this is going to do is the sRGB workspace is a limited color range. It's going to reduce some of the colors in your image. The reason why you want to do that is because some people might be looking at things from a Windows machine, and some people might be looking on a Mac, some people might be on an Android device, some people might be on a different display, whether it's a Dell or Samsung or LG or whatever, there's so many different displays, so many different ways to see your artwork, but not all of them have the same color profiles. By converting it to an sRGB, you've got the best chance that all the colors are going to look the same no matter which device they're viewing it from. That's an important checkbox. Make sure you're using that sRGB color profile. If you wanted to over here in the size, you could click down on this and you could export a second size maybe at a smaller resolution, or you could want to add that, so let's go ahead and maybe add one that's half the size. We'll click this little plus button. Then let's go ahead and add maybe one that is 2X the size here, we'll click the little plus button. We've got 1X, 2X, and half. We've got three different sizes. This comes in really handy when you're developing apps or Web things where you need multiple sizes. Typically, in this case, you wouldn't do this, but I'm showing you how to export your artwork. I might as well show you some of these things as well. We've got this ready to go. Let's go ahead and click the "Export" button down here. I throw it on my desktop. I'm going to call this Final Exports. Click "Open". Just like that, we have all of our final export. Let's take a look at this. We have the original 1X size. You can see it's 52 kilobytes. We can see that the color space is RGB and it's 1024 by 768. I hit the spacebar, do a quick preview. You can see what it looks like here. If I go to the half X, you can see down here that the size is 512 by 384, so it's a little bit smaller. Interestingly enough, I just noticed it did something weird here in the export. I've never seen that before, so we'll track that down. I do that to the 2X size as well. What that tells me is, let's keep this at the original size, which again, usually, you just keep it like that anyway. But something happened. When it scaled it, it scaled all of these layers, but the smart objects didn't come with it. What you might want to do before you export that is come up here to Layer, and then Flatten Image. I'll click on that and we're going to discard everything, and now it's just one flat image. Obviously, don't save it this way or you're going to lose all of your work. But while it's flat, you can come back here to File, come down to Export, go to Export As, and do the same thing again. Let's try this one more time. We have our different sizes here. I'll click "Export", and let's put it in this Final Export's folder. We're going to call it Export 2, just to show you, we'll click "Open" and it'll throw it right into that folder. Clicking here, the Export 2 folder, and this time it should be perfect at every size because as Photoshop is trying to automatically scale the image for you, it was breaking the scaling of some of these smart objects. By flattening everything, now every size will be exactly what you expect. That's pretty much it. You can export a lot of different file types if you wanted to. If you wanted to save this again as a template for somebody, I'm going to step back, Command Z, before I forget and save this as a flat image. I'm going to come up here to File, and this time instead of Export, I'm going to go to Save As. You have the option in Photoshop 2021 if you have the Cloud to save all of this right to the Cloud for other options to sync with other applications, that's really handy. I do that for some of my work, but most of my work, I still save to my computer because I like knowing that I have it on my backups and on my home server. That's how I do it. You can do whatever you want. But in this format option, Photoshop is going to be the default, that's going to be how you're sharing it. But you could also save it as a TIFF, and there's some other things in here depending on your workflow that you might research further for your file type and how you want to save it. Again, this embed color profile, make sure you've got that checked because you want your colors to look as consistent across the board as possible. Then when you're all set and done, click "Save". I'm going to call this Final Final because it's not a true design project unless it has Coffee Bag Final Final For Real. We're going to save this to my desktop. You should be good to go now. The only other thing would be again, if you're going to sell it, check out the platform you're selling it on and see what their requirements are. You might need to create a help file, and then when it's all set and done, zip this folder up. I'm on my desktop right here. I'm going to right-click on it and I click "Compress Coffee Bag Final". That way, you can upload this folder and share it with everybody else. On a PC, it's a little bit different as far as compressing and zipping folders are. But that's pretty much it guys. You did it. I'm so pumped for you. Check out the next video for next steps.
13. Next Steps: Thank you so much for joining me on this course, and learning how to design realistic package mockups using Adobe Photoshop. I'm so pumped for you. This is an awesome skill to have, and I can't wait to see you guys portfolios and your projects. If you followed along, be sure to take a minute and upload what you've been working on so we can see your projects. If you didn't get a chance to follow along yet, be sure that you do. When you do, again, share with us, share on social media, tell the world about what you're up to, and so pumped for you. If you want to learn more about graphic design and web development, I have a lot of other courses and other programs and resources available for you to check out. Be sure when you get a minute, check out those other programs and stay involved, stay in touch with us. Be sure to comment below on the videos, let's know what you're up to and how we can help you. I say we, like it's me and the third person. No, I mean we, as the group and all of the students in this course that have gone through it together. Be sure to reach out and say hello, and so we can help each other out. Guys, that's it for now, that's it for this course. Thank you so much. We will see you in the next one.
Derrick Mitchell, Designer | Teacher | Artist | Innovator
