Make a Holiday Card in Photoshop

1. Welcome!: Hey there. The holidays are right around the corner, and this year I've got another fun holiday card to help you out, and everything you need is included whether that's links to free funds or custom patterns that I've designed specifically for this course. As a bonus, I'm also including a sampling from my Make it snow toolkit. To add a little magical touch with some holiday flurries, you'll learn more about working with type the cliffs panels, stylistic alternate shapes and patterns. When you're finished, you'll have a pretty ready design that you consent to the printer of your choice. Don't have a favorite printer. I will share my favorite recommendation, and I'll even walk you through the process off, uploading your design and adding it to your cart. Everyone knows the holidays are a busy time. Cross another item off your to do list. Grab a cup of hot chocolate and let's get started 2. Prep the Fonts: before we get started with the design process, it's a good idea to set up all of our design assets first. So right now let's start with just the funds. The fund I've decided to use in this class is called Memoriam Pro. If you are a creative cloud subscriber, you can license and use this font for free. If you are not, don't panic. I have to free alternatives for you that I'll show you in a minute. So let's take a look and the reason it's a section. You'll find a link that goes directly to the memoriam front, and you can see that it comes in four different varieties to use the font. It's really simple. There's nothing to download, nothing to install and nothing more to buy. If you're creative cloud subscriber, all you have to do is slide the switches over to activate, and you can activate each individual version of the font. Or you can come up here and just activate all versions at once, and then you just wait to be, and when you pop back over into photo shop, you will find that fund along with all of the others, waiting to be put to use. If you're not a creative cloud, subscriber, I've got your back, of course, and you actually have two different options. The first, if you go over to the resource, is section that you can download the merry and bright word art overlay. So when you open it up, you will find a background Lear here that just makes it easy to see an up above. You will find a vector version of those letters that you can scale and adjust as needed. So to use that, you could just drag it into your project and follow along from there. So while you won't be able to edit the words of this, you can change the color. If you're not a creative cloud subscriber or you just think maybe you want to try a different fund. I've got really great free alternative that I think looks beautiful. So in the resource section you'll find a link to this typeface called Hello Santini or saying Tiny. I'm not sure how you say it, but it's free and it's beautiful, and it can be downloaded for personal use so you can't use it for business logo or something like that, but you could use it for your holiday cards, and I've already given it a test drive, and it looks great in this project. If you need help installing your fun, check out the link in the resource is guide. That will take you to this post by creative market, and it will show you how to install your fine in just a few easy steps, whether you are on a Mac or a PC, so that does it for the fund. Join me in the next lesson, and we'll talk about the shapes and patterns used in this project. 3. Prep the Shapes + Patterns: a couple of other things will be using is a shape will be using a pine tree shape as well as a star shape. The star shape is available in every version of photo shop, but the tree is available in newer versions. So if you don't have the tree, you can go to the resource section and you will find that I've got a file called tree Shape . And it's just a vector shape of a pine tree, so you'll be able to just drag that into the project and use that if your version of Photoshopped doesn't have it, the other things will be using our couple of different pattern files in your resource section. You'll find a file called Glitter and pine dot p 80. The easiest way to load this into photo shop is to simply double click on it, and Photoshopped will load it into your preset. And if you're in Photoshopped 2020 you will find them here in your patterns panel. There's just one more asset that we need for this project, and it's not included with Photoshopped anywhere. It's something that I created, and I'm making it available to you for free, so join me in the next video and I'll tell you all about it. 4. Prep the Snow Overlay: the last piece to this project is the snow overly? So this doesn't come with photo shop. It's something that I created to add snow to an image. So it's just a simple file that you drop into your design, and it makes it look as if the photo was taken while it was snowing. So the files called snow Overlay it's a J peg. You'll find it in the resource section, and you can just download it. And then I'll show you how to drop it into our design when we're ready and it will make it look like it's snowing. The snow overlay is a free bonus, but I wanted to include with this course if you want the full free bonus and you can download my make it Snow Snow Building Toolkit for free. It comes with all different layers and smart filters, and it just makes it really easy to not only add snow to a scene, but to totally customize it as well. You confined up for the newsletter and get the whole kit for free. Otherwise grabbed the free download from the resource section and let's get ready to set up our document 5. Create the Documents: the car that will be building is a flat, double sided five by seven card. If there's a different size that you want to build, you can absolutely do that. But first I suggest you follow along so you can learn the ropes and then customize it any way you like. Either way, whenever you're building it design, it's always good to know the specifications for your final print before you start. So in this case, I've designed this project to be printed from m picks dot com. You can use any printer you want, but the specs for em picks are what will be using in this course. So to get started, we're gonna come up to the file menu and choose new. And over here we're going to make sure that this is set to pixels and we're gonna type A with of 2175 ah, height of 15 75 and a resolution of 300 for the background contents. Let's go ahead and select custom, and you can really choose any color here. But just so we're all on the same page, I'm going to be using a specific shade of great so to find that shade of gray. It's going to be RGB values of 108 108 and 108 And then just click. OK, head on down to the bottom of the window and click create. Now that we've created the document itself, let's go ahead and save this as the front. And then we'll duplicate it and save a back so we won't have any confusion while we're working. To do that will come up to the file menu and choose Save as can navigate to wherever it is that you want to save this and I'm going to call it five by seven front and we want to make sure that the format says Photo shop and we'll click safe. Now we're ready to duplicate it and save the backside so we'll come up to image duplicate and we'll call this one five by seven dash back. We'll click OK, and that creates the document, but it hasn't saved it yet, So to save it, we still need to come up to file and choose save, and this will prompt us toe actually create the PSD. It should have the file name we just gave it, so make sure it's in the location. You want to save it and then click safe. And because we're going to be starting with the front side first. Here in a photo shop, we've got two documents open. Let's just click on the front one to activate that, and in the next video, we'll go ahead and get started on the front design. 6. Front: Add the Pine Tree: The first thing we're gonna dio to the front of our design is create the pine tree shape. So in photo shop, but you can grab these shaped tool over here, the custom shaped tool on your keep on your toolbar. If you can't find it, you can just press the letter you. That's the keyboard shortcut will. And if you click and hold on it, you'll see there's a number of tools. The one we're looking for is the custom shape tool. Then, with the custom shape tool selected, you can come up here in the Options bar and click this little drop down here, and you could scroll through a number of shapes. Photoshopped CC subscribers will find some additional things here, including a folder with leaf trees. And if you click to expand that folder, you will find the option here for what's called the Dead Pine Tree. And if you double click that will select that shape, then we would come over here in the options bar and choose the fill color we want. So maybe a nice green and click over here and we don't need a stroke. Then you are free to click and drag, and if you hold shift, it will stay proportionate. And when you let go, you'll have a shape. If you're not a creative cloud subscriber, then you'll want to use that tree shape PSD file that I've created for you so you can open that up and you'll see a tree, the exact same tree, and it's a vector outline vector shape here so you can scale it if you need to. We need to do is drag and drop it into our design. So I'm gonna grab the move tool from the top of the toolbar, and I'm going to click on the tree and hold my mouse down and drag my mouse. Keep holding the button down and all pause with the button down up here on the front image tab and you'll see that our screen switches to our front design. I'm still holding, re mounts down and then all mouse down over the document itself. And then I always like to hold shift and then drop. So then, when you let go of your mouse, you'll see the tree lands right perfectly in the center of your image. And just like Creative Cloud subscribers that you would have a vector shape layer right here. And if you need to scale it, you compress commander control TV on, then shift drag or just regular drag, depending on your settings from one of the anchor points here, and you can adjust the scale. And then if you want to change the color, you should be able to press you on your keyboard to grab your custom shape tool. Even if you don't have this custom tree shape and then up here in the control panel, you can change the color just like everyone else. So once you've got your tree, you want to use the move tool and make sure you position it in a place where you like it. So I'm gonna go for something about here. I want to leave room at the top for a star, and I like to kind of have the whitest parts of the tree right down here towards the bottom . If at any time you want to resize your tree shape, just make sure that it's active in your layers panel and you compress command or control T to bring up free transform, and then you can drag click and drag from the different corner points. Polling shift or not holding shift, depending on your preferences, and you'll be able to resize the tree as often as you like. So that's our tree shape, and in the next listen, we are going to add the pine pattern to it. 7. Front: Add the Pine Pattern: So now that we've got our tree shape, we're ready to add our pine pattern. So with are dead pine layer active, we're gonna come down to the bottom of our layers panel and click the effects icon to add a layer style. Then we want to scroll through here and find pattern overlay. When this window box pops up, you can click right here to select the pattern. Creative Cloud Subscribers will find a folder up here called trees, and you can click to apply some of these patterns if you like, or in the download that is included with this class, the glitter and pine patterns you can scroll down here, and because we've already loaded it, you'll find a glitter and pine folder, and if we click to expand that, you'll see there's a glitter pattern could make your tree glittery, but we'll save that for the start, Uh, or we could click to add this pine pattern to it. Then, if I click away, you can play with things like the blend mode so you can try different blend mode settings up here, one that I kind of like is maybe hard light, and then I like to lower the opacity a little bit so that the shadows aren't quite so dark . And that's where some of the original tree color from your shape is going to show through. So if you want to change your shape color, you can still do that. Um, and that would change how this looks a swell. So I'm gonna go with hard light blend mode in a pass ity of somewhere between 60 and 70%. You can also click within the image to drag the pattern around within the tree, and you can play with the scale to get something that you think looks good. When you're happy with it. You'll go ahead and click. Okay, if you want to edit this pattern effect at any time, just double click the pattern overlay text right there in the layers panel and that'll pop the layer style window back open, and you can make your changes right there. Now we've got a tree shape and a pattern, and in the next video, we'll add our star 8. Front: Add the Star Shape: So now that we've got our tree, let's top it off with a star. Let's create a new blank layer to hold our star. So at the bottom of the layers panel, I'm going to click the little icon next to the trash can to make a new blank layer. Then we're gonna go back to our customs shaped tools and with the custom shape tool active , we're gonna come up here in the control panel and click the little drop down here to choose a shape. Now, what you see in your panel might look different than mine depends on how you got it set up and what version of photo shop you're using. So to change this, if you need to, you can click the little gear icon right here, and you can view thumbnails, small or large or text only, or just a list. And in other versions of photo shop, you might see categories here like, I think, it says, like animals or shapes or whatever. So one of the options is also also, if you want to be able to view all the shapes, go ahead and select that, and then I think it asks If you want to upend them or replace them, you can just say replace or whatever. Just get him all there. And then you should see a list that looks like this and you can scroll down and you want to find this five point star right here. So I'm going to click twice, so a double click to select it and close the panel. Then we'll come over here in the control panel, and it doesn't really matter what color we choose for. The Fields were going to be adding that glitter pattern anyway. But I'll go ahead and choose yellow. We can leave the stroke set to none. So that's the white box here with the rent slash through it, and then we're ready to just click, and I'm holding down the shift key to keep it proportional. Depending on your settings, you might not need the shift key on when I get to a size that I like gonna let go and that will fill it in. Then I compress V to grab my move tool, and I can move it around if I need to. If I need to resize it after the fact I compress command or control T to bring up free transform on. Then I could scale it larger or smaller again. Holding, shift or not holding shift, depending on your settings. But you want to make sure you keep it proportional now because this is a shape object of vector shape. We don't have to worry about pixels or scaling it. Weaken. Scale it as many times as we want, however bigger, small as we choose, and it will always look sharp. All right, so now we've got our star, and in the next video, we're gonna make it sparkle. 9. Front: Add the Glitter Pattern: we're ready to add the final touch to beautifying our tree. We're gonna add the glitter pattern to our star. So with the star shape, layer active will come back down to the bottom of the layers panel, click the effects icon again and again will choose pattern overlay. And this time, from the drop down, we're going to go back to that folder glitter and pine and click glitter. Now I want to change the settings from last time. So hard light is not working for me in this particular case. So I'm gonna change that. I think back to normal and here I'm going to drag the opacity back up to 100%. And here we come again. Play with scale so we can make the glitter large or quite tiny. You can really play and see what works for you. You can also remember if you move your mouse into the image itself, you can actually click and drag and move the pattern around within the star. So maybe there is a section of the glitter that you like better than another, and you can position it however you want. When you're happy with it, you'll click. OK, and if at any time you want to be able to edit those pattern settings, all you have to do is double click the pattern overlay setting in the layers panel, and that will bring the layers style window back up and you can add it it from there. Our tree is looking pretty good. Join me in the next video and we will start working with type. 10. Front: Create Basic Type: here we are, our trees complete, and we're ready to add our type. Remember, Creative Cloud subscribers have free access to memoriam Pro Headline for everybody else. Here, two options are the word art overly included in the resource is or the additional free font for personal use? Hello, San Tiny. So the text we're gonna be adding says, may your days be And then in the script fund, it says merry and bright. And then at the bottom, we sign off with the name of who it's from. So because we want to draw our attention to the script front that we're using for merry and bright, we're gonna make that part the largest. Also, we're going to be putting each of those elements in their own layer so that we can position them and scale them individually to get just the right look. So we'll start by grabbing the type tool so I can either click over here or press T for type and up here in the control panel, I'm gonna be using Memoriam pro headline regular. I'm not a CC subscriber or I don't want to use that fund. You can use the Hello same tiny Funt. Obviously you can use any typeface that you want, but there's some special things about this particular typeface as well as the Hello same tiny that I want to show you because they're kind of special. So with that typeface selected, I'm going to come over here and click to select White for the color click. OK, and then I'll position my cursor where I want to. And I'm just going to type out Mary with the capital M E R R y. And then I'm gonna press command or control enter. So that's gonna set the type. Basically, that type player is now set and the cursor the input cursor is no longer active. So I can grab the move tool by pressing V, and I can move this into position and it's pretty big. So I'm gonna press commander controlled T, and I'm going to scale it proportionally in my case, holding shift down for a little bit. Just for now. We can always adjust this later, so we've got the word Mary. So let's duplicate that by holding down Ault or option, and you'll see that our cursor turns into this double arrow. So while we're holding alter an option. We can just click and drag to make a copy of that layer. Now, to change this from the word married to the word bright, I'll press T to get my move, tool back and all position my cursor anywhere in there and click to highlight it. Then we'll type the word bright with a capital B R I G H T. And again I'm going to commit this type. You can either press commander Control. Enter or you can can come up here in the control panel and click the check mark. Finally, I'm going to switch to the move tool by pressing V and all position this somewhere about like that. Now we still need the ampersand up there, so we've seen how to duplicate a type player or any layer. But let's just add another new layer by pressing T for the type tool and making sure that before you click to insert your cursor, you want to make sure that you see this what I call the open book or butterfly cursor. You want to see the one that's got the little box around it because that indicates that if you click right there, you will be creating a new type player where, as if you move too close to an existing type lair, you'll see that the wings go away. And if you click there, you are simply putting your cursor in the existing type player. So I compress escape to cancel that. So I'll put my cursor here where it's got wings and I'll just click and then type an ampersand and I'll click the check mark in the control panel. I'll use the move tool to position this about like that, and that's looking pretty good. So what happens if you are not a creative cloud subscriber and you don't have access to memoriam? Then you can use the word art that I've created. So let me show you how we would do that. I'm just gonna hide the type that we've already put here, and I'm gonna bop over to bridge where I've got this file So we'll open that up and then I'll just make sure I'm on the merry and bright layer and using my move tool, I'm gonna click and drag, and I am just watching my cursor and gonna pause on the tab right here. I'm still holding my mouse down and then I'll drag my mouse here, still holding the button down. And then I'll hold the shift key down while I drop it, and then we might need to scale. It's all press commander Control T and I can shift and drag that way. So that is the word art shape that's in the resource is just drag and drop it in and you'll be good to go if you want to test out the design using the other free font that I linked to called Hello, same tiny, then it might look something like this. We can see here in the layers panel. I've done the same thing, so I've got a layer from the word Mary. I've got another layer for the ampersand and another layer here for the word bright. Hello, Sand. Tiny is more of a hand drawn font, and I think it looks really great for this project. Also, now that we've set our basic type, join me in the next video where we're going to kick things up, not with stylistic alternates 11. Front: Stylistic Alternates: If you've never used the glitz panel before or played around with what's called stylistic alternates, you are in for a treat. So here I have my layers with the Memoriam pro headline and I've got my type tool active. So I'm going to start by selecting the M right here. So I'm just going to click and drag with my mouth, just like you would in any program to highlight the type. So I've got this m selected, and you might notice that this funny little fly up appears and it's got some different EMS inside. These are the alternate EMS available in this front. So that means that if I move my cursor right over here and I want to see what this M looks like, I can just click and you can see that the letter switches to a new alternate style of the letter M. Let's see if anything else has alternates so we can move through these letters and highlight them. And we see here that the lower case e have this option, but you'll notice if I click on it. It doesn't really work here. In the word. This would be better if the e appeared at the end of the word, so I'll just click the first tee to return it. Ours. We can just kind of leave the why. Also, I think it's fine the way that it iss. So right now I'm just going to change the end. Let's move down to the word bright and repeat that same process, so I'll grab my type tool and highlight the B. It turns out there's some bees here, but they all look pretty much the same. There's also this little triangle right here, this little carrot. If we click on this, this will pop open what's called our glitz panel. You can also find the glitz panel any time you need it from the window menu here. The glitz panel shows us basically the same thing we saw in this little fly out. But sometimes there's more alternative than what can be displayed in this little fly out, so you can always click this carrot to pop over here and see. Maybe there's like 10 other bees that we might want to choose from, but in this case there's just before, so that's not going to do us a whole lot of good. Let's see what happens if we highlight the G. You can see that we see the options here as well as in the glitz panel, and it's kind of hard to see them here because they're being cut off in the glitz panel. We can use the slider right here to scale them, and we might be able to get a better look. So it looks like some of them have this big, swoopy tail, and then they have different styles of these little balls on the top. So I think I'm going to just go with this G that has a big swoop detail, but not the ball. So I'll just double click to insert it, and it appears right there. Maybe I do like the ball. I'll change my mind. After all, let's don't look like this one. Ah, but now see what happens now. The little ball here is running in to the H. I don't like that, so I'm gonna go back to this guy. Speaking of the letter age, let's highlight that and see what we get Now. Here's a number of options for the eight, and one of them has a ball on the end. So let's double click and see how that looks. That's kind of nice. And we can see we have different options here. I kind of like how the h right here extends all the way up into the loop. So I'm gonna choose this one, and it's right now it's running into the ampersand, But all address that in a minute. I'm also gonna highlight this tea, and it looks like there are several different teas we can choose from, and some of them have big, swoopy things. But I kind of feel like we've got enough Sweeping is happening, so I'm going to just highlight that and go with this still fancy but not so swoopy tea right here. And that looks pretty good. When I'm happy with that, I'm gonna either press commander Control, enter or it can come up to the options bar or excuse me, control panel and click the check right there. So we need to do some adjusting because now, if we look, this fancy swoopy M is running into the B and the ages running into the ampersand, and we need to move things around. So I'm going to move the word bright. So I've got the bright layer selected, and I'm gonna press V to grab the move tool. And I'm going to just see where I can position this where it's gonna not be in the way. So if I tuck this in here, the age is going to run into the wine and can't really move the why. So let me move it over here, and I can tuck the be in between the swoop of the AM and sweep of the y. So I like that. Bring it down. Just ah touch. It might be helpful to know that you can also use your arrow keys on your keyboard to finesse the position of your layers as well. Now we've got to do something about this ampersand. So let's target that layer. And I'm going to switch to my type tool by pressing tea and highlight it because maybe there's different styles of ampersand. And I like this one here because I like that it has the thicker swoop on this part as well as this tale right here. So I'm gonna click to apply that, but I need to make it smaller so all can commit that change again. That's Commander Control. Enter or you can go up to the control panel and I basically just want to scale the ampersand down because it doesn't need to be this big. And it doesn't work in this space at this size. So when a scale it by pressing commander controlled t which brings up free transform depending on your options, you may not need to hold shift to keep it proportional. But I'm gonna hold shift in drag from a corner and that will scale it down and I can move it. I think about like, here would be good and about that size. So I wanted to be small, and it's just gonna kind of tuck into the space between the Why and the H. And it kind of just fits really nicely right there. So this is looking pretty good. I'm gonna click in the layers panel to select Mary and then I'll shift click to select Merry and Bright, and then I can use my move tool and just kind of reposition them if I want to. So that's a look at how to get fancy with memoriam. If you want to use the Hello, Sand tiny. There are some cool options for you as well, so I'm gonna go ahead and hide this and we'll go back to turn on our hello seem tiny. And let's go back to the glitz panel. So you might recall that you can come up to the window menu and choose glitz to bring it up . The reason we have to do it that way is if I grab the type tool and I highlight the M, for example. Hello. Seeing Tiny is different in a couple of ways. One. It doesn't have stylistic alternates the way that Memoriam does. But the other thing that's different is that even if it did, it might not be coated in a way that makes that little fly up appear the little pop up window if we highlight the letters, so just because you have a typeface where you highlight the letters and nothing pops up, it doesn't mean that there is not some great things buried within that fund. It just might mean that it didn't get coated in the way to make the fly up appear, and instead you'll have to go digging in the glitz panel so I'm going to uninsulated that and let's go to the cliffs panel. And up here is where we type in the name of the typeface we wanna look for. So because I have this highlighted it already jumped toe Hello Seem tiny. But you can also click and scroll and select. You know any other typeface that you need to and then down here it says alternates for selection and hello. Seeing Tiny doesn't have alternates, so that's not gonna show anything there. I always recommend just clicking this drop down and choosing entire front because some type designers don't really code there type very well and you never know how things are gonna get labeled. So right now I've got this set huge. So I'm going to drag the zoom down here. Now if I scroll around, we can see we've got capital letters and lower case letters, and that's it. So we don't have different stylistic alternates for those different letters, but we do have some cool dingbats, and if we scroll down to the bottom, it's really hard to see because just the way that they're in here. But this font has some cool swooshes like little underlines and kind of squirrelly bits. So I'm gonna use the type tool and come over here again looking for the cursor with the box around it, or the open wings on going to click to insert my cursor. And now, if I double click any one of these, you can see that there's a number of cool underlines that we might want to put here so you can pick a favorite of yours. I'm looking at this and thinking I'm gonna go ahead with this last option. So will highlight and delete those and all commit my type up here. And then let's close the glitz panel and I compress commander controlled t to bring up free transform. And I'm going Teoh proportionally scale this and move it into position, and I'll just kind of drop it right here and press enter. So that's a really cool bonus of the same tiny option. So even if you don't have access to Memoriam or maybe even if you do, you might really like this fun as well. It's always worth taking a look at your glitz panel to see if there's any surprises that might be hiding in your fun 12. Front: Sans Serif Type: Now that we've got our main type not only set, but also styled, we're ready to add the more simple text to finish off this whole piece. So for this type, I'm going to just be using a sans serif font. A san serif font is just a really simple clean font that doesn't have the little feet at the tops and bottoms of some of the letters. Like if you think of times new Roman, for example, it's got little feet those air called serious. So a sans serif font does not have those things. So I'm gonna grab my type tool, and again look for a cursor with open wings and I'm gonna click to create any type player. And right now, my curse there is huge. So I'm going to come up to the control panel and choose something smaller and up here, I'm gonna click, and I'm just going to be using a san serif typeface so you can use any San serif typeface. The one that I'm gonna be using is called Montserrat. And you can use this. There's a link to it in the resource section. It's free. Just download and install it or you can just use any San serif font or really any font that you want that's already on your system. So I'm gonna choose Montserrat, and I'm going to choose the light version and I'm going to turn on my caps lock so I can just type in all caps and I will type May your days be And then Commander Control, return or enter. And I'm gonna press commander Control T and proportionally I'm going to scale this down, drag it over. So I'm gonna position it in here. Maybe so it just fits right above the rest of the word Mary, and I'll just kind of took it down. May your days be merry and bright, and then I'm going to switch to the move tool by pressing the letter V and I'll hold down Ault or option to get that double arrow again. And I can click and drag to duplicate this layer. Bring it down here where we're gonna change it to say, you know, the Smiths or whoever you are, whatever name you want to put their or your clients. Maybe so I'll switch back to my type tool and then I'll click and commander control aid to highlight it all. And I'll just write the Smiths and then I like to do a speech and then a little pipe. So that's the shift and the key that is, to the right of your bracket keys on your keyboard and then another space. And then we'll put the year We'll set that and I'm gonna move this. I wanted about here, but then now we need to take the whole word art situation, and I need to move it over to the left. So in the layers panel, I'm going Teoh, see that I've got this layer selected. So I'm gonna hold shift and then click on the bottom type player so that they're all selected and I can use the move tool, then to move it over about like so, if you are using the hello san timey typeface, then you might need to just take your san serif type and maybe just scale it down a little bit. So, Commander Control T and you can scale that down, um, for both of those layers, and then you might need to just, you know, move them around a little bit to get them where you like them. So you should have when you're finished. Something that looks like this. So now that we have our type, we're ready to add some magic with a little bit of holiday snow. 13. Front: Snow Overlay: to add a little bit of magic. We're going to use that snow overlay that you downloaded earlier from the resource section . So this is a sampler version of the entire free snow making tool kit that I've created that you can download at the Link in the resource section and the whole thing's free. But right now we have this sort of scaled down version that is just a simple overlay. So that's what I'm going to show you here. It's just a simple J peg on a black background with some flurries. So I'm gonna press commander Control Aid, put a selection around it, Commander Control, see to copy that selection. And then I'm going to click over here to go back to our design and all press commander Control V to paste it in. Now, over here in the layers panel, it might land in a different place, just depending on what layer you had active when you pasted it. So you might need to drag it around. It doesn't really matter where it goes. As long as it's above the star and the pine tree. The rest it's gonna have the same effect. So just to show. You all drag it up here on top of the type players. So I've got the hello sin tiny version here, which I've hidden. But that's right there. So let's rename this layer here snow. So I'm gonna double click where it says layer one and I'm gonna take snow and press enter. Now, of course, we have the problem where it's covering up our whole design. So to fix that, we're gonna go up towards the top of the layers panel where it says normal. These are the blend modes and we're going to click on, then select screen. And we get this. We can dial down the opacity if we want to. Maybe faded just a little bit. And there you have it. Adding some magical snow flurries is as simple as copying, pacing and changing the blend mode. It amazes me every time. Still, so the front of our design is finished. Join me in the next video where I'm gonna show you how to save it and get it ready for printing 14. Front: Save + Print Prep: to save this file so that we can come back to it. Maybe you want to remix it for another project. We want to first save it as a PSD file. So that's already been done earlier. So we just want to then choose file and save to update our saved version. So that will keep everything safe with all the layers on the type and everything. Just how it is now. But we don't want to send the PSD for printing because that's not gonna work. So for printing, we're gonna choose file and will choose, save as and navigate wherever you wanna put this. And I'm still going to call it five by seven front. But instead of Photoshopped for the format, I mean a click and I'm going to select Jay Pek. Now we're going to see this little warning here next to the layers option. That's just letting us know that J pegs cannot have layers. So what it's going to dio is smushed down all the layers that we currently have, and it will just flatten the whole thing as a J. So that's what we want. So it's OK that we see this there that's to be expected. It's going to save it as a copy, so we'll click, save, and you'll see here that we're now looking at the J Peg. So it's flattened everything into a background layer, and now we get to choose the compression options for the J. Peg. So because we want this to print, we want it to look as great as possible. We want the least compression, which means the highest quality file possible. So we'll leave this to a holiday quality setting up 12. This is maximum and the sliders all the way to the right and we'll click, OK, and then that is saved on our system. And now we're back toe looking at our PSD. So we have our layers here in our PSD file, and the J peg is safe, flat wherever we've saved it. And it's waiting for print so we can actually go ahead and close this file now and join me in the next video where we will work on the backside 15. Back: Photo + BW Conversion: All right, we are ready to work on the backside of our document. So over here in photo shop, I've got my five by seven back file active, and I'm gonna pull up this image here. So this is a picture that I'm gonna add to the back of the design. So whatever picture you have that you want to add, now is the time to get it and open it up. And to put it in there, I'm gonna press commander control A to put a selection around everything, Commander Control. See to copy it and then I'll click back over to this tab and command or control V to paste it. It is huge. So that's probably what will happen is your file might be so huge that, you know, you're only seeing like a piece of it. So before you panic press commander controlled T to enter free transform and then press command or control and the number zero and that will zoom photoshopped out so you can actually see the bounding box around your photo, and then you can actually see how it's appearing in your documents. So I'm gonna proportionally scale this down so that it fits within the document and then all press return or enter and commander Control Plus to zoom back in. So here we can see in our layers panel. We have a background and we have layer one, which is our photo, and we can go ahead and leave it just like this and move on to the next thing. But I think that it kind of adds a nice touch when this photo is black and white. So if you also want to make your photo black and white, then I'm gonna show you how to do that. Down at the bottom of the layers panel, there is this little black and white circle. These are the adjustment layers and you'll notice if you click on that, there's one called black and white. And what's cool about making black and whites this way, as opposed to the number of other ways you can do it, is that you can actually really find tune this black and white so you can tell Photoshopped how you want the reds to convert the yellows, the greens, everything, each individual. Hugh, you can actually tell it how to convert. So this image has a lot of greens in it so I can take this green slider and I can brighten those greens or dark in those greens. And then her skin tones are going to be, Ah, largely yellows. Weaken dark in them and you can see it's also affecting the yellow that's appearing within the greens and the trees in the background. So you can really fine tune your black and white. And when you're happy with that, you can just click to close the panel, and you can see in the Layers panel that we've added a black and white adjustment layer. If at any time you want to remix the black and White Conversion, you can just double click right here on this thumbnail, and that will open the properties panel where you can make these adjustments. There's also presets up here at the top that you can choose from, So I'm gonna click right here to close it, and that looks pretty good. Join me in the next video, and we're gonna make it snow on the backside of our card, too. 16. Back: Snow Overlay: so if it's snowing on the front of our card that we probably want to make it snow on the back. So we'll go back to that snow overlay file commander control A to put a selection around it . Commander Control, See to copy it. And now I'll click back over to the tab for the back of our design and Commander Control V to Paste. And again. The snow overlay is covering up everything, but we're gonna fix that. Let's rename it in our layers panel and been a double click right here, and we'll take snow. Press enter, then will come here to the blend modes and again we'll choose screen. And if we want to lower the opacity a little bit, we can do that as well. Join me in the next video to save the back of our design and get it ready to print 17. Back: Save + Print Prep: just like with the front of our design. We want to save the back as a PSD. We've already created the file, so we just want to save it to update it. So I'm gonna come appear to file and choose save battle, just update the file we've already saved. And now again, we don't want to send the PSD to print. So we're gonna choose file and save as. And this time, instead of photo shop, we're gonna choose J. Peg. And we know we're going to get this warning because J pegs can't have layers but photo shops going to smash him down, and it will save this as a copy. So we'll hit. Save here. We can see it's flattened them down. So that's RJ pen, and we want the highest quality, least compressed file that we can. So we'll set this with 12 and maximum very large file Click. OK, and that's it. So now we've got two psd is one for the front one for the back and to J pegs for printing one for the front and the second for the back and the next video. I'm going to show you how to get these beautiful cards printed 18. Let's Print!: now that we're done designing, saving our files were ready to get them printed so you can send these wherever you want to be printed. But if you are looking for a place, I recommend em. Picks dot com m p i x dot com You'll need to sign in or creating count if you don't already have one and thin. Once you create account, get signed in. You want to look around for the cards option and within the cards option you're going to see D. I. Y cards. Once we click on that, you can see there's all kinds of different shapes and sizes. We are looking for a horizontal flat card, so I'm gonna click that, and here we want to select that it's five by seven. So then you can see down here that there's a place for the front and the back design, so we're going to click toe, add our photos, and I'm going to choose from my device from my computer, and I have saved them on my desktop. So I want to make sure that I'm just bringing in the J pegs. So we've got the five by seven front and five by seven back. Use those and I'll click upload so we can see down here that this is the front of the card . So I'm gonna take this image and drag it and drop it to the front. That looks good. I'll click the arrow to flip to the back, and I'll drag this photo and drop it for the back on. Then I'm ready to add it to my cart. It's asking me to make sure that everything looks right, and it does, so we'll go ahead and say Yes, added to my cart. Once I get it in my cart, I can choose the type of paper that I want. You can decide if you want it glossy. If you wanted to have rounded corners, do you want envelopes? Which kind of envelope? So if you want to for an extra fee, you can also order address labels. Once you get everything ready, then you're ready to just check out, and that's it. So hopefully you can see the process is pretty simple, so just go to m picks dot com, create a free account and you'll be able to take it from there 19. You Did It!: congratulations. You have finished your design and gotten it ordered. So I hope that you learned something new in front of stop along the way. And even more importantly, I hope you had a good time. That's it. You did it. Congratulations. You have not only designed a card, but you've even gone through the process of getting it printed as well. I hope you learned some new things and photo shop along the way. And even more importantly, I hope you had fun. Be sure to check out all my other classes and come say hello on Instagram. And if you want to keep in touch and get all kinds of extra fun goodies and freebies subscribe to my newsletter from KERA Pledge image dot com. Thanks again for watching. I will see you next time.