Transcripts
1. Grid Collage for Social Media - Introduction: Hello. I'm Helen Bradley welcome to this graphic design for lunch class, create a grid collage for social media in Adobe Photoshop. Graphic design for lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're going to create a grid collage for social media. We'll start by creating the general outline of the collage and then we'll fill it with photos, and we'll finish off with creating a border effect that can be customized to suit you. Now as you're working through these videos, you might see a prompt which let's you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, give it a thumbs up. These recommendations help me get my classes in front of more people just like you who want to learn more about Photoshop. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to every comment, and I look at all of your class projects. Now if you're ready, let's get started creating a grid collage in Photoshop for social media.
2. Grid Collage for Social Media - Part 1: To create the grid collage with start with a new document, so I'll choose File and then New. My document is going to be 1000 by 800, and at a resolution of 72 pixels per inch. You'll want to make your image the size that you want for your particular purpose. So if you're on Facebook or Instagram or wherever, check and see what the specifications are for the ideal image. But I suggest that you round it so that you round it up to a value that it's easy to divide into little pieces, that's why I've used multiples of a 100 here. So I'll click "OK". Now, before I get started with this, if you're using Photoshop CS5 or earlier, have a look at the addendum video for this class because I go through the process of setting up the grid for earlier versions of Photoshop there. You can come back in part two, but you'll want to go to the addendum instead of going through this step because this step is not really going to work for you. So with that in mind, if you're using Photoshop CS6 or later, you're with me right now. So let's get going. We're going to select the "Rectangle" tool down here in the shape tools, we're going to select a fill but no stroke, and we're just going to click once on a document to open up this create rectangle dialogue. So the grid I'm going to do is going to have a 400 pixel wide image here that is half the height of the document, another one over here and another one in the middle. There'll be a couple of little ones in here and a couple of 300 by 400 ones in the corners. So I'm going to start with my 400 by 400 because they're nice and easy. So I'm going to make sure that this box now reads 400 pixels by 400 pixels, and I'll click "OK". So here is my colored box. I'm going to the move tool. I'm just going to move it right up here using the smart guides to line it up. So there is that one and it's on a shape layer here. So I'm going to duplicate this layer. So I'm going to right-click and choose "Duplicate layer" and click "OK", and that gives me two layers with the exact same shape. So with the move tool, I'm just going to move this one over here. Then I'm going to click back on the "Shape tool". I want this shape still selected. Click on the "Shape tool" because that gives me access to this Fill box here, and I just want to fill this with a different color. It's going to be easier to manage these later on if they're all different colors, that's the only reason why I'm making them different colors. Right-click "Duplicate layer". Click "OK". Move tool, moving into position. Don't know if that's going to be perfect yet. We can sort that out in a minute. Go back to a shape tool, go back and fill it with a different color. So next up, I want a shape that is 300 wide by 400 tall. Well, I'm just going to duplicate this layer here, click "OK". I'm going to go and drag this version away and I'll recolor it while I am here into a bright red, and here you can see we can get its width and height. Well, I don't want it to be 400 wide. I want it to be 300 wide. So I'm just going to make it 300 wide. That's all right, and I'm just checking its position, it's nicely nested away in the corner here. So this one here just needs to be moved. Now, I've got auto-select turned on, when I go to the selection tool with auto-select turned on, that's just going to immediately select whatever's under the cursor here. Now, I don't usually have that turned on, but works particularly well for the process that we're using here. So I suggest that you turn that on. So that one's pretty good. This one here is the one I want to make a duplicate of. So I'm going to right-click, "Duplicate layer", click "OK", move the shape over here, and then just go and get the shape tool so I can get to the fill color and fill it with a different color. Next, we're going to duplicate this again. We're going to the shape tool. We're going to make this 200 by 200. You can see it's shape here. I'm going to move tool. I'm just going to drag it up into here. Back into a shape tool so I can fill it with a color. Right click "Duplicate layer", click "OK", move tool, drag it down here, go back to a shape tool and fill it with a different color. I'll make it a dark blue. Now, we have the basic grid and we're ready to go on in the next video and we're going to put the photos into our basic grid.
3. Grid Collage for Social Media - Part 2: We're now ready to add our photos to our grid and anyone who was using Photoshop, CS5 or earlier, has rejoined us at this point. So we're going to choose "File" and then "Open" because I have a selection of images for my collage. Now I have nine images here. I'm going to open all of them. Even though I have only seven spots available in the collage, that gives me the chance of a little bit of variety. So I'm going to start off. This is one image I know I do want to, so I'm going to press Control or Command A to select everything, that's the same as choosing "Select All" and I'm going to press Control or Command C, which is copy the same as selecting "Edit", "Copy". Now, I know that once I've used this image, I don't want it anymore. So I'm actually going to close it at the same time. I'm going back to the first image, which is my template image, and I'm going to think about where I want to put this image now. This is a fairly central place in port isaac, so I think I want to use this box down here for it. I'm going to select that box layer and I'm going to press Control or Command V. Now that puts this image on a separate layer. If for any chance that didn't happen for you, if it didn't go on a separate layer, I'm just going to undo it, you would go to this layer, you would select new layer so that you're putting in a new layer immediately on top and then paste it in with Control or Command V but it should work fine by just selecting the layer and pasting it in, Photoshop should make a brand new layer for you. Now I'm going to the "Move" tool here, making sure that "Auto Select" is selected and I'm just going to move this image down into position. You can see it's sizing handles here so I'm going to hold Shift as I re-size it. I want to place it over the blue box and I don't want to see any blue box at all because I'm going to use the blue box to clip it. The blue box at the moment is just telling me how big the image needs to be. Having got that in position, I'm going to click the check mark here. I'm going to select on this layer, I'm going to do one of two things, either I'll choose "Layer", "Create Clipping Mask" or, I'm just going to undo that, I'm going to click on this layer, I'm going to hold Alt and Control, that would be Option and Command on the Mac and just click between these two layers, and that does exactly the same thing, it creates a clipping group. What we're doing is we're taking this really large photo and we're cutting it down to the size of this blue box, but we're doing it in such a way that when we have the photo layer selected, we can still move it. So we could still rearrange it in here and we could still make it a little bit smaller if we wanted to, because we've still got a little bit of area around that blue box. Once I've got that image into position, I'm going to click the check mark, it's time to go and get the next one. Well, I think I'll take this one, Control A, Control C and close the image, that's Command A, Command C on the Mac. Come back in here, decide where I'm going to put it, probably this one up here, so I've clicked on it and I'm just going to choose Control or Command V to paste it in. Now it's huge and the slot for it is really small. So I'm just going to put it in position, line it up roughly where I want it to be and then I'm going to do my Control Alt, click, Command, Option, click on a Mac or of course "Layer", "Create Clipping Mask". It would say create clipping mask here if you hadn't already created one. So just to get this image see if I want to rearrange it in a different position. Let's go and get another image. Control A, Control C and close the image. Come back to my image, select where I want it to go, I'm thinking down here, Control or Command V to paste it in, move it down, re-size, holding the Shift key so its sized in proportion, picking the pace of the image that I want, create my clipping mask, and then moving the image into position a little bit better. Let's go and see what we've got over here. Control A, Control C, close the image. Let's put this in over here. Control or Command V. It's way too big, that's not a problem, we know what to do with it. Move it up, size it and create a clipping mask. Well, if you can't create your clipping mask, check up here because it might be because you have to confirm the transformation. So let's go and get the next image. This is one I wanted, grabbing it and I think I want it down here. If you're a fan of BBC television, you may recognize Port Isaac. This is a place where the TV series Doc Martin was filmed. It's called Portwenn in the series, but it's really Port Isaac in Cornwall. So that little geography lesson over, let's go and finish this off, and create my clipping mask, even though it doesn't look like I needed to create one, I did and let's go and get this one. Control A, Control C, close the image, the others I don't need either any longer. Let's paste this in, let's resize it and create my final clipping group. At this point, we now have all the images in place and we can just fine tune the images. Because we've got this "Auto Select" option selected, you can just come in here and move any of these images around, re-size them. If you do resize them, you'll need to click the confirmation checkbox there, but this gives me a chance to look and make sure that I've got the best bits of each of these image in position in my collage. In the next video, we're going to go ahead and put a border on the collage.
4. Grid Collage for Social Media - Part 3: Before you progress any further, it's a good idea to save this image and close down any of the additional images that you still had opened that you don't plan to use. Now I'm going to the last palette and it's time to put borders on these images. I'm going to select one of these rectangles. In fact, I'm going to select the one at the very bottom here, and I'm going to click the "F_x" icon here and choose "Stroke". I'm going to use a stroke around this image. Now I'm choosing inside here, and I'm going to make the stroke six pixels in width. Write now that looks a little bit narrow, but ultimately, each of these images is going to have a 6.0 stroke around it on the inside. When we add all those together, we're going to get 12-pixel borders. So they're going to be double the width of this. To make sure that I'm using white, so I have white selected here, and I'll click "Okay". If I roll down the last palette here, you can see there's an effect stroke last style. I'm going to right-click here and I'm going to choose "Copy Layer Style", and I'm going to click on this rectangle, the colored rectangle, and I'm going to Control-click on each other rectangle here. I'm going to right-click any one of these and choose "Paste Layer Style", and that paste the same lifestyle over all of these images. Now on the inside here, we've got 12-pixel borders. The problem is that around the outside edge, it's still only six pixels. I'm going to roll up to the very top of this document, click the "Topmost Layer" and click to "Add a New Layer". I'm going to the Rectangular Marquee tool. I'm going to drag out a rectangular marquee that is the exact size of this document. Then I'm going to strike it, so I'm going to choose "Edit Stroke", and I'm going to put a stroke on the inside that is 12 pixels wide and is white in color. If I click "Okay", we'll end up with 12 pixels stroke around the edge of this document, which is going to make all these lines look perfect. I'll press "Control or Command D" to deselect the selection. Now this point, we might want the flexibility of being able to use any color border that we like. Let's go ahead and see how we do that. First of all, I'm going to make sure that I have the very, very topmost layer of this document selected. Then I need to create what we call a stamp layer. This is a layer that contains the entire document on a single lab, but which does not destroy the layers underneath. To get that on the PC, we're going to press "Control Alt Shift" and tap the letter A. On the Mac, we press "Command Option Shift A" and you can see that this gives us one lab, the very top of the document that has everything on it. Well, we're going to select the white bits. I'm going to the Magic Wand Tool here and I'm going to set my tolerance to zero because I only want to pick up the white bits. I'm going to click once on this border. Then I'm going to checked and make sure that because I selected white, there wasn't any white in these underlying images that's also been selected. If it had been, let's just zoom in here and let's pretend that it had been. Let me just go and add a little bit in here. Say we had a little bump like this where some of the image had been selected. Well, we would go to the Rectangular Marquee tool here. We would zoom all the way in so that we can see it really, really clearly, and then we would hold the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac as we just selected over the area we want to remove. Now if you get it wrong, just press "Control Alt" say command option you see on the Mac and try again. Hold the Alt key down, make your selection with your Marquee tool, and that will remove that area from the selection. But with luck won't even need to do that. Now I have all the white areas of this image selected. I'm going to fill them with black. Black is my current background color, so I'll press "Control, Backspace Command, Delete on the Mac". Now we have a black border but before I deselect this black border, I want to remove the photos from this. I'm going two choose "Select Inverse", and that selects the photos, not the border, and I'll press "Delete". If we have a look over here in the last panel, we have a layer that has the black bits on it, but not the photos. Now I can press "Control or Command D" to deselect the selection and look what we've got here. We've got one layer which controls the overall grid layout, this layout border. By selecting this layer, I'm going to control, click on it. I can choose any color I like and fill it with that color. I have the flexibility of adding whatever color border I want to my images. I actually want mine to be black. I'm just going to go back to this layer control, click on it. Black is now my foreground color, Alt, Backspace Option Delete to fill it, Control or Command D to deselect it. Now this image at this stage is complete and it's ready to go up on your favorite social media outlet. But I'm going to finish it off with one extra element. I'm going to add some text. I'm going to just make sure that white is my foreground color. I'll click "My Text Tool". I have Myriad Pro Regular here, and I'm just going to type the word Port Isaac-Cornwall. I'm going to select my text and I'm just going to click in here in the size tool and shift up arrow to create it at a reasonable size, and I'm going to my move tool and I'm going to move my text into the position I want to see it in. I'm going to add a layer in between the text and this topmost grid. I'm going to click on the grid and just click the "New Layer" icon. Well, I've got a bit enthusiastic there. I'm just going to get rid of one of those only need one. Now I'm going to the Rectangular Marquee tool. Now I know how big my text is. I'm going to drag out a marquee that is the size of my text. Because I'm working on a layer below my text, I can now fill it with a color I want to use and in this case, it's black. I'll press "Control Backspace, Command Delete on the Mac" and then Control or Command D to deselect my selection. I always like to type my text first and put it in position and then add the box behind it because it's a little hard otherwise to work out exactly how big the box needs to be. I would now save this in two ways. Firstly, I would save it as a PSD file. It's already saved as a PSD file, so I'm going to resave it with the current changes. Then I'm going to save it as a JPEG file because it needs to be a JPEG file to be up on the web but I don't want to lose all this work, because he is half the work that I need to do to create yet another collage later on. If I wanted to, I could quite easily make this a different collage. I'm just going to go and open a flower image now I head some open earlier, so let's just go and get a flat image. Say I wanted to make that call more collage into a flower collage. I'm going to open the images I'm going to use Control A, Control C, close the image. Go back into my main collage, determine where I want this image to go. Let's say it's going to go up the top here. I'm going to select on this box here, so I know exactly where it's going to go. I'm going to press "Control or Command V" to paste my image in. Now I no longer want this image, so the one that's already clipped to this [inaudible]. At this point, I'm going to trash it, and I've got my flower image, so I'm just going to move it into position. Well, I think that looks pretty good, and I'm going to make a clipping group for it. You could see how easy it would be for me to go back through this particular document, get rid of the Cornwall images, and just replace them with any type of image for my collage. This can be a template layout. You may want to create two or three that you can use over and over again, on social media, just replacing the images as you work. Your project for this class is going to be to create a collage just like this for social media purposes. Create an image of a size that you want to use, and then add your boxes to it. Add your photos and clip them to the shapes, and add a frame to your collage using the stroke feature in Photoshop. When you're done, upload and post your finished project. I hope that you've enjoyed this course and that you've learned lots about working with shapes and clipping masks, and strokes in Photoshop. If you did enjoy this course and if you see a prompt to recommend it to others, please give it a thumbs up. This helps other people to identify this as a class that they may want to take. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and I look at all of your class projects. My name is Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
5. Grid Collage for Social Media - Addendum for CS4 and earlier: If you're working in an earlier version of Photoshop, the way that you create your grid is going to be a little bit different, everything else is going to be the same, such as File and New. My document is 1000 by 800 pixels in size, 72 pixels per inch, I'll click, "Okay." I'm actually going to fill this bottom layer with white because it's going to be a little bit easier to see what's going on. So I'm going to press control-backspace command, delete on the Mac. Now I'm going to create a layout using guide, so I am going to choose "View" and then "New Guide." Now I want to a horizontal guide across the middle of the document at 400 pixels. I'll type 400px and there is my guide. Now on the top row I need an image that's 400 by 400, so I'm going to put a guide in that is vertical at 400 pixels. That'll work for the top row. Then I had 22,101, so I need a guide here at 600. "View", "New Guide", "Vertical", 600, type px or Photoshop is going to do it at 600 inches and you'll never see it again. This is the top row. Now on the bottom row I had 300 and 400, so I'm going to need a guide at 300 vertical. "View", "New Guide", "Vertical", 300. The one in the middle is 400 and this one's going to be 300 here, so that means that this guide here would need to be at 700. "View", "New Guide", "Vertical", 700 pixels. One final guide here, a horizontal one for these two little 200 by 200 images. "View", "New Guide", "Horizontal", 200 pixels. Now have my guides and I'm ready to create my shapes, and I'm going to do those using the Rectangular Marquee Tool. I'm going to click on the Rectangular Marquee Tool and here is an option that generally will say normal. We're going to go to Fixed Size. And we're going to start with our 400 by 400. I'm going to type in here 400 px. If you don't type px, again Photoshop is going to try and make it 400 inches, which won't be happy. At 400 pixels by 400 pixels, now I just need to click anywhere, it doesn't matter where I click. Now I can just move the Rectangular Marquee Tool into position, but I don't want to put my square on this background layer because it's filled with white. I'm going to click here for a new layer. I have a foreground color so alt-backspace option delete on the Mac to fill that square with the color. Now I can just duplicate this one. I'm going to right-click and choose duplicate layer and click "Okay." I've got two shapes on top of each other, so I can just move this one out of the way. It's got the selection marquee around it, which means that if I go and choose a different color, I can just press alt-backspace option delete to fill that shape with color. Now I made one for the bottom down here. So I'm going to right-click and choose duplicate layer, click "Okay", drag this one down into position and snaps because of those guides, go and find a color, alt-backspace option delete. Now if you're going to make any mistake at all, it's going to be about now, because you're going to forget to make a new empty layer. So just make a new empty layer, otherwise you're going to have two shapes on the one layer. If that happens to you, just get rid of the layer and go back and build the pieces up manually again. Back to our Rectangular Marquee Tool, I'm going to make these two little ones, which are 200 by 200. I'm going to type 200 pixels by 200 pixels. I'm going to click anywhere, it doesn't matter where, and I'm just going to move it into position using those guide to snap it to choose the color or backspace options delete. Duplicate this layer, right-click "Duplicate Layer", click "Okay." Now I'm going to drag this shape down, so I'm going to the move tool, I'm going to drag the shape down into position. Now I'm going to move this rectangle down into position, so I'm just going to drag it down, going to choose a new color, sort of pinky color. The risk now is that I'm going to press alt-backspace option delete and this is going to happen. The problem was that I didn't actually have this shape selected, I've got it's transform control showing, but I don't actually have the shape selected. I'm going to control, click on this layer thumbnail, so that's now selected, so now I can fill it with color. Next up I need a new layer, and this time I need to put these two images in 300 by 400. Go back to the Rectangular Marquee Tool, those are going to be 300 wide and therefore 100 high. Click down here to create this shape, move it into position and go and fill it with a color. Duplicate this layer, go and move the shape into position. This time it still has its marquee around it, so that tells me that I'm going to be filling it alone if I go and get a fill color. Let's go and get a fill color alt-backspace option delete. Now I've got all my shapes, I'm just checking that every single one of them is on a separate layer. So everything is looking really good here, I can turn off the background layer if I want to, then I can trash it because I no longer need it. The only thing we need to do now is to get rid of these guides and we do that by choosing view and then clear guides, and just press Control or Command D, to select the selection. At this point, we've got the exact same grid as we created in the first part of this video tutorial. You're ready to start with part 2 and everything you're going to do there will work the same way in old and new versions of Photoshop site. If you're working with Photoshop CS5 or earlier, this is how you set up your grid.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
