Introduction to Photoshop: Basic Skills + 3 DIY Projects

1. Trailer: My name is Brit Morin and I'm the founder and CEO of Brit and Co. We are a company that's focused on the intersection of DIY and tech. Today, I'm teaching an introduction to Photoshop. It'll cover all the basic skills including how to use adjustment layers, what all the tools do, and how to edit all your photos. Then we'll also translate that into how to create real-world DIY projects with those photos. There are three projects that you're going to complete today once you've mastered all your Photoshop skills. The first is a wooden serving platter and we're going to actually show you how to edit and adjust text so that you can burn into the platter. The second is a market tot. We're going to show you how to use transfer paper and to print out your photos after they're edited. The last one is a greeting card. The greeting card is my favorite because it sums up all of the skills you're going to learn. People generally think Photoshop is this big, scary software program but it's actually super simple. I think that Photoshop is a way for you to really make your photos and your memories uniquely yours. 2. Creating Files in Photoshop: First step in using Photoshop is to understand how to create and save your files. So to do that, we're going to show you how to create a file first. To do that, just go to File, New, and the first step is to name your file. I'm going to call this one my first Photoshop file. Next, you want to size your document, and you can size your document either for print or for the web. If you're sizing it for print, you're probably going to want to size it in inches. Most people are familiar with 5x7, 8.5x11, so forth and so on. So, you can change those measurements here. But if you want to save it for the web, you actually probably want to save it in pixels. I commonly save my files at 645 pixels, and to create a square image, I can also make my height 645 as well. This is just the amount of pixel width we have on our website Brit & Co. but you can choose any width you want. Now as, for resolution, the lower the resolution, the smaller your file will be. This makes small files great for uploading to the web, because it takes way less time upload. But if you are printing them, you're going to want to use something like 300 pixels per inch. That ensures a really crisp, bright, tight, image once you print it out. Check and make sure that your color mode is correct, RGB is great. If you wanted to go black and white, you can use grey scale, and make sure that your background is white unless you want to use a background color like red, green, yellow, or if you want to make it transparent. Most often, you're just going to use white. Click Okay, and there you go. This is a 645 pixel by 645 pixels square. Again, I can edit this to be an inches if I wanted but I'm going to make this one for the web. To save your image once you're done with your file, make believe that we've Photoshopped this already. You're going to go to File, Save As. Now, here comes the tricky part. If you want to save it as a PSD, this creates a special Photoshop file. This means that all of your layers will be intact, so you can come back and continue editing wherever you left off. But if you're done with this, and you just want to upload it or print it out, you should actually probably save it as a JPEG or as a PDF. This compresses all of the different editing layers in your file, and makes it a smaller image, so you can upload it or print it out much easier. Let's save this as a JPEG. Just press Save, I tend to keep the quality generally high, but you can go Max, or you can go Low. This basically just adjust the size of your file. So, let's go back to High and Okay. Nowm my file is saved. Now, another way you can open up files is to actually open your Finder window, and then drag and drop a file onto the Photoshop icon of your doc. 3. Adjustment Layers: An adjustment layer is basically like a sheet of tracing paper layered on top of one another. You could trace designs on one, layer on another one, trace more designs, and yet at the end of it you have one final image made up of all these different layers of paper. The foundation layer is always where you want to start though. So, that's what we have here with the balloons. Now, to create an adjustment layer, all you do is go to Layer, New Adjustment layer. You can see all these different options of the types of layers you can add on to this image. I'm going to start off with vibrance. Vibrance helps enhance the vivid colors of the photo. You can see that as I drag my vibrance up, the colors become much more embedded. It actually enhances the lighter colors more than the darker colors. So, you can see that when I start from zero right here, and I can go all the way up. Now, watch the red, it doesn't really change but the blue changes quite dramatically. Same thing happens when I go down. But you can see how we've actually extracted the color out of this image and the black is what stands. So, the darker colors stay a bit darker and the lighter colors fade away. Saturation actually makes the images a little bit deeper, and this is the type of tool that can actually affect your skin tone. So, be careful if you're editing photos of people and using saturation. As I enhance saturation, I start to look like I've been to the tanning bed a few too many times. Now, I'm going to go back and make these zero, zero, and maybe I'll move my vibrance up to 15. This creates a little bit more vibrance than I started with. Now, I'm going to click this arrow to close that layer, and I'm going to open up a new one. Again, I go to Layer, New Adjustment Layer, and this time I'm going to show you what you can do. All right. This is a fun one. Check out this line, this is where the hue is. Now, if I drag this up, it's actually distorting the colors in my images and actually affects the way that the image itself looks. It's kind of crazy but it gives a pretty cool design. I kind of like the teal sky instead of the blue sky. What about a purple sky? You can see how you can have a lot of fun with this, especially if you're doing Andy Warhol style pop art. Now, again, you have the opportunity to adjust your saturation here, you can adjust the lightness or darkness of the photo as well. So, if you're shooting in a really shaded area, you might want to turn up the light. For this image though, we are shooting outside obviously. So, I'm going to keep it right at zero. All right. Now, one other last thing that's really fun here, is you can actually change all of these to be totally different and hit colorize, and then I'll randomly adjust it back and forth for you. Just a fun tool to play around with. So, how do I get rid of this layer now that I've added it. I can do two things. One, I can click this little i in my layers panel, and that completely turns off the layer. You can see I can turn it back on by clicking the i again, i off, i on layer off, layer on. If I want to get rid of it completely, I can actually just control-click and delete the layer. Yes I'm sure I want to delete and it's gone. So, I'm going to turn off my Vibrance layer, and I'm back to normal right where I started. All right, let's show you how to do color balancing. Layer, New Adjustment Layer, Color Balance, Okay. Now, all images are made up of three different colors, cyan, magenta, and yellow. You can actually color correct the mixture of colors in your photo. So, you can see how this turning at red gives it a little bit more of a pinkish tent. Moving it down, makes it a little bit more blue. So, if I want my sky to really be blue, I'm actually going to turn it down a little bit this way. Now, the same thing here. I can give it a greenish tint, or a purplish tint. Again, I really want to enhance the color of my sky here. So, I'm going to add on the side of purple, or magenta, and finally there's yellow and blue. You can see if I go extremely yellow, I have a little bit of a sepia look here in my photo. If I go all the way blue, it's a little bit overly blue. So, I'm just going to make it slightly blue. You see how that can make a photo look drastically different. I'm going to show you what it looks like. My Adjustment Layer is currently turned on, and now it's off, on and off. So, you can see how those subtle changes actually can make a pretty big impact in your photos. Let's move on to exposure. I actually use this tool a lot because sometimes I don't have the right lighting on all of my photos. Exposure changes all the tonal values of your photos. So, if you're shooting in a really light area like the sky, you can actually make it completely dark. If you're shooting in a dark area, you can actually make it completely light, or we could do some sort of spacing between. You might really want your photo to look cool like this. Like I can make the sky almost turn white but I can still see the balloons. Play around with exposure until you're happy with the way it looks. Something like that looks cool, right? All right. Again, I can turn it off or back on. It's that easy. The last one I'm going to show you is how to create a photo filter. Yes, this was around before Instagram, believe it or not. All right. I'm going to go to New Adjustment Layer, and then Photo Filter. Click Okay. Now, look at all of these different filters you have here. Imagine this like the panel of Instagram where you can pick the filter for your photos. I know all of you are Instagram users. So, you can choose a cooling filter which actually like we just discussed, impacts more of the blue tones in your photos, or a warming filter, which really brings out the reds and the yellows in your images. You can actually even just choose something like red to completely draw out that color in your photo. You can also choose something like sepia. This makes a photo look a little bit more old fashioned, kind of like it was shot back in the 70s, 80s. You could go deep red if you really want to do the extreme. Let's see what underwater does. Underwater gives it a little bit of a blue image. But you can even click this image and adjust it, and make the tones slightly darker, slightly lighter, just like that. Changing the density will actually just slightly modify the tone and the way that it's laid across the photo. All right. I'm going to go back to my filters. Let's see what this one looks like. Move my density down, and back up. Doesn't this photo look like it could have been shot in the 80s? All right. I'm going to close my Photo Filters, turn off my Adjustment Layers, Control-click, and actually, delete all of these layers at the same time. Now, I'm back to where I started. 4. Photoshop Tools - Part One: All right. Now, we're going to discuss the most important part of Photoshop, the tools. I'm going to show you how most all of the tools work. Some are a little self-explanatory. First up, is the move tool. Once you have an image open, you can select the very top tool in your tools panel, or you can actually just click V as a keyboard shortcut to select this tool. The move tool lets you actually move your image around on the canvas. Why is this useful? Well, first of all, if you want to layer different images together, so let's say, I want this image of me with these balloons. I can switch back and open up a picture of Ryan Gosling into the same image, and I can keep layering on images just like that, while keeping them within the canvas that I initially scoped out when I created this file. Now, I'm going to delete Ryan, sorry Ryan, and then I'm going to move myself back up to be the whole image, that's the move tool. Pretty easy right? Next up is, the lasso. I'm from Texas, so this is my favorite tool. Let me show you how to use it. We're going to go back to Ryan, because I think he felt a little bit left out when I deleted him. Now, to choose a lasso, it's this third tool right here. Now, there's the regular lasso tool, which lets you basically, draw a shape onto your image, and then that creates a whole separate image that you can move around if you want to. Now, I'm going to draw it right over his face, select my move tool again, and now, I can move Ryan's head all around. Which is just a little bit weird, actually. So, to undo that, I just command Z, and to de-select the lasso, I command D. Now, the image is back to normal. The lasso is cool, but let me show you what magnetic lasso can do. It's in the same lasso panel. But magnetic lasso is different in that it actually, smartly understands what it's trying to lasso around. So, in that first example of the lasso, I had a lot of white area in my background. The magnetic lasso will make sure that I'm really cropping this image close to Ryan's head. My goal is to not select any of the white background. So, I'm going to keep doing this. It's actually making these points for me. I'm not clicking the mouse or anything, I'm just dragging along the line of his face, and his ears. I don' think I've ever looked at Ryan Gosling so closely before or maybe I have. Now, I'm going to finish this lasso, all around his head. Once it highlights like that, you know that it's ready to move. Now, I'm going to show you why something like this could be fun or interesting. I'm going to open up this image of a guy named Mike, who's one of the engineers on our team. We put him over here. I'm going to go back to Ryan, I've got his face lassoed. I've got my move tool selected. Now, I'm going to drag his face over to Mike's. Now, you can see it's a little bit small. So, I'm actually, if I command T, it creates the ability for me to stretch out this image. So, I can do something like this, press "Enter," drag it on up, command T again, and if I want to actually move the angles, I can just adjust from the corner of this rectangle. And now, Mike has become Ryan Gosling. It's crazy, right? All right. That's a little bit of fun you can have with the lasso tool. I'm going to save this one, to send to Mike. All right. Next up, we're going to show you how to use the magic wand. So, this is my good friend George Clooney. You may have heard of him. As you can see, he's standing in front of a white backdrop. The magic wand, is a tool that actually lets you select a giant area of space that's all similar in color, all at once. So, in one click, I've actually now selected that entire white backdrop on the left side. If I want to select both sides at the same time, I can select "Shift," and then just click on the right side, and now both areas are selected. So, this is pretty cool, but let me show you what you can do with it. I'm going open up my colors panel here, and I can pick any color. I'm just going to select the shade of blue. Now, I can use the paint bucket tool, and automatically fill in the white space with blue. To deselect the area, just command D. Now, you could see George is standing in front of a blue screen, not a white screen. It's magic. All right. Moving on. I'm going to show you how to crop. So, let's go back to the balloons. If I really just wanted to crop in on my face, I can select the crop tool, drag and drop a square, move it around till I'm happy with it, I can change the shape as much as I want, make it smaller or bigger, and then just press "Enter." Once again, to deselect, just click on the square. All right. That's all you've got to do. That's the crop. Crop it like it's hot. You get it? The next one is the eyedropper tool. So, I'm going to go back to my balloons here. The eyedropper is located right here. The eye dropper is really great for picking up different colors that are in your photo. So, you can see that, the color in my color panel here changes based on the color I'm selecting here in this image. It's really great if you want to create text to match a photo, if you want to change the color of something else in your photo to match, if you have a bouquet of flowers for instance, and there's one and that's pink, and the rest are red, you can make them all look red, and the exact shade of red. You can do the same thing with these balloons if I wanted to. I can actually select a balloon using my magic wand tool, and if you want to select all of it, you just keep hitting the same section with your mouse, then I can use the eyedropper to pick a color like this orange. To make this balloon orange, I'm just going to go to edit, fill, making sure that it uses the foreground color that I've selected. You can change the opacity. What this means is that, the color is either going to be really bold, or it's going to be a little bit more translucent. I'm going to make it a little translucent since it's a balloon, click "OK," and there you go. Once again, to deselect the shape, Command D. Now, I have an orange balloon, and because the opacity is lighter, it's not as bold as this orange, but again, I could change that if I wanted to. 5. Photoshop Tools - Part Two: Moving on, the spot healing brush. This is one of my favorites for photos of people's faces. So, we're actually going to add a little bit of powder to Paris. I'm going to select the spot healing tool, and all I do is click on her face. You can see that I'm actually magically applying foundation and making her face a little bit more smooth. The spot healing tool is actually picking up the colors of the skin around it and creating a really smooth texture on her face. I can do the same thing to powder her forehead just like this. It makes getting a touch up a whole different story when you're in the virtual world. All right. If I want to sample a color, I can actually use the healing brush tool. What this allows me to do is to sample a certain color on an image, so in this case, maybe I want to sample Paris' eye-shadow. I'm going to make my brush a little bit smaller so that it can get really accurate, so I'm going to make it 10 instead of 19 pixels. If I hold down the "Option" key and click, I'm actually just sampling the colors right in here. From there, I can actually add that color anywhere on this image. So, if I wanted to beef up the eye-shadow over here, I could do that. If I wanted to add eye-shadow down her nose, I could do that, and so on and so forth. To delete it, I just Command-B. Just like that. If I wanted to sample her lips, same thing. I can move the pinkness of that lip down there right up top. Now, this is an exact sample, but I can actually change the sample up here. Click, and you can see that it's actually turning the bottom dark part of this image to the top, so she has big lips now. This looks a little bit messy, so I would experiment with this cautiously. Now, if I actually wanted to take this a step further, I can use the smudge tool to really make these colors blend together. I can smudge out some under-eye circles, weird skin tone patterns, some shine on the nose, little imperfections that the spot healing tool may have caused. The smudge tool and the spot healing tool work really well together hand in hand. You can see how you can keep going on this for a while, but I think you guys have the gist. Next up is the cloning stamp. This is another really good one for little imperfections you might have in your photos. As you see here, let me select the cloning stamp, this is it right here. All right. Megan Fox, she's gorgeous, she has a couple little imperfections we're going to fix right now. So, to do that, all I do is sample an image of clear skin, I press "Option" and click, and I've just selected this sample of skin. Now, I can cover up this sample with that one. I can do the same thing over here. Select a sample, cover it up. You might want to select really closely to the area you're covering up to make sure that it mimics the colors and skin tones evenly. Once again, you can use your smudge tool if you want it to fade into each other just like that. All right. She's looking a lot better. I'm going to show you one last tool that I use a lot called the blur tool. The blur tool does just what it sounds like it does, it blurs things out. So, if I wanted to blur out my face and just make the balloons really obvious, I could do that here. It creates a cool effect for photos. In fact, a lot of photographers actually blur the outside of their photo to make the face stand out. So I could try to blur out my balloons a little bit and really focus on making my face stand out. Can you see it? It's really gradual, but you can see it. This just makes a photo pop a little bit more, and directs your eye onto the place in the photo where you really want your viewer to focus. The last tool we're going to get to hear is Type, and this is a pretty obvious one again, but it's a way for you to write on top of your photos. You select the type tool, create a text box, and using my eyedropper tool, I'm going to sample this red from my balloon to make my font match the image. I click the move tool. Let's say that I want it here, but I want the font to be a little bit shaded. I can double-click on the layer in the adjustment panel over here, and you can add different types of options. You can add a shadow to it, you can add an inner glow, color overlay. Once again, you can still sample the colors that you already have in your image. So you can change the text colors here. You could even add a drop shadow if you really want to make it stand out, but if that's a little bit too heavy for you, you can actually tone it down a little bit so that it's barely standing out. A really good rule of thumb is to add drop shadows onto your text if it's on top of a photo, it's sometimes really hard to read the text if it's blended right into the same pane of your photo, so I like to add a little bit of a shadow here, makes it much more readable. All right, there you go, that's how you use Type. 6. Customize a Serving Board: So now, I'm going to show you how to edit text so that you can use it to burn onto a serving board. So, to get started, we're going to open a new file, "File", "New". I'm going to name this file, "Serving board". I'm going to make my width 11 by 7 and make sure that my resolution is at 300. The background can be white, I'm cool with that, press "Okay", and here we go. Now, once again, I'm going to start with my text box here. Just drag a big rectangle. I'm going to make sure that my text color is black. From here, I can edit the size, the font, and whether it's bold or italic, just right up on my layers panel up top. Make my size about 60, and you can tell roughly what size is going to be because the cursor is blinking. You can also test out a few characters if you want to. Control-A to edit them all. If you go to "Window" and hit "Character", you'll see this text panel pop-up which lets you really edit your text. So, to get started, I'm going to write, "say cheese". Two lines. I'm going to highlight both lines. Now, I'm going to select a font that I actually downloaded from the Internet for free called "Flex", and I'm going to change my font. Now, I'm going to show you what all of these different features in the dialog box here do. So, we just edited the font. All good. We edited the size. I can even make it bigger if I want to. I will bring it up to 72. Now, this icon here is called your leading. It actually changes the spacing in between your lines of text. So, as you can see I can make them overlap each other, or I can make them completely separate. See, before I had that at 60 points, so my y was actually hitting my e. I don't want that to happen. So, I'm going to turn into 72 points, make sure that my two words are not connected, and that looks a lot better. The kerning increases or decreases the spacing between certain pairs of letters. Sometimes A and V sometimes intersect each other. So, that's what kerning can do. This is the kerning panel here. I'm going to make sure that mine is optimized to zero, so that I have consistent space in between my letters. Now, tracking is similar to kerning but it changes the space between characters in the whole line of text. This is tracking right here. You can see what happens if I move it to negative 50, squeezes them really closely together and positive 50 spreads them further apart. See what happens when I go all the way to 200. That's a little too far for me. I'm going to keep it right at about 50. Now, these two icons here change the vertical and the horizontal scale of your text. So, if I wanted to stretch it up really high, I could change it to 150 percent and just stretches it up just like that. I'll go back to 100 to make it normal. You can see what happens if I change the width to 150 percent, stretches it out really, really wide. All right, back to 100, keep it normal. Lastly, I'm going to select the baseline shift. This is actually really fun for me to show you if I use the word jump because that's exactly what it's doing. Now highlight the letter that I want to jump, and you can see, it just raised. I'm going to turn it to 20 points. My p is actually jumping, which is exciting. So, you've got all of your text set just the way you want it, but in this case, our text is a little bit too small for what we want for the serving board. So, in that case, I'm just going to Command-T to bring up a transform box around my text. This basically lets me stretch out the text bigger, smaller, turn it at angles if I wanted to, and it actually is a great way for me to keep the text the same way it is without stretching the letters, so I can just make it bigger. You can do the same thing by changing the font size, but doing this was an easy, quick shortcut. I'm going to hold down shift while I drag the edge of this box out with my mouse, and this keeps my text all in a line. I press "Enter", and I can move it right here. So, just a little bit bigger. We want it to take up about half the size of the canvas, and just center it like that. Now, we're ready to print. So, to print, just go to, "File", "Print". Makes sure that it looks good here. This is how it's going to look on your piece of paper, and print it out. So, now, you've got your say cheese font printed out on a sheet of paper, and we're going to transfer this font to your cheese plate, get it? Using these wood-burning tool. And the first thing you're going to do is just cut out this font, leaving a little bit of room at the top and bottom for you to tape it on to this wood board with your painter's tape. You don't need to worry about keeping your lines too straight. You're only going to be burning through your letters. Put that aside. Now, you can position this any way you want. I think it's cute if it's at an angle, so you can put your cheese out over here. I'm just going to cut a couple of strips of painter's tape. Tape it on, make sure that your paper doesn't move while you're burning into the wood. And from there, it's time to burn. So, you want to make sure that your wood-burning tool is plugged in and warm. Be very careful, obviously you don't want to touch this thing. It can burn you. You're going to trace these letters, and you might have to just hold down onto the wood a little bit while you trace, so that the burning tool can actually really penetrate into the wood. You can see some smoke rising, and that's completely normal. So, you're going to continue to outline these letters, and try to keep your movements as smooth and as slow as you can. Feel free to go back over your letters to make it even smoother. Once you're done burning, you just remove your paper, and here is your cheese board. If you want to, you can touch up the font a little bit using your wood burner. Just be really careful, you don't want to do anything too crazy when you don't have your stencil on. Its all ready to use, so go ahead and throw a party. 7. Customize a Market Tote: Now, we're going to set up your documents for your tote bag, and the first thing you're going to do is create two documents, one that's a three-by-three and one that's an 8.5 by 11. The three-by-three is going to be the size of all of your photos along with the front of your tote bag, the 8.5 by 11 is the size of the transfer paper you're going to use to put those photos onto your tote bag. Now obviously, three-by-three times 12 photos you do the math, it's much bigger than an 8.5 by 11. So actually we're going to use two of those eight by 11 files. Did I confuse you yet? Okay, let's take it a little bit slower. First, make your files. I'm going to show you how to create one new one, File, New. We're going to make this one a three-by-three. This is going to be called photo1. All of these presets look correct. Open it up here. Now I'm going to make the second file as well, File, New. Again, this one is going to be 8.5 by 11. That's all you got to do for your setup. You'll notice here that I actually had my grid lines turned on. You can do this by going to View, Show, Grid. This is just going to help me make sure all my photos are aligned perfectly with one another. To get started, all you need to do is edit your photos. So, use all of those skills we just taught you in the previous lessons to edit the photos of your choice. I'm going to drag and drop a couple of my images into Photoshop. You can see that this photo doesn't exactly fit the size of the canvas. So, I'm going to shift down and drag my mouse up to stretch the image, then move it around, continue doing that process until it fits. I'm going to press enter and then I'm just going to center the photo just like that. Now, I can use any sort of editing tools that I want here. I can go to Layer, New adjustment layer. Let's edit the color balance here. I'm going to give this one a little bit of a warm color balance. I'm going to turn up my yellow, my blues, my reds, there we go. Now I'm going to quickly turn off my grid lines so I can really see the photo and I'm going to edit some of the shine off of my husband's face. Powder him up a little bit, looks good. Add it a little bit of the imperfections here. All right, that one looks one to go. So, I'm going to save it Brit and Dave. All right, all set. Now I'm going to do the exact same thing with 11 other photos. So New, I'm going to create a three by three image. Now I'm going to drag and drop a photo of this delicious ice cream cone that I ate recently onto my Photoshop panel and what I love about this one is just how vibrant these colors are. So I'm going to really use what I just taught you guys about color vibrancy to make these sprinkles stand out even more. So, Layer, New adjustment layer, Vibrance. Then turn up the vibrance. See, that's making the sprinkles even more colorful. All right, that one's ready to save now too. Save it as ice cream cone, all right. Once you've edited all 12 of your photos, you're ready to place them in your file to print on transfer paper. So, open up the file that you created that's 8.5 by 11. You see I have my grid lines up here ready to align my photos, and now I'm just going to drag and drop the files that I just created. Then I can use the move tool to move it all the way down. We start from the bottom actually, just because the way that the transfer paper is sized, we actually have to use two sheets of transfer paper, therefore, we need to start at the bottom left. So, you want to make sure that you're two grid spaces in and one grid space up. Now I'm going to drag my second file. You want each image to be two grid spaces apart from one another. Just like that. So again, it's two grid spaces in and two grid spaces apart. For the sake of time, I'm actually going to cut to what this actually looks like once all of your photos are placed. So, you can see I have six photos here. They are all two grid spaces apart, one grid space from the bottom. Now for my second sheet of transfer paper, it's almost the same except for I'm two grids spaces apart and one grid space from the top. This is going to make it so that I can connect the bottom of this page with the top of this one and make it look like one complete grid of 12 images. Now that that's done, I'm ready to print. File, Print, and here we go. So now you've got your photos printed out onto your transfer paper and all you're going to do is trim them up a little bit to make sure that they fit on your tote. I'm just going to take a little bit off the top and a little bit off the bottom to make sure the margins look the same between every photo and on every edge. So, your final tote will come out looking something like this. Now all you got do is iron them on. Do it one at one time and start by flipping your transfer paper over and lining up the top of your paper with the theme of your tote bag. Now, just iron away. Once you're done ironing the second sheet, just pull it off and say hello to your new favorite tote. 8. Turn Handwriting Into Font: Next step, I'm going to show you how to turn your own handwriting into a digital font that you can import into Photoshop for all kinds of projects. We're going to show you how to use it on a greeting card, but there's also ways to use it for notepad, stationary, you can use it on top of your photos, all kinds of use cases for using your own handwriting. So, to get started, all you need to do is download an app called iFontMaker from the App Store. It works on iPads and iOS devices like iPhones. Once you have it downloaded, just open it up on your tablet. You'll be prompted to actually draw out every letter of the alphabet using your finger and your own handwriting. You can use cursive or you can use a serif font, just make it feel like you. It gives you baseline instructions for the baseline that your font should be, the x-height, cap height, ascender, and descender. Now, in the world of typography, you really want to make sure that you try to follow these guidelines as closely as possible. So, when you're drawing you're A, try to stick to the baseline, the cap height, don't go above the ascender, and don't go below the descender. You're going to start with caps, and then you'll move to lowercase. If you want to redo something, you can just press the redo icon down here. If you want to skip ahead to letters, you can go to lowercase and practice it here. You can also do numbers, and it'll prompt you to create punctuation marks. Once you're done creating every single letter of the alphabet, uppercase, lowercase, numerals, and punctuation marks, you can hit the Share button at the top right and click Build Font via 2TTF.com. This is going to convert your font into a digital font that you can use on the web. As you see here, it creates a font file and lets you e-mail it to yourself or you can go straight to the website to download it. 9. Make Your Own Holiday Card - Part One: All right, once you're done creating your new digital font, you'll be directed to a website where you can download it. This is what my font ended up looking like, I chose a cursive pattern. I'm just going to hit download, it downloads it onto my computer, and I can double-click it from the download file, and then just click "Install Font." This makes your font available to use in all of your word processing programs on your computer including Photoshop, of course. All right, now, we're going to jump back into Photoshop, and get started on your greeting card. You want to open two different files in Photoshop, one is a five by seven card. You want to make sure that the width is seven, and the height is five. This is going to be the size of your finished greeting card. Because this is going to be a printing card, remember that you want it in inches, and you want the resolution to be 300 pixels per inch. I'm going to title it greeting card press "Okay" and there we are. Now, i'm going to open the photo that I'm going to use my greeting card. Just go to file open. I've got my photo right here, and I'm going to start by editing it. So, first I'm going to change some of the colors around by creating a new adjustment layer. I'm going to try this one. I'm going to turn the density down, so that it's only slightly warm. Alright. Now, I'm going to start with my photo. From here, I'm just going to drag and drop this image to flatten it. If you just copy all of your layers and hit flattened image, it'll merge all of your changes together, so you don't lose any when you transfer one image to another. So, in this case, I'm now going to move this photo to my five by seven document, just like this. Now, you might have to resize it slightly. To do that, just hit "Cmd T," stretch it out a little bit. You want your photo to take up roughly half the size of your greeting card. Next, we're going to play around with some fun shapes. We're going to create light strands on your greeting card. First, you're going to hit the pen tool, it's right here. To use the pen tool, you just hit two dots, I'm going to click once, and I'm going to move my mouse all the way over, click again but hold. From here, you can actually stretch this line to look like a light strand. Once you let go, you'll see it does this fill, I'm going to actually turn off the fill, and turn on a black stroke. Now, that looks a little bit more like light strand, but it's still a little bit too thick for me. I'm going to see if we can make it only one point thick. So, I have a thin strand of lights. All right press "Enter" and you're done. I'm going to do that again, click once, click the other side, hold and drag, and you can make your lights strands as loose, or as tight as you want to, let's see, you can turn them upside down, you can make them fall over, that looks good. Let go, looks pretty good, Enter. Now I'm just going to make one more, here to here. You can experiment with how you want these to look. You can make them crazy, you'd just want them to look natural. So, I think something like that looks good. Alright. Now, if you want to, you can actually highlight all three of these shapes. Use your move tool, remember just hit "N" and "V" to move them all. So, they are basically at the top border of your greeting card. Now, instead of replicating all of our art work to create light strands on the bottom of your card, you could also keep your shapes highlighted, then Ctrl click on them, and duplicate the layers. This does what it sounds like it does, it duplicates all the layers. Now, I can just drag the duplicates all the way down to the bottom. But to make them look a little bit different from the top, I'm going to turn them over. To do that, hit Cmd T, this creates a transform box outside of your shapes. Use the corners of the box to turn it all the way over just like this. So, there are my light strands, all done. Now, every light strand means a set of lights, right. Okay, so to create those lights, you're going to use the rectangle tool in the ellipse tool. We start out with the rectangle tool. Make sure my color is black, and I'm just going to draw a tiny little rectangle just like this. Now, once again, you can edit the stroke, you can make it thicker or thinner. For me, I'm actually going to make it 0.5, to make it even thinner than the strand of my lights. I'm going to show you how to use the ellipse tool to draw tiny little light bulb, just like that. Press V to select your move tool, and connect your light bulb to the light socket. If you want to make sure to connect them directly to the light strand, you can "Cmd +" to zoom in. That way, you can make sure that your rectangle on your ellipse are both together, and they attach to the strand perfectly. 10. Make Your Own Holiday Card - Part Two: So, what color should we make these lights? For this one, I'm going to make it a red light. If I wanted to, I could actually even choose the same color red that I'm using, that I'm wearing in my photo. I can choose, the same shade of red as my coat. Now that that's selected, and before I get started, I have to rasterize these two layers. Which makes them so that I can actually fill them in with color. All right. Again, just make sure your Ellipse is selected, not the ellipse, the rainbow. You see this little arrow, you just want to make sure that's pointing inside of the shape that you want to color. My red selected, my ellipse is selected, I'm going to click inside there, and now I have a red light bulb. I'm going to make my sockets a dark hunter green color, I'm just going to move to the green shade of my color panel, click a dark green, and do the same exact thing here. Color them and just like that Command, minus, to zoom out. Now, I can actually highlight both layers, the ellipse and the rectangle. I'm going to Control click, duplicate, select V for my move tool, and then move these lights around. I'm going to start with a bunch of red lights, and then I'm going to show you how you can change them all to different colors. To make this process a little bit faster, once you have a set of two lights, you can copy all four layers, both ellipses and both rectangles, duplicate them both, press enter, and now you can move these around. If you want to move individual lights around, you can also just select those layers, and move them to whatever destination you want. You're going to continue doing this all throughout your greeting card until you have as many lines as you want. If you want to, you can also even turn them, so that not every light is actually facing the same direction. Now, I have a lot of lights on my light strands. They're all red right now, and to make them different colors, again, you can just click on the layer, and if you aren't sure which rectangle is which, just use the eye tool, to click and see which lights turning on and off, figuratively not literally. Here's copy 11. Now, I can just click on my color panel. If I want to make this light a shade of blue, I can just click on blue. Once again, I can also use the eyedropper tool, to actually select a shade of blue that's already in my photo. That the consistency between the photo matches, and then just click on the paint bucket, and fill in your light. If you wanted to do this a little bit easier than clicking on and off, you could obviously just change the titles of your adjustment layers. You can do that here. You can double click them to say upper right left. That way, you know that's the light bulb that you want to change. That's really helpful when you have a lot of different shapes and files that all look the same like this. All right, all set. Now I've got my light strands in place, I've got my photo in place, and now I need a custom message. This is where your handwritten font is going to come into play. I'm going to choose the text option. Make sure my text is black. From here, I can actually go in and select my font. Here it is. Now, I'm going to create a text box, and you can see by the size of my cursor that this font size is way too big. I'm going to cut it down to 36. Now, I'm going to write Mary, and this is still a little too big. I'm going to expand this, Christmas, and what did we learn about our characters? I actually need to change the lighting, to bring these two words a little bit closer together. I'm going to say 36 points. That way, everything is not touching. I'm also going to try to bring my letters a little closer together as well. I can actually probably cut it down to -75. Because I used a cursive font, the letters actually won't connect in cursive, but you can use some of these cool font tools, to make it look as if they do. Now, I'm just going to center my font, and I'm going to command T, to turn it at a little bit of an angle, just like that. Press enter, and then I'm actually going to use a normal font, to write love, and I'm going to select a font that I already have on my computer, maybe something like Geneva. I'm going to make it much smaller, about 18 points, and say Love, Brit and Dave. Now at this point, my letters are a little bit too close together, I'm going to go back to zero. Still a little bit too big for me. I'm going to edit it down to 14, and I'm going to move my font down just a bit. It looks something like this. That's it. At this point, you can send it to print, package up your envelopes, and wish all of your friends and family, a happy holiday. 11. Explore Design on Skillshare: way.