Learn Adobe Photoshop: By creating a Social Media Graphic

1. Introduction: Do you want to learn how to create social media graphics for Twitter using Adobe Photoshop? Then this short class is for you. My name is Kate and I'm an Adobe instructor working at the UK's leading Adobe Training Center in London. I'm a graphic designer and the shoe designer who's worked with Jimmy Choo and Sophia Webster. We will start this class with all the Photoshop essentials you need to know to create graphics for social media and Twitter. Things like how to create shapes and distort the shapes and also how to add special effects like drop shadows and transparency. We will be playing with art boards and learn how to place images and change the image adjustments accordingly. We will also be working with a call to action button, which essentially is a button that encourages viewers to click on it, and it will direct them to a website or to a promotion or to the purpose of this document. We will then learn how to save and export our files into print ready or web ready documents. I encourage you to use your own images, and graphics, and logos, and colors and make it your own style. I cannot wait to see what you come up with, so let's get started. 2. Getting Started: Hey guys. Welcome to this Twitter graphic exercise class. We will be creating this Twitter graphic, and we're going to learn a lot of Photoshop skills along the way. Things like how to place images and how to create a rectangle with a border, how to create another rectangle and add transparency, how to work with texts, and so much more. Let's start with your files. You should have received a Twitter graphic cuisine ZIP file, which essentially is a compressed folder. Now, in order for you to get this folder, you need to double-click on a "ZIP File" and it will expand into a folder, and you can access all the files inside. But I'm going to get rid of that because I already have a folder. In this folder, if you double-click on it, you'll have all the information you need for this graphic. This is the JPEG of this file, but you'll have a lot of other information. You'll have the logo, which we'll be using, an SVG file, which means it's a vector or digital drawing, we'll have the font, which we're going to download, and that's the font to use in this exercise, we'll have the image, and we'll have the Adobe Photoshop file. Now, I'm currently using a Mac, which means that I can see a thumbnail, a preview of my file. But if you are using a PC, you will see a PS in blue which is the Photoshop icon. It's just a different way of previewing it but pay attention. If it has PSD in the end, then it's a Photoshop file. Let's download this font. If you double-click on this font, it will say install font, and I would like you to click on it and click on "Okay." I don't have that option because I have that font already, and then this font will be in all your programs and softwares. Now, we're going to open this Photoshop file, which I've already prepared. I've created an art board, which is this for us, so we can copy this over here. Now, there are a few ways of opening a Photoshop file. You can either right-click on this file and open with whatever version of Adobe Photoshop you have or you can head to Adobe Photoshop and you can click on "Open" or "File Open" and you can try and find this folder and select the Twitter Class cuisine PSD file. Click on "Open", and that is our Photoshop file ready to go. 3. Adjusting the Image: Before we get started, I will start with a few Photoshop pointers and essentials and then we can get going. First of all, if your Photoshop doesn't look like mine, it's because maybe your workspace currently looks different. The workspace is a preference of how you view Photoshop and your panels. Let's change that. We're all going to go to "Window workspace" and select "essentials default". It should look more or less like this, which is green. Now, these are panels and the main panel we'll be working with today is the layers panel and the artboard panel. Artboard one over here is artboard one over here, which is like a Canvas that we're going to paint. We're going to add all the graphics here. Then this artboard is the original artboard with its layer underneath it. The layer underneath is the image. It's a JPEG. Then you can also hide a layer by clicking on the eye and then you can show it just so you know. If you can't see this option, it's possible that the arrow is facing to the right on your artboard. Click on it so it faces down and it will expand that folder. Now a couple of things about layers and panels and tools which we'll cover as we go. First of all, the most important tool that you want to be on is the move tool. We're going to use this one a lot. Then we're going to use the type tool a lot for text. Then we're going to use the shape tool for shapes. Now let's go to the move tool. You can also create guides. If you left-click on the ruler over here and you hold and you drag it down, you can create a guide and you can see where to line things up. Create another one. Now we don't need this currently, but we will need this later. Let's get started. I would like us to select "artboard one" in the layers. Which is a layer we'll be working with. If you do want to zoom in, for Macs it's Control plus, and for PCs Control plus. But you don't need to. We're going to place this background image in here. When I create a graphic, what I started with always is the bottom layer. Whatever is at the bottom, and then I work my way up. I would start with that image and then maybe the rectangle, another rectangle. Let's make sure we select artboard one. We have artboard one selected and we can go to "file, place embedded" and make sure you select that folder that we've just decompressed from a zip file, and you can select that image. Click on "place" and obviously we're going to have to resize this. You can do this by clicking and dragging and moving it around. I think mine is a little bit too big, so I'm going to make this a little smaller. There was artistic freedom here, so you don't have to make it look exactly the same, just make it look good. When you're done and you want to place it. You can press "enter" or "return" and this will place the image. Now, if you're not happy with the image you just added, you can resize it. But you need to go to edit, "free transform" or "Command" or "Control T", the shortcut here. Then you'll be able to resize it and you just have to click and drag. Just bear in mind that older versions are Photoshop, you would have to hold down the "shift key to keep the proportions to resize it. But you no longer have to do this for newer versions. You can just click and drag. Just make sure you use whichever is appropriate for you. When you're done, you press "enter" or "return". Obviously, my colors here are not the same. This needs to be brighter and some other adjustments. That's what we're going to do. We're going to change the adjustments of this image. Just make sure that the layer I selected over here and then you go to image adjustments. This is where we can change stuff like brightness and contrast and colors. Let's just get ahead to brightness and contrast. Make sure preview is ticked so you can see what you're doing. Let's add some brightness and very quickly it's starting to look the same. When you're done and you're happy obviously, artistic freedom again, you click on "okay". That is the image placed. 4. Creating Shapes: The next part is we're going to learn how to add shapes and work with the shape tool. We're currently on the move tool, but if we go to the shape tool over here, and what we're going to do is this rectangle first, and then later we can do the long rectangle that has a border. There's a few ways of doing this. If you want to get it exactly the same, what you can do is draw a rectangle on the existing one and then we can move it there later. If you want we can do that, or you can just do it by eye and look that the rectangle ends at the end of the second finger. Let's do that. Now to draw a rectangle, you need to click and drag, and it's okay if you're beyond the borders, that's absolutely fine, and you click and drag and you let go. Now, whatever color you're going to have in here, depends on the color you have in a few places. One place could be here. At the top you'll see fill, which means the color that a shape is filled with, and stroke means the border, but it's currently zero, so there's no border. Now you have the same options here in the Properties panel. Now, if you have an older version, you might not see the Properties panel. If you can't currently see the Properties panel, then make sure you go to Window, Properties and it will open it up. The fill is also available here and there. If you want to change the fill, you can either click on it and you can change from your existing swatches, which are colors that you've saved here. Or what you can do is at the top you'll see white and black, so if you select white, it will give you that color. It should be fine now, we should have that color. Now, clearly there's a transparency here, so we're going to make this transparent. The way to do this is to go to opacity here. In the layers panel, you'll see opacity, which is the opposite of transparency. If the opacity is 100 percent, then it's completely opaque, it's not transparent. To make this transparent, we need to reduce the opacity, and again, there's artistic freedom, we're doing things by I. Whatever you want, I'll add, I guess 86, let's say, and that is this rectangle done. Now if you do need to move your rectangle, make sure you go back to the move tool, because the only thing you can do with the rectangle tool is draw rectangles. You go back to the move tool and it's placed and you can move it around if you need to. Remember if you make a mistake, you can always edit, undo, or Command, or Control Z, which is a shortcut. Super. The first rectangle done. Can you see this rectangle is above this image? Which means that it's in front. We're good now. I would like you to make sure that you have this rectangle layer selected, and now we're going to go back to the rectangle tool again and we're going to draw this rectangle. Now it's a little bit different because it doesn't have a fill, it just has a border. What I want you to do is we can again do it by eye if you want. We can click and drag and try and get it more or less to look the way we want it to, click and drag. Now this looks good, but it's not what we want, so what we're going to have to do is remove the fill and add a border. We can head here to fill and stroke and click on "Fill", and you'll see this red strike through. When you click on that, it will remove the fill, and then I would like you to click on this one which is the border, and you can select white from up here, so you're sure it's white. But it currently doesn't have a width, can you you see it's 0 px? What I want you to do is click here on the arrow and you can increase the border to however you see fit, you be the designer here. I'm going to do approximately like this, it might not be exactly the same, but that's fine. When you're done, you can click here and that's done. Now let's move on to the other shape maybe, because we're doing all the shapes first. Now, if you want to create a shape here, that shape, that's in the same spot, you can use the guides that we've just created. Now this is called a Call-to-action button. Just so you know. If we can go and left-click and hold and drag from the ruler, and drag it down to the borders of our Call-to-action button, and it's going to be here. We're still on the rectangle tool, and if you're not, make sure you go back to the rectangle tool. We're going to create another rectangle by clicking and dragging. Again, approximately the size, it doesn't have to be exactly the same. Now it has a low setting, so we're going to have to change that. We're going to have to remove the border. Click on the border, and we're going to have to add a color. Now if you click on this option, you might have that color ready here. I might have pre saved it. But if you don't have this color, that's absolutely fine, because we can use something called an eyedropper to copy that color. But we're going to have to click on this first, so you see a color picker, you can choose loads of colors. Then we're going to have to click on this piece here, so we'll copy that color. Just copy that color, click on "Okay", and viola, we have that color. Super. But we're not entirely there, so how do we round the corners? In the Properties panel, if you click here again, below the fill and the stroke, you'll see these guys here, and these are for corners, they represent each corner. Make sure that the link icon is on, which means that they will all change the same, all corners. I just want you to left-click on one corner and drag it inwards, and you will see the rounded curve shape rectangle, which is great. That's what we want. 5. Working with Text: We have a couple more shapes to draw here, but we'll cover this later. Let's go to text now, which is what we'll do now. To create text, you always have to go to the Type Tool. Now remember, we've already downloaded the font which was DIN Alternate Bold. What we do to create a text frame is we left-click and drag, and try and create a text frame. Then you can start typing, class return cuisine, like we say in French, or cuisine. Obviously, our text is not the way we want it to look, but that's absolutely fine. We'll change this now. I would like us now to highlight our text. Make sure your frame is big enough, because if it's not big enough, you won't be able to see your whole text. Highlight your text. If something went wrong, and your text is massive, and you can't see the text, you can also go to Select, All, or Command or Control A, and this will select your whole text. Next, you go to the Properties panel again, we're going to change all the character formatting of this text. We're going to go here where mine says Myriad Pro, yours might say something else, and we're going to type D-I-N, DIN Alternate Bold, which is a font that we need. Then below, you will see a few options, so this is the font size. You can increase that by clicking and dragging. This will increase the font size. Or you can click here, change the font accordingly. Or you can use the trick that I love to use is you click on this box, and then you press the upward arrow on your keyboard or downward arrow, and this will change the size. Now you're always free to change the frame again, make it bigger if you need to. That's fine. Now can you see the space between the lines here, is a bit bigger on mine here, than on this one. Yours might look completely different. Now we can change this here in the leading. You can use the arrow on your keyboard, and press up or down, and this will change the leading. I'm just going to make my font a little bit bigger. We're just doing it by eye. If it's not the same font size, that's fine. Now mine is currently white even though we can't see it, and I knew this because color here is white. If you need to change that color again, you can click on it. You can either pick a color or you can pick that black color to make sure that it is indeed completely black. Click on "OK". That's one piece of text done almost. Now obviously, mine is Caps Lock. If you didn't type it in Caps Lock, you can add the Caps Lock option actually in the Properties panel. You just have to click on this three dots here, which always means more options for this panel, and then we'll have some more options. But for the Caps, if you scroll down, you will see Type Options, and here is all caps option that you would like amongst other options. Now if you go to Paragraph over here, you can also choose how you align your content. I would like to align this in the center, so pick this one, and voila. You might want to make this a little bigger. Now my text is a little bit more to the right and I need to move it to the left. To do this, I need to go to the Move Tool. I'm currently on the Type Tool, but I need to go to the Move Tool. I can click and drag, and it's going to move to the left. Super. Now let's add the next piece of text. We're going to go to the Type Tool again, and we're going to create a little tiny text frame here for the join now. We're going to click and drag, and create an additional text frame on top. While my text big, so what I do is I just press Delete. If you have Lorem ipsum dummy text, press Delete and it will get rid of it. You can type join now, but obviously, you won't have enough space for it, which is fine. If you've typed join now and you press Command or Control A, it will highlight, select all this text. Then we can head back to character here, and obviously, make the font size smaller. Highlight the box, and press the downward arrow on your keyboard until you think it looks good, and the size looks fine. Artistic freedom, again, always. DIN Alternate is the font, so make sure you change that. Now scroll down, and make the color white by clicking on this, and click on "OK", and now it's white. If you need to move this down, then you can always go to the Move Tool, click on it, and move it down. Voila, now let's add the website. Again, you know the drill, we go to the Type Tool, we click and drag, and create a little text frame. We press Delete, delete all the text here, and you can start typing the text if you want, classcuisine.com. I totally have typos, but that's absolutely fine. Then select your whole text, either go to Select, All, or Command or Control A. This will select your whole text. Now obviously, we need to make some changes, and make this smaller or bigger, depend on yours. Highlight this and press the downward arrow on your keyboard to make it a bit smaller. Then go to Color, and select the black here, so it's black, and we can see better. I think I'm happy with this, and if not, I can always change it later. No problem. Then remember to move it, you go to the Move Tool, which is why it's called the Move Tool. When you click on it, make sure you click properly so that the layer is selected. Then you can move it up, and my website is too big, so I'm just going to double-click and make the font smaller. If you double-click with the Move Tool, it should automatically take you to the Type Tool. If not, you go back to the Type Tool and click on it. Go back to the Move Tool, and I believe that is our text completed. 6. Saving & Exporting: We're going to cover something new now, and that is how to add a shadow to our lovely call-to-action button so it highlights it and it encourages people to click on it or look at it. What we're going to do is we're going to have to select the rectangle. But it can be pretty hard to select the rectangle because we have that text above. The best way to select the rectangle is to go to the rectangle layer. Now, how do you know that this is the correct rectangle? My trick is to click on the eye, and this will temporarily hide whatever rectangle this is. You can see it is indeed this layer, and then I can show it obviously again, I need to see it. It's important that this rectangle layer is selected. Now we're going to add a shadow. To do this, we need to add something called an effect. To add an effect, we need to go at the bottom of the Layers panel and you'll see fx. If you click on that, you will see a bunch of options. But if you select drop shadow, whoa, that's a big shadow. That's fine. We can change that, no problem. We can change things like the opacity. Yours will look different to mine. I'm going to reduce the opacity, make it less dark. You can play with the distance. Can you see the distance changes? You can change the spread. You can change the size. Actually if I change the size, that will make a massive difference. I work with the size, I changed that, and then I can change the spread a bit, and the distance. You want to go quite a little, just a little bit of everything here. It doesn't have to be that dramatic, but of course you have the artistic freedom, so feel free to change that. If you wanted to, you can also change the color of your shadow. We're not doing that here, but if you wanted to, you can click on that and choose another color. Let's go crazy, purple, and you can see a preview here. I'm just going to press "Cancel" because I don't need that. I'm not sure if I'm happy with this shadow, but if I'm, I can click on "Okay", and that is my shadow done. If at any point you need to edit the shadow, you can double-click on the Drop Shadow option here in the Layers panel and you can edit it again. Okay. We're getting there. Now, the next option is adding our logo, which is an SVG file. It's a vector. We need to make sure that we're adding it to this panel. I want you to select the top layer of Artboard 1. To add a logo or anything in our existing document, we go to File, Place Embedded. This is how we place any image or text in Photoshop. If you can go to that Twitter Graphic folder and select Chefs and Place. If it's massive, no problem. You just click and drag and make it smaller and then you can move it around. More or less like this. Obviously, as usual, you can choose how you want it to be. When you're done, you press Return. You can move it with the move tool by clicking and dragging. Mine is a little bit smaller here, but I think I prefer that. That's fine. If you want to change that, remember, you can go to Edit, Free Transform, and you can resize it a little bit and make it a little bit bigger, and then press Enter or Return when you're happy. We're getting there. Now for those two rectangles over here, it's basically two rectangles. We're going to draw one and then we're going to duplicate the other. I'll show you how to do that. We're going to go to the rectangle tool and we're going to try and draw a very thin rectangle, starts here where cuisine starts. We're going to go click and drag and try and make it extremely thin. Again, we can always change this later, no problem. Then whatever the cutter this is, if we go to Fill here, we can use the black here or you can select back from here again. That will be our rectangle. If you're not happy with this rectangle, you can change it in the settings in the properties. You can change the width and the height. If you need it to be longer, you can add more width. If you need to make it thinner, you reduce the height. Quite nice. Then if you're happy with your rectangle, you go to the Move tool. Instead of redoing the same one, I'm going to show you how to duplicate this. I want you to Control plus or Command plus and zoom in, and I want you to click on this rectangle, and I want you to hold down the Alt option key until you see a black and white cursor. If you don't see a black and white cursor, make sure you hover over the black rectangle only. You hold down the Alt option key and you click and drag, and this will duplicate this rectangle, which is cool. When you're done and you're happy with the placement following those pink guides, you let go and that is your rectangle placed. Then you can still move logos if you wanted to. That is our graphic done. So congratulations. The final thing I'll end on is how to save and export our files. First of all, what I want you to do is make sure you select Artboard 1. Then if you want to save it, you can go to File and you have lots of saving options. Let's go to File, Save As, and save on your computer, and maybe on desktop so we can find it. If you wanted to save it as a Photoshop file with layers, you would just have to select Photoshop, and then you click on "Save." It will just be a Photoshop file like we opened before. I'm just going to cancel that. But if you wanted to save this as a JPEG, or PNG, or any type of document, and just this one, then it's important that you select Artboard 1. Then what you can do is go File, Exports, Artboards to Files. This will come up. If you tick Artboard Content Only and Export Selected Artboards, it will only export this one. Below you can choose a quality. So the higher the quality, the larger the file size. In browse, you can choose where you want to save it to. I'll just save it to my desktop and I'm just going to call it twitter new. Good luck trying to find it. Then when I'm done, I click on "Run" and it will do its thing. Click on "Okay", and if I minimize this, it will be called twitter newArtboard 1, which you can always change later. No problem, you can rename it. That is our graphic done for today. Congratulations, I hope you enjoyed this and I hope you go on and create your own amazing graphics. Now, it would be amazing if you change all the content, the text, the images, the logos, and use your own content, making it your own, and publish it in the project section so I can have a look at it. I'm so excited to see what you guys come up with. I'll see you soon.