Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi. My name is Cat Coquillette and I'm the founder of CATCOQ, which is my Illustration and Design Brands. I'm a digital nomad, which means I don't have one home, rather I travel around the world, working from coworking spaces, coffee shops, Airbnb's and apartments. I license my artwork to companies that printed on everything from phone cases to apparel, art prints for your walls, pretty much anything that you could print artwork on, I probably have that product available somewhere in the world. So, this class is all about learning the language of Photoshop, creating layers and using color, manipulating text, working with adjustments and using shapes. I'll also show you how to remove backgrounds because everybody wants to know how to do that. So, that will be a full lesson on its own. When I first opened Photoshop, it was really confusing for me. I wasn't familiar with the program and I didn't really know what to do or how to do it. In the years since then, I've used Photoshop more and more frequently, so now I'm much more comfortable with the platform and every day I learn new things that I'm able to do with Photoshop. The project for today's class is going to be creating a Web banner image for your Websites. Even if you don't have a Website, you can still use this for social media like Instagram or Facebook or just use it as a way to feel comfortable moving around in the Photoshop platforms. You can either use the exact same files that I'm using that you can download in the Resources folder or you can use your own and follow along. In today's world, there are so many applications for using Photoshop, so if you work in marketing or own your own business or just need to make some digital assets, this is a great tool to get started. I'm really excited to teach you guys Photoshop today. Thank you so much for taking my class. Let's get started.
2. Get the Software: Photoshop is an incredibly powerful program. So, at first, it can seem a little overwhelming with all of the options available, but we'll break everything down so you can understand step-by-step how to do different actions. By the end of this class, you'll be familiar with Photoshop and you'll even know how to do things with layer masks, transparencies, edit photos, create shapes, use text, and more. Adobe Photoshop is through the Creative Cloud and it's a subscription based service that you pay month by month. Along with your Creative Cloud subscription, Adobe will also provide assets to download, fonts and new features and updates to all of their programs. If you don't know Photoshop on your computer yet, no problem. You can just go to adobe.com and download a free trial. Today, we'll be using Photoshop CC 2018. If you're on a different version, that's okay. Things might look a little bit different, but you'll be able to follow along just fine. Today, we're covering the fundamentals. But once you have that basic understanding, you'll be able to do so much more after this class. So, for example, once you learn how to use a specific tool, you'll be able to apply it in a lot of different ways depending on what you're trying to do. This class is about learning how to use Photoshop as a whole and understanding the program. Once you get that basic understanding, you can use some of the tutorials that Photoshop has built in to learn how to do specific techniques. Now that you have Photoshop downloaded on your computer, let's go ahead and dive in.
3. Opening Up Photoshop: Now that we have Photoshop downloaded, we can go ahead and open it on our computers. So up here, I'm going to click the Creative Cloud icon, and open Photoshop. This is what the intro screen looks like when you're first getting started. It's pretty self-explanatory and straightforward. We're just going to create new. So now we have the new document window, and because this is our first time opening Photoshop, we don't really have any recent items. But if you did, this is the area where they would appear. You can either use Photoshop's presets for creating a document if you're working with a photo, a prince or maybe something for webdesign. They provide these pre-set up templates that they suggest. But what we're going to go ahead and do is create our own. So, over here on the right, you have your preset details and this is where you can customize it based on the type of image that you're wanting to create. So, the first thing we're going to do is just name our document. We're making a web banner, and the default is inches, but we're going to go ahead and change that to pixels since we're going to be creating a web image. If we were making something to print, we'd go ahead and use inches, centimeters, but because it's web based, we'll be using pixels. The orientation we'll be using it is just going to be a generic web size that works across a lot of different platforms like Facebook, Twitter and maybe your website. So we'll be doing it 1024 by 512. This just gives us some flexibility so we can crop it into a square later on. It's just a pretty generic image size that will work for a lot of different templates. Next, we have resolution. Default resolution for printing is 300 dpi, but since we're working in web, everything comes down to 72 ppi. The difference between the two are pixels per inch, which is on web, and dpi is dots per inch, for anything that's printed out. So, 72 is great for web, but what we're going to do here is use 900 instead. The reason we're adding 900 now is just so we have some flexibility with the image size. You can always scale down in Photoshop and shrink your image to be smaller, but when you start sizing up, you'll lose resolution and your images will get blurry. So, it's best to err on the side of caution and start with something larger. The next option you see is color mode. We'll be working with RGB which is web colors. The two you'll use most often are RGB for web, and CMYK for anything that you print. RGB stands for Red Green Blue, and those are the pixels that make up your monitor. CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black, key is black, it's a printing term, and those are the four color components for anything that gets printed out with an actual printer. The next setting is background contents. The default is white, and this is pretty simple, we're just going to keep it there. Okay, now that we have everything set up in our new document settings, we can go ahead and click Create. So, after you've clicked Create new, this is what your screen should look like. If you're opening up Photoshop for the first time, Photoshop might offer you some tutorial options, but we can just close out of those for now because I'll be walking you through instead, and to close any of these tabs that we're not using, you click the hamburger and simply go to close. Now, our screen is a little bit cleaner. So, after we've opened up our document, this is what our art board will look like. So, let's just go through and I'll show you what different parts of the window look like. So, right here in the very middle, this is our art board and this white rectangle is going to be the space that we're creating our artwork in. Any time you want to make your art board a little bit bigger, you can zoom in. So, all you have to do is press Z on your keyboard, which brings up zoom. You can also do it over here on the magnifying glass, and you can click and pull in words. This can make your window larger or smaller if you zoom outwards. So, zooming in, zooming out. So for this, I'm just going to zoom in a little bit, so it takes up more of the screen. On the left, from top to bottom is the tool bar. These are all the main tools that Photoshop has to offer. If you're just opening Photoshop for the first time, when you hover over these tools, Photoshop provides a little explanation of what every tool does. You'll only see this the first time you use it, but it can be helpful just so you can get a general idea of the capabilities of each tool. So, the main one we're going to be using is the Move tool. You can either click it or press V on your keyboard to access the move tool. Up on the top, you have different options and these options change based on which tool you're actually using. So, if I choose a different tool down here, the options will change. But now we want to click V or press this, and this is our main Move tool. On the far right of our screen, we have some different panels, so these are the panels that Photoshop decides people use the most frequently. So, the first two you see are color and swatches. You can toggle between the tabs to see different variations of the same panel. Beneath that, you have properties, and so for now, because there's nothing on our board, it will show you the basic document properties. You also have adjustments to the right as well. The last panel is probably the most important with Photoshop, it's our Layers panel. We'll get more into this later, but just know that we'll be using a lot of this. So, like I mentioned earlier, you can customize the interface of Photoshop to work for you. So, for example, if you're using layers very frequently, you can simply click and drag this out, expand it downwards, and have this be a much larger and more accessible panel. If you ever wanted to go back in its place, all you need to do is click the tab and drag it wherever you'd like it to be. You can rearrange the order of tabs as well. Again, it's very customizable, and as you become more familiar with Photoshop, you'll probably have a layout that looks incredibly customized. So, for example, I don't use the Properties or Adjustments panel all that frequently. So, I'm going to go ahead and close those out right now. So again, all you need to do is click the hamburger on the right and click close. Now, we have a little bit more room in our window. Because we have customized our workspace a little bit, if you ever want to go back to the way it was before, it's really easy to do. All you need to do is go to window at the top menu, workspace and reset essentials. This will bring everything back the way it was before. So, if you ever lose a panel, don't worry about it and you can always get it back. There's also another way to get a panel back. For example, I'm going to close my layer's panel, and instead of resetting the essentials, I'm just going to pull it back by going to window and clicking Layers. Everything that has a checkmark next to it means it's displayed over here on the right. If it doesn't, that means it's hidden. So, clicking layers brings it right back to where it was. So, if you ever want to see what the size of your document is, all you need to do is go to image, image size, and this will give you all the information for your image. So, for right now, the dimensions are 1024 pixels by 512, which is what we decided at the beginning. That's showing the default in inches, but I'm going to go ahead and switch that over to pixels, so we can see the exact width and height. The resolution is also 900. We've already settled these things, but this is just a great way to double check. Another way to check the dimensions of your art board are to pull up your rulers, you can do that by going to View, Rulers or command R, and you'll see over here. So, by bringing up the rulers you'll be able to see the dimensions of your art board as well. You can also click and drag from the ruler to add guides to your file. These are invisible guides that won't show up when you print, they're just there to help you out for now. But we don't need to do that right now, so I'm going to undo it, which is Edit, Undo, New guide. Another way to quickly undo something is command Z. When you use the command Z key command, it will undo the exact last thing you did, and then if you use it again, it will redo it. So, it doesn't infinitely go back in steps, it only goes back one step and then redoes it. You can access different screen modes by pressing F on your keyboard or going to view screen mode and selecting from these three options. You'll always start in the standard screen mode, but there are different ones that remove the menu bar, have the menu bar. It just depends on what you're working on and what you feel comfortable seeing on your screen as you work. So, what the full screen mode with menu bar looks like is this. When you're in the full screen mode with menu bar, you're able to move around your art board, and the way you do that is by pressing H, which is your hand tool, or going over here on your toolbar and simply clicking the hand. When your hand is selected, it lets you click and drag around your screen. You can also do this by scrolling up and down with your mouse, but if you want to have a little bit more control over it, the hand tool is the way to go. The last screen mode that you can go into is the full screen mode, and what this does is remove all the extra panels you're just looking at the art board. Photoshop wants to make it as easy as possible for you to use. So, a lot of times, if you're accessing something for the first time, a dialog box will pop up to give you some more information about it. We're going to skip that for now, so click 'Don't show again' and enter into full screen. Once you're in full screen, it's only about the artwork. All of your panels have disappeared and you only see the art board. This can be great if you're on a final area of your piece and you just want to see what it looks like as a standalone. If you ever get here and you don't know how to get back because there's no panels, don't worry about it, just press F and that will bring you back to standard. So, now that we have a basic understanding of what the workspace looks like, let's bring a file into Photoshop. If you go to the resources folder in Skillshare, I provided some files for you to work with. You can either follow along with those files or create your own as we go. So, I'm going to open my resources folder, and the images that we'll be using for this video are in the web banner folder. The first thing I'm going to use is my background texture. There's a few different ways that you can get this into your art board. The simplest is just clicking it, dragging, and letting go. After you've dragged this file into your art board, you'll see a bounding box with diagonal lines. What we're going to do is use the corners to resize it to fit into this box. So, if you have your mouse over any of the edges, you'll have the option to click and drag up and down to resize. But what we want to do is make sure that it's resized in the same proportion. We don't want it to be skewed too skinny or too horizontal, because then we lose the essence of that texture. To do that, you hold down Shift, and now no matter how you decide to scale it, it will remain in the original proportions. So, I'm holding down Shift and clicking with my mouse at the same time and I'm simply going to drag it up and down to fill in my art board. You can also click and hold and pull it around in different areas. Once you have it the way you like it, all you have to do is double click or press Enter on your keyboard, and it's set in the space. All right. Now that we have the basic documents set up. It's pretty simple. We can start adding more layers and playing with some effects.
4. Working with Layers: So this video is going to be all about Photoshop layers and what they are, and how you can use them. So, if you look over here in your layers panel, you'll see that there are two layers on the file right now. We have this background texture layer, and then the white layer beneath it that is a default that Photoshop puts in there, and it's just the background. With these eyeballs, you can turn a layer on and off, with the visibility. You can see it's still there, you're not deleting it, you're just temporarily hiding it. Layers are always stacked. So, whatever the first layer is on the layers panel, will be the one that's the most evidence. If you move this around, and I pressed V which is the move tool, again you can access it up here on the top-left of your toolbar. You can click and drag that file around, and here you can see the layer underneath this. They're pretty intuitive to use, and you'll quickly get the hang of it once you get started. Some layers are locked, and when I first got started with Photoshop, this trips me up a lot. It took me forever to figure out that this lock meant I couldn't do anything with this layer. So, right from the get go, you can unlock your layer just by clicking the lock and breaking it. So, I did that with the background layer and so now, I can click and drag a layer up, click and drag it down, and whichever layer is on top, is the one that's most visible. So, I'm going to go ahead and put my background layer on top. So, it's the first thing visible, leave it there, and I'm going to drag in a couple extra files just so that we can stack some more layers onto this files, you can see what it looks like. So, in the resources folder, if you double click on layers, I have two files that we're going to click and drag into our Photoshop file. When I drag each of these in it'll create a separate layer for each file. So, go ahead and highlight both and drag them in. What Photoshop does, is created this bounding box before you place the image, it's basically sizing to the dimensions of our board that we created. So, to set the file, you can either double click or press enter on your keyboard. This is the second one coming in, same thing. Just double click to place it, and now over here on the right, you can see all of our layers. Because this gold-eye is at the forefront, It's our top layer, you can click and hide it behind this one. They're all still there, nothing disappeared or got deleted. It's still there. It's just hidden underneath. So, you can click and drag your layers around and play with different placements just to feel more comfortable using the layers. So, for this I want my background texture to be in the backgrounds and I'm going to put my gold-eye layer, click it, and drag it above everything else so it's on top. You want to move a layer around, just make sure that that layer is selected, and then you can use your move tool to click and drag it around. So, one great way to think about layers is, stacks of paper. So, because this eyeball is a PNG, which is a transparent file, it has no background, it's the first stack on top. After that, you have this photo, which you can turn on and off, and then last, you have the background-texture layer. I'm going to go ahead and turn off the default Photoshop background, which is this white layer, and if I turn off all of my layers at once, again by clicking the eyeballs, you see this transparent background. I mentioned this earlier, but I'll just repeat that this gray and white grid indicates that it's completely transparent. There's nothing there, not even whites. So, if I left all of these off and then only turned on one of my layers, this eyeball, this is the only thing on the screen. Everything else is still there, nothing's deleted. It's just hidden. As you get more involved with Photoshop, you might get a really complicated file that has maybe 20 or 30 layers. Instead of just having everything lined up on the right panel, you can group certain layers together to keep it more organized. So, if I want this gold-eye layer grouped with my frame layer, all I need to do is select both, and I can select both by holding down the shift key and then clicking both layers and doing command G, which groups them together. Another way to group them together, is to click on the folder down below which will put them into a group. You can even rename your groups by double clicking on the group name and typing something in. To be able to view the layers that are in your group, you can just click eye-art, and you'll see the layers that are in the group. So, if you want to minimize it, you can do that just to keep them more organized, or open it up and still be able to edit and move around those files. In the same way that you can move your layers up and down on your layers panel, you can also move groups. So, let me turn on my background texture and click and drag, and right now, I've put the eye-art folder underneath the background-texture layer. So, it's hidden. If you want to see that again, you can either move it back up to the top where it's visible or you can turn on and off your background-texture layer to reveal what's underneath. If you want to make a copy of your layer, that's also really simple to do. So, what I'm going to do is, hide my background texture layer, and toggle the eye-art down on the folder, and what I want to do, is make a duplicate of this gold-eye. You can do that a couple different ways, you can do the key command, which is command J, and you see the copy has been created, or you can click and drag it into the new layer button, which also creates a new layer. The reason you don't see the copy, is because it's directly behind that same layer in the exact same position. So, if you do want to make it visible, just make sure your move tool is selected, and you can click and drag it aside. If you're ever moving a layer, and you want it to stay perfectly horizontal or vertical and lock in with what you're dragging it from, press and hold the shift key as you drag it, and that makes sure that it stays, in this case since we're going sideways, at a perfect horizontal and just release the shift as you release the click when you're done dragging in. One of the new features of Photoshop CC 2018, is when you click a layer on the art board it'll automatically select. So, keep an eye over here on the layers panel, and watch how the layer selection changes based on what I'm clicking on on the art-board. So, right now frame is selected because that's the last thing I clicked. But when I click this eyeball, the new layer is selected. So, it just makes things a little bit simpler and more intuitive as you're navigating through your space and designing in Photoshop. If for whatever reason you don't like this feature, it's really easy to turn off. Just go up here to the menu bar and uncheck the auto select. Now, when you click the bottom layer it doesn't auto select down at the bottom. So, it's your own personal preference, whatever you'd like to use. But for now, I'm going to turn auto select back on. So, in addition to command Z, which undoes the previous action you just did. You can also go over here to your history panel, click that, and what I'm going to do, is click the bottom and drag it down so we can see a little bit more. Say you've gone a few steps further and you've messed something up and you'd like to go back. It's really easy to do. Just go into your history panel and click whatever stage you are at, and you can go back all the way to the beginning of your art-board. So, if you look at the very top image, this is where we started, this is just opening the file, we've done nothing to it, and then if you scroll to the very bottom, this is the last thing we did. So, say you've made some changes, but you want to go back about five steps. You can't do that with command Z, because it will only take you back one step, but with the history panel, you can go back as far as you need to. So, if I want to go back here to layer order, gone back about 10 steps or so, and if I do a new action now, everything that's grid out will be erased, because I've started a new action. So, let's say I'm going to make a copy of this layer, click and drag it. Now, you can see that the history panel has changed to indicate the new direction that I've taken. I'm using my move tool which is V, I'm just going to click it and drag it off to the side. We'll get to it later. So, layers are one of the most important tools that you'll be using in Photoshop. You really never work in Photoshop without layers, they'll come in play for everything that you're doing. It's a really great tool and it's something that's unique to Photoshop, and just be mindful at how you can organize your layers, move them around, turn them on, turn them off. Things are never truly gone, they can just be hidden with layers.
5. Creating Shapes and Color: All right. In this video, I'm going to show you how to make shapes in Photoshop. So, you can find the shapes over here on your toolbar, this rectangle. Again, since there is a little triangle on the bottom right, it means that there are more shapes available. So, I'm going to click and hold it and you'll see every available shape that Photoshop has to offer. So, we're going to keep it pretty basic right now. We're just going to select the rectangle tool. You can also get there by pressing U on your keyboard. With that tool selected, it doesn't matter how many layers are selected or which layers are selected because when we draw the shape, Photoshop is automatically going to create a new layer. So, nothing will be erased. So, I'm going to click and drag and let go, and I've created a rectangle. You can see over here, Photoshop even named it Rectangle 1. So, to resize your shapes, we'll be using our transform tool, which is command T for transform. You can also get there by going up to Edit, Free Transform. The key command is listed over here. So, you can see what the key command is as you select that tool. So, as you get going with Photoshop, you'll start using more and more key commands. So, you can see the transform tool is in place because a bounding box has been placed over that shape. So, when you hover over any of the edges, you'll see your cursor change from an arrow to something like this. So, you can click and drag it up and down, side to side and you can even grab the corners and expand it this way. If you want to retain its original shape, all you need to do is hold down shift as you click and drag it up and down. So, what I'm going to do is make a long rectangle without holding shifts. To finalize the transform, all you need to do is double click or press enter. Now, I'm going to show you how to make a perfect square. So, make sure that your rectangle tool is selected. Again, you can press U. As you draw your box, which can be drawn however you like. If you hold down shift, even if it's, say, skewed to an extreme rectangle, by pressing shift, it will convert to a perfect square. So, releasing the mouse, letting go off shifts, and you have your perfect square. If you want to move this around, just make sure that your move tool is selected, which is V, and you can click and drag your box wherever you like it to be. If you want to size it, to make it a little bit smaller, we're going to transform it. Again, that's command T. Then, you can click and drag. Don't forget to hold down shift as you do this so it stays a perfect square. You can see Photoshop smart guides coming into play again with these pink lines, as it lines up these two rectangles to be perfectly in line. Anytime you're done using the transform tool, you need to double click or press enter. So, what I'm going to do, is go over to my rectangle on the right. So, select that layer by going over here to my layers panel, and I'm going to use my transform tool, so, command T. I just want to drag the corners so they line up perfectly with my other square. It's already pretty close. Photoshop is just going to make it a little bit easier by locking those images. Another thing you can do while the transform tool is selected is rotate your box. So, in a similar way, when you have the arrows where you can shrink up and down, if you just go a little bit away from the box, that arrow turns into a curved arrow. So, now, you can click it, and drag it, and rotate it around. If you hold down your shift key, it will rotate at 15 degree angles, so, you can have it to be perfectly at 90 degrees or whichever angle you'd like to have it at. So, for now, I'm going to put it at a 90 degree angle. Then, to complete the transform, I'm just going to press enter. After you've drawn your shape, you can still edit it in the properties window over here. When I pull both my shapes over to the right side of my artboard by making sure those layers are selected and I'm using my move tool, which is V, and clicking them over. Now with my box selected, and I can check to see if it's selected just by turning the eyeball on and off. So, cool. Rectangle 2 is the box that I'm wanting to select. So, over here, my properties window, I can still make adjustments to this box. For example, if I want to change the color, all I need to do is click the swatch and pick whatever color I like. So, for this, I'll make it blue. I can even add an outline to it. So, by clicking the stroke button, I can add, let's do a bright yellow stroke. I can barely see it there because as indicated, it's only one pixel, but if I change this to 20 pixels, the stroke gets much bigger. If I don't want to have a fill in that box, all I need to do is click that blue swatch and then select this white rectangle with the red line through it, which means no color. So, now, I have two shapes, each are a different color and I can select both at the same time and align them if I want to. If I want them to be perfectly centered over each other, I just need to make sure that both are selected and then go up here to the top of the menu and click a line vertically and then click a line horizontally. Now, they're perfectly overlapping each other. So, I'm going to go to my transform tool, which is command T and I can hold the downshift to make sure it stays a perfect square. I can move it up and down. So, I want to make it a little bit smaller and then move it over here on the page. So, what I'm going to do now, is zoom in even tighter in my artboard. So, you can see what I'm doing as I move it. So, I'm going to press Z. You can also get it over here with the magnifying glass, and just click my screen and pull myself in. Not that far, I'll back out a little bit. Perfect. So, now with the yellow square selected because this is, you can see it's turning off and on, that's my selection. I'm going to press V, which gives me my move tool, and I can either move this rectangle by clicking it and dragging it or I can use my keyboard and use the arrows to move it around up, down, left, and right. If you want to skip ahead a few pixels, hold down your shift key as you move right and left or up and down on your keyboard, and it will jump even faster. So, when you are moving something around in Photoshop, it does provide these smart guides, which are these pink lines, and this is what allows you to jump pixels, unlock shapes together in a way that is more aligned. In order to avoid the smart locks that Photoshop puts in place, all you need to do is press and hold control on your keyboard. As you can see, as soon as you do that, you're able to move the mouse pixel by pixel and no locks take place. When you let go off control, it goes back into locking mode. So, you can either move it by just clicking it and dragging it with the move tool selected or you can move it in transform, which is when we're doing command T, and you can size it up and down or move it from side to side. Just remember that when you're using the transform tool, you always have to complete the transformation, which is pressing enter or double clicking. So, now what I'm going to do is, zoom out on my artboard. I can either use the zoom tool, which is Z, and move myself out of the artboard, or I can do command minus, which also moves it out. You can also do command plus to zoom in. There are a few different ways to zoom in and out. If you want to see your entire artboard on your screen perfectly locked in, you can do command zero, which fits to screen. So, a lot of times if I want to zoom back out and see my artboard, say, I'm zoomed in really tight like this, I can just do command zero and it's fit to screen. So, we've made some rectangles and squares. There are a lot of other shapes you can make with Photoshop. Just going over here clicking and holding, you'll see the shapes that are immediately available. Within each of these shapes, you can customize them up here on the top in this top menu section. So, say you're working with circles. You're still able to edit the circle up here, as well as on your properties panel. So, what I'm going to do is, zoom out a little bit, so, you can see my full artboard and I'm going to do command minus just a couple of times. Cool. So, you can see my full artboard. I'm going to delete this yellow outline box. We don't need it anymore. So, to get this rectangle to be perfectly in the center of my artboard, what I'm going to do is, command T for transform. You know Transform is on because that bounding box appears, and now I'm simply going to click it and drag it into the middle and wait for those guides to lock in. I want a pink line both horizontally and vertically that covers the entire screen. So, I can let go. To complete the transformation, I'll press enter, and now I know that that rectangle is perfectly in the center of my artboard. So, actually, I want to use this rectangle as we're building this web banner together. So, what I'm going to do is, use my transform tool, which is command T. I'm going to click the corners and just drag it so that it becomes a bottom bar on my screen. You can just kind of eyeball the size of this. Photoshop will lock it automatically to the edges of your artboard, so you don't need to worry about going over or not covering enough. To finish the transformation, I'll press enter. There are a ton of ways that you can alter color in Photoshop. The possibilities are pretty much endless. So, first thing I want to do is just close my history panel. I'm not really using it right now and I don't need it. In order to maximize my space in Photoshop, I'm going to go ahead and close this panel as well. I'm also going to close libraries. So, what I want to do is change the color of my rectangle here at the bottom to match the blue of this eyeball perfectly. So, I can do that a few different ways, but I'll show you the simplest way first. I'm going to go over here to my properties panel, and here I can see everything I need to know about this rectangle. I can see the width, which is 1024, which is the same width as our artboard. I can see the heights and the positioning of where it is on my artboard on the x and y-axis. But down here, on this black rectangle, I'm going to click it, which is where I can set my color. You can pick your color from any of these options you see below. All you have to do is click on them and it will change on the artboard. In addition to clicking the swatches down here, you can also custom adjust the color by going to your color picker and scrolling up and down on the hue and finding an exact tone. So, for this, I'll click navy, press OK and then you'll see the bottom switched to navy. But like I mentioned earlier, I want this blue to match the light blue of the inside of the eyeball and there's an exact way to do that. So, I'm going to go back to my color picker. When you're on color picker, you can click anywhere on this palette to find an exact color. But if you take your cursor outside of the screen, an eyedropper appears. What this eyedropper does is, it selects the color from an exact place on your artboard. So, if I want this blue, all I need to do is put the eyedropper exactly over the blue, click once, and you can see over here that the palette changes to fit that exact blue. I can click anywhere on my artboard and have the same effect. So, if I want this grey cream color, click there, and it will show up and change on the color picker. If I want the exact navy, it's pretty intuitive and you can click everywhere and do a lot of exploration. This is just a great way to get an exact color. So, I'm going to click that blue, press OK, and my shape has changed color. If you want to see that color picker in real time, all you need to do is, double click on your rectangle layer and it will pop up. Now, whenever you click anywhere on the palette, you'll be able to see live on your screen what that new color looks like. You can click and drag the arrows up and down on the rainbow hue and then click from anywhere on the square as well. There's not one right answer to this. There's a lot of different ways to do it. So, you can explore and find a way that works best for you. For now though, let's table that and move on to learning how to use text.
6. Working with Text: It's really easy to add text in Photoshop and there are some specific tricks I used to do it really well. So, what I'm going to be doing is adding some text to my Web banner. The main tool we'll be using is the Type tool, you'll see it over here on the toolbar. It's just the big T. You can also get there by pressing T. It's very intuitive and simple. All you need to do is click on your art board and start typing something in. So, as you can see, the type is huge, it's an ugly green and I don't like that typeface, so we can alter all of those things right now. So, the first thing I'm going to do is click and highlight everything. You can do this by clicking and dragging or by using command A which will highlight all of your text. The way you alter your text, you can find it up here on the top of the Menu bar or by going to Window, Character. Both of these are ways that you can alter your text and have all the options but you'll have a little bit more options available over here in the Characters panel. So, the first thing I'm going to do is shrink it down, that 12 point type is way too big for this Web banner, so I'll put it down to 6 and see how it looks. It's much better. I also want to change the typeface so instead of Mirian Pro which is the default type for Apple, I want to change it to Mission Gothic which is a last type typeface. I download a lot of the fonts I use from Lost Type. It's a typography co-op where you can have access to some really great designers and fonts. So, for now, I've already downloaded it and I put it in the resources folder. You'll find it in the font folder. Mission Gothic and we're just going to add all of it. All right. Click and open it with font book. For Mac, that's the default font organizer and we're just going to install it. Now, the Mission Gothic is installed. I'm going to highlight all my text again by doing Command A and going up and clicking where it says Myriad Pro and typing in Mission Gothic. I'm going to do regular and now we can also adjust some other options but the font. So if I want to center this type lockup, there's a few different ways I can do it. The first thing to do is to highlight everything, so you can either click and drag or press Command A. Up here on the top menu panel, you can center text here. You can also do it over here by toggling over to paragraph and clicking the center button. You can also write a line, left a line but for now I just want to center. So, now I'm going to toggle back into the character panel and change the color. You can change the color here or up here on the top menu bar. So, for this, I want it to be a navy blue that matches the blue of the art prints, so I clicked my Color Picker and I'm just going to hover over, select the blue, it'll change automatically and then press Okay. If you want to move your type around the screen, just make sure that you're not in the text tool and you're in the move tool. You can't use a key command right now because if I press B for my key command, it'll show up on the text. So, you have to manually do it. So, I'm just going to go over here click and now with my move tool selected, I can move this lockup around the screen. In addition to adjusting the size, you can also use the Transform tool to make the type bigger or smaller. So, I'm going to do Command T and make sure that you're holding down Shift as you do this because the last thing you want is to skew your type like that. It looks really bad, never do that. So, I'm going to scale up my type a little bit, press Enter to set it. Now, if you want to edit anything with your type, you have to make sure that you're in the type tool. I'm going to press my T to get back into my type tool and now what I'm going to do is make art prints a boulder weights. So, over here is my typeface and then on the right of that is the weights and I'm going to do black which is very, very heavy. No. Now that looks bad. I'm going to do bold which is pretty heavy. I want to track it out a little bit so it feels a little bit more modern and refined. So I'm going to adjust my tracking 240 which just adds a little bit more space in between the letters and lets them breathe a bit more. Now if I want to decrease the space between EVIL EYE and EVIL PRINCE, I simply highlight everything and go over to my writing tool and I can make it tighter or larger, so going up to 18 points puts a much bigger gap than. You can also click the icon and drag it to the right or left to decrease the space and increase it. So, I'm just going to eyeball it. That looks pretty good which turns out to be a six points. To wrap everything up, I'm going to go back to my move tool and select that. So, in addition to adjusting the type size over here, you can also use the transform tool to bring your type up and down. So, if I'm going to increase it and then press enter, you'll see over here that the type size has increased from sixish to seven and a half points. So, now I'm just going to make sure that my move tool is selected which is V and center this to a good place. Now I want to add some footer text down to the bottom here, on top of my banner. I also want to add a box around my sales code. So, what I'm going to do is go over here to my rectangle tool which we learned earlier, click change my fill to no color and make my stroke whites and I'm going to put it at three pixels, we'll see how thick that is. I'm just going to click and drag a box around to CATCOQ and then press V to go back to my move tool. Perfect. So, now what I want to do is organize my layers a little bit, they're getting a little bit out of control and I want to make sure that they're a little bit easier to work with. So, I want to make everything down below on this banner in the same layer. So, I've selected my rectangle, the 20 percent off and I also want to select the rectangle. If you're selecting more than one layer, you can hold down Command as you select that layer. So, now what I'm going to do is take all of those layers and move them out of Group 1, just put them above it somewhere, let go and now do Command G to group them together. You can see how this layer looks by turning it on and off, then you can see that everything is together. I'm going to change the group name to footer. Now, I want to view what my banner looks like at real size. So, to do that, I use Command one. This is what my footer will look like when it's actually on the web. So, one thing I'm noticing is this type at the bottom is a little bit chunky and big, so I want to make it a tad bit smaller. So, what I'm going to do is open my footer folder, select my type and the rectangle, use my transform tool Command T and drag everything to be a tiny bit smaller and then reposition it on the page, press Enter to set it and now it's looking a little bit better. One more thing I want to do is adjust the color of that banner on the bottom, so it's a little bit darker so that the white type pops up a bit more, double click the rectangle, change my color mode to HSP by clicking the H. Now I can simply click anywhere on the square to get a darker color and you can see in real time how that white type really pops when a darkened the rectangle. We'll, press Okay. So, the last thing I want to do is add a little bit of text above where it says EVIL EYE ART PRINTS and I want it to be a different weight and a different size. So, I'm going to do that on a brand new text box. So, I'm going to simply press T to get my type, click anywhere on the page and type in MY BEST SELLERS. Now, go back to your move tool and now I'm going to use transform, instead of adjusting the size and the character panel. I'm going to use my transform tool so that it perfectly aligns with EVIL EYE. So, making sure that that layer is selected over here, I'm going to do command T for transform and I'll drag it over, lineup that M with the E and click the corner of the box and holding down Shift, so that everything stays proportional. I'm just going to drag it and make it a little bit smaller. Press Enter. It's not perfect yet but that's because I want to change the weight. So, I'm going to make it Black Italic. Cool. So, now I'm going to go back to transform, it's almost perfect but I want to make it even more so, so I'm going to use Command Plus to zoom in a bit and click holding down Shift, so that it stays proportional and make sure it's absolutely perfect. Now I press Enter to set it. Now I'm just going to use my keyboard, the up and down arrows to move this up. If I want to jump more than one pixel at a time, I can hold down Shift when I press the arrow. I'm going to do Command one, so that I can see what it looks like in real size. Cool. It's looking pretty good and I'm pretty happy with it. You can also apply effects to your text as well. So, for example, I'm going to press T to get my type tool, click MY BEST SELLERS and then highlight it all by doing Command A. Then appear on the top, where you see this T with the curves line underneath, you can click that to see different ways to warp the text. So, for example I'm going to do Arc. Let me move my box so you can see what I'm doing. We can make this angle less extreme by going to Bend and toggling this back down to a less extreme angle. Fifteen seems a little bit less extreme but I'm going to bump that up a little bit more to 23 and press Okay. Now, what I'm going to do is track out my letters a little bit more so that the letterforms aren't as distorted. I can go over here where it says VA, click and drag to the right and you can see the letter spacing track out a little bit more. So, now what I want to do is bring my type backed down so that it locks with either edge of EVIL EYE. So now, I'm going to go back to my Transform tool, so Command T and I'm going to click the corner. Remember we always hold down Shift to keep things proportional but there is another trick, if you hold down Alt at the same time, it will stay centered as you change the size. So right now on my keyboard I'm holding down Alt and Shift and I'm going to bring that down a little bit. So, it feels good. I can click, drag it, make sure it's centered, I want to make it a little bit bigger. So again, holding down Shift Alt, clicking the corner, raising it up a bit and then pressing Enter to finish the transform. I want to move that up, so I want to make sure V is selected for move and I'm simply going to click, hold Shift so that it stays in the same place vertically and drag it upwards of it. Cool. So, now the type is looking pretty good. So, if you want to scale down the main type, you can do that since everything is in the same folder. So, just make sure that folder is selected and then do Command T for transform. Now everything is selected and you can click drag, holding Shift so that it stays proportional and make it a little bit smaller, move it to where you want it on the page and press Enter to finish the transformation. So, now we've built some layers into our Photoshop file, this is a great time to save our work just so that we don't lose anything later on. So, to save it, it's pretty straightforward, I'm going to go to File, Save As. The title name is already up there because we named our file at the very beginning when we were setting up our document, so I'll keep it as Web banner. I want to save it to my Desktop, so I'm just going to click Desktop. You have a lot of different format options but we're going to want to save it as a Photoshop file. If we save it as a Photoshop file, it just means that we're saving all of the layers, all of the settings, nothing changes. When we open it back up, it'll look exactly like it looks now. So, stays as Photoshop file, don't save it as anything else for now. This is our working file, we can save it down later and just click save. Now we have a backup in case Photoshop accidentally crashes. It happens from time to time but if you save frequently, it's not as stressful. So, now that we've gotten to a great place with where we want our type placed on our board, let's move forward and learn how to do some different effects.
7. Adding Effects: So in Photoshop, there are hundreds of effects that you can apply to your shapes, your typography, images. So, we're going to go over just a few of those today. Let's go ahead and start with the typographies, since we just finished that lesson. Make sure that your type layer is selected. Just clicking where it says, Evil Eye Art Prints, and that will select this layer right here, and you can find your effects down the bottom of the Layers panel where it says Effects. I'm going to select Blending options and that will pull up all of the options we have for effects to apply. I'm going to pullover the windows so we can see what we're doing. There's a lot of different effects here that you can apply, but I'm just going to show you a couple that I use the most often. The first one I'm going to do is going to be the drop shadow. When you click the box, you can see it being turned on and off. So, take a look over here where it says Evil Eye Art Prints, off and on, and even within that, you can play with the opacity of your type and the shadow together, and then you can even change the blend mode. So, if I want to put a multiplied blend mode on my drop shadow, it will sync in a little bit more to the background, like you can see there. If you click OK, the effect will be applied. If you ever want to see what your effect looks like on and off, you can click the eyeball. It's similar to how you click the eyeball in front of the layers, but you can click it in front of the effects. Off, on. If you want to go back and edit your effect later, all you need to do is double click what the effect is. I will double click on Drop shadow, and now we can go through and edit it. I can even turn it back off if I want to. Now, it's disappeared. Again, there is a lot of flexibility here and no matter how many effects you play with, you can always revert back to the way that your type or shape was previously. In addition to applying effects to your typography, you can also apply effects to shapes. Let's go down here. I'm going to go to my footer layer. Again, toggling that caret down, selecting the rectangle, which is this rectangle down here, and if you ever want to check that that's the layer you selected, you can just turn the eyeball on and off. That's the one. Rectangle is selected, making sure that I have that layer selected, I can go down to effects, click Blending options. If you already know what effect you're wanting to apply, you don't need to click Blending options, you can just go straight to that effect right here. For this, say I want to apply a gradient overlay, and I know that's what I want, I'll just go ahead and click it, and now when the layer style pops up, I'm already on gradient overlay. It's just a little shortcut you can do. Right now it's applied gradient to that horizontal bar, and I can adjust the gradient by double clicking and selecting what kind of gradient I want. You can do crazy rainbows, you can do two color ombre effects, and you can also make your own colors. If you click the black and white preset, here you have your gradient and it's applied down here at the rectangle. If I want that white and black to be maybe blue and green, all we need to do is double click the white box, and select what color I like to use instead. Say, I want to do a navy, click OK, to a turquoise. You can find that color, press OK, and then you get your gradients. You can even add a third color in the middle just by clicking anywhere on the bottom of that gradients, and in the same way, you can add a third color. There's a lot of flexibility here. You can adjust the angle of the way that you want your gradient to appear. You can even give it a diagonal angle, you can either manually type in the angle you're looking for, or just click the line, and pull it around on that circle. For now, I'm going to go ahead and add a slight gradient. I don't want that magenta in the middle because I don't think it looks very good. I'm going to change my blue to something similar to what we had before, and have it run into a really slight ombre gradient that goes to a little bit with green. Cool. Then press OK to set your effects. Now, you see over here, it's on. If I want to turn it off, all we need to do is click the eyeball. One more effect that I use pretty frequently that I want to show you is a plain stroke. For this, I'm going to apply it to my text layer. We already have a few different effects that we've played with, but I'm going to add one more. Making sure that layer is selected, I will go to Effects, Stroke, and first thing I'm going to do is change the color because you can't really see a black stroke on the navy blue. So, I make it a bright blue stroke. Now, you can see it a little bit more. You can also change the size of that stroke. Right now, it's at one pixel. If I make it five pixels, it covers almost the entirety of the text. If I want something that's more of a middle ground, two looks pretty good. You can also adjust the blend mode. Right now it's on normal which is just that normal flat color, nothing has been changed to it. If I go to soft light instead, it's going to get quite a bit later. So, it almost looks like there's a white outline on that text. But for now, I'm going to put it on normal, see what that looks like, press OK. There's an example if you want to have your type outlines, but I don't want to use that effect, I just wanted to show you guys what it looks like. So, go ahead and click the eyeball, and turn it off. Those are some of the effects that I use the most frequently. As you can see, just by clicking the Effects panel, there are a lot more you can work with and there are a lot of different options you can do with any of each effect. So, play around with it and find out what works for you and the artwork that you're working on on your screen. Now, let's go ahead and move to what everybody wants to know how to do. We're moving background's.
8. Removing Backgrounds: So, one of the most common things that people want to learn how to do in Photoshop is remove the background, so that you can isolate an object and the rest of the image is transparent. So, there are a lot of different ways to do this and I'm going to show you some of the ones I use the most often. So, on this file, what I want to do is remove the background from these art prints. So, right now, it's two-framed art prints that are on this stucco drywall background and I want to remove them, so that they will blend seamlessly with this background I've already established. So, I'll show you real quick. If I turn this Frame layer on and off, you can see the background back here. So, what I'm wanting to do is remove this chunk, so that these frames fit flat on this background. So, the first thing I'm going to do is since this is a smart object, this frames file, all I need to do is double click it. I'm going to say, "Don't show again." This is just Photoshop telling me that all I need to do is save the file that I'm about to be editing and then, it will automatically be placed back into my new file. So, okay. So, here is the file itself. So, real quick, I just want to dive in a little bit deeper and talk about the difference between rasterized objects and smart objects. Right now, in the Layers panel, on my Frames layer, you can see on that thumbnail on the bottom right, there's an icon and that indicates that this is a smart object. So, what that means is I can use my Transform tool, make it really, really tiny, set that transformation and then bring it right back to where I started and it looks the exact same. It's retained its original resolution no matter how small I make it, which is great for editing. So, real quick, I'm going to make a copy of my smart object, just so we have something to compare it against later. Photoshop makes it really easy to edit a lot of smart objects, but not a hundred percent of the time. Sometimes, you have to rasterize a file to edit it the way you want to. It doesn't occur that often, but just be aware of it. You'll see it every once in a while. So, right now, what I'm going to try and do is, I've just made a copy of the layer but it's the exact same smart object, I'm going to try and erase part of it. So, I use E for Erase. Photoshop won't let me do it and the reason for that is, because it's a smart object, it will only let me erase part of that if it's rasterized. So, I'm going to click, "Okay." Let's go ahead and rasterize it, behind that layer real quick. So, now I can erase it because it is a rasterized file and I can edit it pretty much however I want. Undo that. But the only problem with rasterized objects is you lose a lot of flexibility when it comes to scaling those objects up and down. Let me show you what I mean. So, I'm going to make it really tiny, set the transform and then bring it right back up to the top. It is super blurry and pixelated, and the reason is because when I made it smaller, Photoshop reworked that image to have a smaller amount of pixels present because there didn't need to be that many, since it was so small. If you compare that directly against the smart object, you can scale that up and down infinite amount of times without losing resolution, whereas the rasterized object will conform based on the new size, and you won't be able to increase that size again without it going blurry. So, if Photoshop ever prompts you to rasterize something before you're allowed to edit it, you can pause and think about it. It's not always bad to rasterize a file. For example, if you know you're not going to be resizing it later and it's going to stay at those exact dimensions, it's fine to rasterize. So, again there are a lot of ways around rasterizing a file, but if you do need to, it's not the end of the world. Just be conscious of the limitations that you'll encounter afterwards. There are two different ways that you can remove a background from a Photoshop file. You can either do it with destructive editing or nondestructive editing. So, as you can guess, we want to do nondestructive. So, what that means for removing the background, is instead of using an eraser just to remove it, we're going to be applying a mask, which means that that background is still there, it's just hidden with this mask that goes over the top of the image. Okay, here's a quick tip that will apply for everything you do in Photoshop. If something's ever not working the way you want it to, like you can't move an image or you're not able to apply an effect to it, 99 percent of the time, it's because either that layer isn't selected or it's locked. So, right now, this layer is locked. So, I just click the lock to break it and now I'm able to edit that layer. So, now that it's unlocked and able to be edited, I'll just show you real quick what not to do. I'm going to press E which gets my eraser. You can also find it over here on the toolbar. There it is, eraser. We're going to make it a little bit bigger, so you guys can see what I'm doing. So now, what the eraser does is it simply erases out of the image. What you were erase, you can't get back, unless you go into your history and reset a few steps. So, if I click and drag, that part of the image is erased. It's not masked and the only way to get it back is to either do Command-Z or to go into your history up here on your panels and go back one step. So, we're not going to be using the eraser, but just do know that that's an option that's available. If you ever do need to use an eraser for something, it exists. But what we're going to do is make a mask. So, what a mask does, I'll show you real quick. You can select the part of the image. I'm going to click mask down here at the bottom of my Layers panel. So, although everything else is erased, all it is is hidden behind this mask over here. So, you see the mask is applied to the layer on the right. So, if I unlock the mask, and again, don't worry you're not following along, this is just an example to show you. I can click and drag something around. So, the entirety of that file is still there, it's just hidden. I can always get rid of the mask later and get my artwork back. So, we'll be using the mask effect, not the eraser effect for this lesson. So, there are a lot of different ways that you can make your selection to remove the background. So, really quickly, I'm just going to go through and show you some of the main ways and the options you have within each method. So, the most basic method is the Lasso tool. You can get the Lasso tool by pressing L or going over here onto your toolbar and selecting, it's like a cowboy lasso, you can't miss it. So, you can make a selection with your Lasso tool of everything that you want to select. So, right now, as you can see, it's not totally perfect and that's why the Lasso tool might not be the best method for this, but I'm just showing you an example. If I want to select the other art prints, I'm going to hold down on Shift and then drag my Lasso around with my mouse as well. I'm holding down on Shift to select more than one thing at once. So, now both of my frames are selected and to make a mask out of it, I'm going to go over here into my Layers panel and click on here the mask. It's the rectangle with the circle in the middle. Now the background has been removed, my frames are cut out. They are really poorly cut out, which is why I'm going to show you a better method after this. When you see this checkered background, that indicates that it's a transparent background. So, you have your mask and one cool thing about the mask that I briefly touched on earlier, is that you can move your mask around. You can go back and get things back that you didn't actually want to hide. So, just make sure that the mask area of your layer is selected, not the image layer itself. If you're trying to paint in your mask and you have your image layer selected, it's not going to work. So, I'm selecting the mask area and I can use my Brush tool. So, press B for Brush. You can also find it over here on your toolbar. I'm going to increase my brush size up here. So, as long as my default color is at white, which it is over here. If it's not, then press D for default and the white will appear as your foreground. So, making sure my mask is selected, I can click with my Brush tool and paint that area back in. So, this is what I mean when I say that your mask preserves that background. It's a nondestructive form of editing, you can always get those areas back. But as you can see, the Lasso tool right now isn't the best way to remove the background. That looks pretty crappy and that's just me drawing with my mouse. So, there's more precise ways to do it. So, I'll go into that and show you. The first thing I'm going to do is remove my mask. So, I'm going to Ctrl-click on the mask section of the layer and click Delete Layer Mask. So, the Pen tool is really similar to what we did with the Lasso, except you'll be much more precise with it. So, the way that I use my Pen tool is by going over here and we have our Layers panel selected. So, I'm going to go over the paths and then going to create a new path. To do that, I'll go to the very bottom and click this little box and I have Path 1. So, now that I have created a path, I'm going to use my Pen tool and draw very precisely around these frames. So, to get your Pen tool, you can press P or go over here to your toolbar and select your Pen tool. It's the first one that will pop up. There's a lot of different types of Pen tools, but we're just going to be using the standard one for now. So, I have my Pen tool selected and I'm going to zoom in by pressing Command-plus a couple of times. So what I'm going to do is use my pen tool in a similar way that I used my lasso, except it's much, much tighter and more precise. So I click to start my path. And since I've started my path, all I need to do is click and draw along the area that I want to have selected. I'm going to zoom in a little bit more so command plus and then scroll up. This corner has a slight round edge to it. So instead of being perfectly straights, I'm going to click down here, hold shift, and pull my selection to give it a slight curve. And this is what I mean, you can get much more precise in a way that you cannot with the lasso tool or magic wand. So, I'm going to finish my selection and get around the rest of this box. Cool. So now that I've drawn the path around this frame, I'm just going to do the exact same thing with the frame over here on the right. I don't need to press down shift to do this because I'm in the pen tool not a selection tool. So I click anywhere to get started. So, similar to painting, you want to go a little bit tighter in and not get any of that background because then when you remove the background, you don't want to show that border. Cool. So now I finished drawing my path, you can see it over here on the right. I'm going to zoom out by doing command zero which fits my art board to my screen. So now I have my path drawn. You can see it over here on the right. The path is in these two gray boxes. Now I'm going to press command D to deselect and that means that both of my paths are now deselected. So it's not one above the other. So now I'm making sure that I've clicked my path layer, I'm going to go down to the bottom to this circle with the dotted line, select that. And now we're at the same stage where we can make the mask selection. So to get back over to your layers, all you need to do is look at these tabs, click the layers tab and now we're back. And now that we have our selections similar to the other ways that we had made our selection with the magic wand tool and the lasso tool, I'm just going to make sure my layer is selected, go down to the bottom of my layers panel and click the mask icon. As you can see we just need to invert the mask so select your mask and do command eye. And now you have that perfect. This has been the best one so far where it's really precisely done where the frames are completely removed from that background. So now that I've removed the background, I want to bring these frames back into my web banner. So you can see up here on the top, you had these two tabs. So, the web banner is the left tab and the file we've just been editing is the right tab. So if I want to add these frames to my web banner, just a simple way to do it is to click your tab, pull it out, make sure that your layer is selected, click the layer and pull it in and drop it. You can see it's absolutely huge on the screen, that's no problem. It just means that the layer we were editing was really high res, whereas this web banner is at a lower resolution. So, you can see the layer we just dragged in over here on the right. The reason it went right in the middle of this layer of my main type is because that's what was selected previously. So, I'm going to bring this layer up to the very top. I'm going to click it and drag it. Make sure you're not dropping it in this folder. You need to see that little line so it appears above the folder. Cool. So now I want to resize it to fit it back down into my format. So I'm going to command minus, a bunch of times to zoom out. And now I'm going to use my transform tool to resize it and make it smaller. So remember we used this tool a little bit earlier which is command T for transform. Now you see that big bounding box that we can use. So I'm going to click a corner, press and hold down shift, so that it stays proportional as I resize it and simply make it a lot smaller and bring it back in. And remember, always pull down shift as you do this to make sure it stays proportional. So once it feels like it's at a pretty good size, I'm just going to release and then press enter. You can also double click to set it. So, I'm going to go back and remove this old layer that has the background. So, I think it's down here, like frames, just press delete. Or you can also click it and drag it into the trash can. So now I have my frames up top, I'm going to click them and reposition them to where I want them. And again, you still have that background there. It's just hidden by the mask. So now that I've deleted the background from these frames, you can see how they seamlessly fit with the background that's already established. So remember my background layer is down here. Turn it on and off so you can see, so you can see that transparent background. When I put the actual file there, it looks like the frames are back on the wall. One more thing I want to do is add a drop shadow to these frames. In the original artwork, it had a slight shadow and we lost that when we pulled it off the background. So I'm going to artificially add it back in with the layer effect, like we did in the previous lesson. So making sure that that layer is selected on the image not the mask, we're going to go down to effects, click drop shadow. And now you can see it's already previewed on there. So I'm going to bump up the opacity to make it a little bit darker and then give it a slight bit more distance. Cool. Press OK to set it. And remember, I can toggle on and off those effects but I think it looks better and more natural with the effect on. So, just to reiterate, I use masks all the time, anytime I want to erase something. So whether it's a full background or just a little piece of the artwork itself, I'll always throw a mask on there. So next up, I'll show you some really quick tips that I use to retouch my photography.
9. Editing Images: So, now that we've edited the background out of these art prints, I'm going to show you some techniques I use in basic photo editing. Things like playing with the color and saturation, the levels, the contrast. It's really simple to do. So, let's go ahead and dive right in. So, the first thing I'm going to do is, I'm looking over here at my layers and they're getting a little bit out of control, so I'm just going to simplify it a little bit and rename this instead of layer one. I'm going to call it art frames. I'm going to go ahead and minimize my other folders just so we don't have to look at them right now. Group one, there's nothing in, so I'm going to press delete, and make sure that my art frames layer is selected. So, the first thing I'm going to show you how to do is to change the color. And again, one thing we're really wanting to focus on is how to edit things in a way that's non-destructive. So, as long as we edit it, but we can always go back later and undo whatever edits we've done. That's the key here, and you can do that with adjustment layers. So, let me show you what I mean. So, make sure that your art frames layer is selected, and then go up to the top and click layer, new adjustment layer, and you have a lot of different options here. So, the first thing I want to do is play with some different colors. I'm going to go to hue and saturation and press Okay to make a new layer. So again, we're making a new layer for hue and saturation, and that way, we can always turn that layer on and off if we want to go back and preserve our original file. When we add a new layer adjustment, it will apply to everything that's underneath that layer. So, for example, if I have my hue and saturation selected, make sure you have that selected, not the mask, and then you toggle up and down on hue. You see everything on my artboard is changing colors, and I don't want that to happen right now. So, I'm going to do command z to undo. So, in order to make that not happen, all you need to do is click the layer thumbnail, don't click the mask. And then, up here you see this little box in properties. Click that box, and you see this little arrow come down as it tabbed over to the right. This means that everything you apply in this hue and saturation layer will only go to the layer previously beneath it, nothing else. So, now I click the thumbnail for hue and saturation. Now, when you toggle the hue up and down, it's only affecting the previous layer right beneath it. So, human saturation is just a really fun cool thing to play with. I use this a lot and when I've scanned in my artwork, and I want to adjust the colors on my watercolors. So, if I painted a red apple, I can use hue and saturation to make it a blue apple or purple apple. So, for this, we can just see how that looks on this actual artwork, it's pretty cool to mess with. So, that's hue and saturation is the intensity of those colors. If you drag it all the way to the right, those colors become neon and really vibrant, and if you drag it all the way to the left, they become desaturated. I'm going to put that back at zero. You can also type in the numbers here if you want to be more precise, and then lightness is exactly what it sounds like. You bring it to the left to be darker, and to the right to be lighter, but I'll put that back in zero. So, right now I have my hue at plus 39, but if I ever don't want to have that, I can either put it back in zero, or I can just turn this adjustment layer off by clicking the eyeball. There's a lot of different adjustment layers you can do. Let's go ahead and play with another one. So, I'm going to go to layer, new adjustment layer, and another one I use pretty frequently is levels, so I'll click that, press OK, and remember, do the same thing. You want to have the layer thumbnail selected, and click that box so that it only applies to the layer right beneath it. So, now up here in properties, you can adjust your levels. So, levels is a great way of adding more contrast or less contrast in a really precise way. If you want the image to get overall lighter, then you use the very right hand toggle, and then you bring it to the left, so you can see the image gets lighter, but the darkest parts stay pretty dark. In a similar way, if you want to get it darker, you can click the left toggle and pull it to the right, and now the image steadily gets darker, but the lightest part stay light, and you could also use the middle toggle to go back and forth. So, for this, I want to make it a little bit darker in those shadow areas, so I'm going to click the far left toggle and move it a little bit to the right, right before I hit that spike. And so, I'll apply one more adjustment layer just so you can see some other options. So, I'm going to do one more, which is curves. Curves is kind of like color balance levels, saturation all in one. So, up here in properties, you can see since this layer is selected, we have the curve options. Don't forget to click that box, so that it links with that layer that's directly underneath. Like I mentioned before, your panels have a lot of flexibility, so you don't have to work with that panel locked into the top right. So, for properties, I actually want to pull that tab out and expand it a little bit. You can always put it back where you found it, or if this is a particular menu item that you're using a lot, you may find yourself customizing your art board for that. So, one cool thing about curves is that, they come with a lot of presets. So, right now it's on custom, which means I would move everything around myself, but I don't want to do that right now. I just want to be really simple and use a preset. I'm going back on history. I'll just go back to where I was. You can get those presets to the right where it says defaults, click that. Now, you have some different options. This is great if you just want to really quickly adjust the contrast on a photo, but you don't want to go through everything with levels. You just want it to be really fast. Go to presets, increase contrast, and you're done. It's ready to go. You could also manually do this by dragging these in, but by having these presets, everything is done for you. So, if you want to do a quick edit to your photos similar to how you can just increase the contrast in Instagram, this is your best option for doing that. So, I'm going to put my properties back into my tab over here on the right, and I'm actually going to undo that real quick. So, I'm just going to go into my history, click one step above that, and everything is back where it was before. If I want to delete all of these layers, all I need to do is press delete, or if I want to hide it for now, but I might want it again later, you can just turn on and off the eyeball. Hue and saturation, I'm going to delete, but I'm going to leave levels there as an option for later. So, now the banner is getting pretty close to finished, I'm going to go ahead and turn that level adjustment back on to darken the contrast in those frames. And now, I'm really liking how it's looking, and I think it's pretty much good to go for uploading it to my websites. So, let's move on to the next class which is all about resizing and saving your files for web, for print, or anything you might need.
10. Saving and Exporting: In this video, I'm going to show you how I save, how I export, and how I can resize and crop my file based on whatever dimensions I might need. The first thing I'm going to do is save my Photoshop file. This is really important because it's great to keep your working file as is. Once we start saving as JPEGs or PNGs or whatever format, we're going to lose these layers on the right, so it's best to always keep your working files. So if you ever need to go back and access it later, it's still really easy to edit. So, the first thing we're going to do is Save As. So, you can do that by hitting Shift Command S or by going to file, save as. As you can see, we've already have our web banner here. This was what we saved halfway through this class just in case save because sometimes Photoshop does crash. So, we'll just click that, it will repeat the file name. Make sure that the format is in Photoshop. You've a lot of options here, but for our working file, we just want to save it as a Photoshop file. As you see layers are already selected. So simply click "Save." We'll save over that old file, and we're good to go. So now, whatever adjustments we do and however we save it, we still have that original file saved. So, we're good with the working file. So remember, at the very beginning when we were setting up this file, we gave it a really high resolution of 900 PPI. You can find your resolution by going to image, image size, I'm going to change it, it is inches right now, but we really set it up as pixels, so we write 1024 by 512 at 900 PPI. So, it's a pretty big file. When we save it for web it only needs to be at 72, but if I want to save it as is just as a high res JPEG, all I need to do is go to Save As. So, Shift Command S like we did before, you can also go to File, Save As, and in the same place, all I'm going to do is change my format to a JPEG. Ignore all the other JPEG options, just a standard JPEG is all we need. So, it's saved as a JPEG, web banner. You see the extension changes from psd to jpg, that just indicates that this is a JPEG file, which is a flat file that we cannot edit. So, I'm going to save it. I want the quality to stay at 12. Remember, this is going to be my super high res JPEG file. You can bring your quality down if you want to, but if we want it to stay really high res put it back at 12. Press OK and we have it saved. So, in your resources folder or wherever you've just saved your JPEG, you can view it. So, this is the flattened version of the file whereas the psd version is exactly what we have here with all of the layers. So real quick, I'm just going to open my JPEG and show you what I mean. I'll open it in Photoshop by clicking and dragging it in, and here we go. It looks the exact same as our working file, the only difference is over here in the layers of our working file when we look at our JPEG, there's no layers. Everything has been flattened into this one background image. So, if you unlock it and try and move things around, it's all flattened together and it moves at once. This is great for what a JPEG is inherently meant for which is a final file. If you ever want to make edits to something, just make sure you're editing the psd file, not the JPEG because you can no longer move things around, it's all flattened and compressed together. So now, I'm going to show you how to save a file for web. One of the key points about saving files for web is you want it to be as small an image size as possible, and that way it loads really quickly on a website. So to save for web, I'm going to go to File, Export, Save for Web. So now you have your thumbnail of what it's going to look like as you save for web. Make sure that you're saving as a JPEG, you have some different types of web files here. You have JPEGs, GIFs, PNGs, you can save both as a PNG-8 and PNG-24. Make sure JPEG is selected. I want the resolution to be high, which puts my quality at 60. If I want it to be super high, I'll go to maximum and it'll bump the quality up to 100. But again, I don't want the file to be huge, I want it to be pretty minimal so that it loads quickly. So, I'm just going to select high. Let the quality remain at 60. I'm not going to mess with anything down here, I'm just going to press Save. So, now you have an option of where to save it. So, we have our web banner here. There was a higher res file that we saved earlier. So, what I'm going to do is just add a little bit more to the file name, so I'm going to write web and it's saved. So, let me show you what that looks like in terms of file size. So, the high res JPEG we saved was at 379 kilobytes. The one we just saved for web is only 113. So, it's significantly smaller, which is great. When you look at the web version versus the high-res just off the bat, you can't even really tell that much of a difference in quality. It's there, but that's the great thing about saving for web. It's a lot of the compression that takes place, you don't even notice. So, now that we figured out some basic ways to save, I'll show you how to crop and resize your file. So, let's go ahead and start with cropping. So, you can get to crop by pressing C on your keyboard. You can also find it over here on the toolbar. It looks like a square with little arrows coming out of the edges. It's like this. So, you're going to quick crop. You have some drop downs, but we won't be using them on the crop tool, we're just using the basic crop tool for now. So right now, after you've selected your crop tool or pressed C on your keyboard, you see this box around your art board. This box allows you to crop in and around in different areas. So, you can either eyeball it like this, or you can be really precise and use them with a preset crop settings. So first, I'll just show you what a basic crop looks like. So, one thing to always be aware of when you're cropping is make sure that delete cropped pixels is unchecked. If you do check that and you have a rosterized file, Photoshop will cut that part of the file out and you won't be able to get it back. So, it just helps you with editing later on. Just make sure that's always unchecked unless you're absolutely sure that you want to lose that content that you're cropping out. For me, I like to keep that unchecked so I have some flexibility later on. So, I'm going to show you again how we crop just so that you guys feel really comfortable learning how to do that. So, I'm pressing C to get that tool and you can click and drag wherever you want that crop to be. You can move it around, you can use the corners, you can use the edges, wherever you want that crop to be fitting in. You'll find it, you'll press enter to set the crop and you're good. If you want to move your crop back out, simply draw the crop back in and expand it again. So you have a lot of flexibility there. So up here on the menu bar, right now it says original ratio, you want to click that. If it doesn't say original ratio, it just means that you want a different one which is fine too, but click that area. If you want to crop it in a really particular ratio, Photoshop has come up with some presets that you'll probably most often use. So let's go to square and now the crop will be a perfect 1:1 ratio which is what provides a square. As you pull the crop in and out, it will always stay at that 1:1 ratio. So, you can use this to pull it around, find the crop you want, press enter to establish and now you see up here it's 1:1. You can use their preset over here or you can just type in exactly what you want. So if you want to 1:2 ratio, you can just type that in and move your crop around and it will stay at that ratio. You can click this arrow in between the numbers to swap it from a 1:2 to a 2:1. Again, everything will stay perfectly in ratio. So, press enter to set the crop and you're good to go. So as you become more familiar with Photoshop, you'll find yourself using a lot of key commands without even really thinking about it. I forgot to say this earlier, but I'll say it now, if you're drying your crop in and you want to get out of the crop entirely, just press escape on the keyboard and it will revert back to where it was before the crop. So the key commands for crop would be C just to bring up the crop tool in general, escape to get out of the crop and enter to set to the crop once you've established it. So, what I want to do is just save these two frames as a square so that I can use them on Instagram. So I'm going to press C for crop, go up here to my aspect ratios and click "1:1" and I can drag my crop over here. You can pull the image around with the crop, you can use the toggles on the edges of the crop. There's a lot of different ways of making it really precise for you. So just use whatever fits most for what you're trying to do. So now what I'm going to do is drag it in a little bit. Make sure that these frames are perfectly in the center and press enter. So now before I save it for Instagram, I just want to remove this layer which all I have to do is hide it by pressing the eyeball and I also want to move this texture layer up a smidge to cover that transparent part. So I've selected that layer, I'm going to select to press V for move and move it up a little bit. Cool. So, now it's a square and it's ready to save for Instagram. Just a quick thing to note because I made this mistake all the time when I was getting started with Photoshop, if you press Save right now, you're going to override your previous Photoshop file which has the wider crop and it will resave this new file with a square crop. So just be really attentive, be careful not to press save and if you do, you can always go back in history to where you were before the save and then revert it. But if you want to save a new file in the square format that's also a working file then you want to do Save As. So File, Save As, and we're going to call this one Web Banner-square and keep it as a working file with all the layers with that Photoshop and then press Save. So since I've saved a new Photoshop file, you can see it up here at the top of the screen instead of Web Banner.psd, it now says Web Banner-square.psd. So if I want to bring my old one in, I'll just go back to Finder, find that Photoshop file. Here it is right here. You can even see the time I had saved it. So 11:20, so here it is. So, now you have two Photoshop working files. You can toggle between the tabs and the only real difference in the files is that one is cropped and one isn't. So, now are pretty much, we're done. We got our file put together, we played with text, overlays, shapes. We've built this custom banner, we've saved it for web and we've also saved our working file. So, congratulations guys, we did it.
11. Final Thoughts: Thank you guys so much for taking my class today. It's been a lot of fun to put together and I hope you got a lot out of it and I also hope you feel a lot more confident and excited about using Photoshop. Feel free to post whatever you've created during this class in the Project Gallery. Other students can view it and leave comments and I can take a look as well. If you have any questions or comments you can also post them in the discussion board. If you'd like to learn more about Photoshop techniques, check out some of my previous classes as well. Now that you've learned the language of Photoshop, you can move forward and learn new techniques and grow your skills. Good luck and I can't wait to see what you create.
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Cat Coquillette, Artist + Entrepreneur + Educator
