Transcripts
1. Geometric Overlays for Social Media in Photoshop - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class: Make and Sell Overlays for Social Media in Adobe Photoshop. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're making geometric photo overlays that can be used over your photos for social media, but also can be created to be sold. You'll learn some techniques for making these geometric overlays and also saving them for use yourself and for sale. As you're working through these videos, you might see a prompt which let you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, give it a thumbs up. These recommendations help me get my classes in front of more people who just like you, want to learn more about Photoshop. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read all of your comments and I look at all of your class projects. Now if you're ready, let's get started making geometric photo overlays to use for social media and for sale.
2. Geometric Overlays for Social Media - Part 1: Before we get started making these geometric photo overlays, let's have a look and see what it is that we're looking at. This is the creativemarket.com website and these are kind of overlays that I'm talking about. Overlays that you can use either to just place across the top of your photos, or ones that effectively crop the photo as well as include some geometric elements. We're going to create both types today. When you're creating these, you first need to make a decision about what size document you want to use. If you're making them for social media purposes, something like 1200 by 800 might be an appropriate size. If you're making them to sell, you may want to make larger versions so that people can use them for high-quality images. You may also want to make a series, for example, for square images, some for portrait and some for landscape. Now today I'm just going to use a standard document size. I'm going to choose, "File" and then, "New". It's going to be a social media document size, so it's 1200 by 800, which is a landscape image. Just setting it to be transparent and I'll click, "Okay". It will help me if I have an image to look at while I'm working, so I'm just going to choose, "File", "Place Embedded" and embed an image in this document. I've already downloaded one from unsplash.com that I'm going to use. I'll give you the download link for this if you want to use it yourself. I'm just going to click the check mark place it into my document. For my geometric elements, I need to be really careful that I don't put these over the top of the photo on the same layer because otherwise I won't be able to extract them later on so that I can isolate them to save them so that they could be used on any image anytime. Of course, if we wanted to sell them, we wouldn't be selling them with this image, with it. I'm going to start with a new layer here. I'm going to place a series of circles across this image, and to do this, I'm going to use the Elliptical Marquee tool. I'm trying to build this particular video up so it can be used with practically any version of Photoshop. I'm going to drag out a circle and then do that by holding the "Shift" key as I drag out my circle. I want it to be just over half the width of this document, so it needs to be a fairly large size circle. Now I want to put a stroke around the edge of it, but it's very hard to eyeball exactly how big a stroke we need. So using the option of, "Edit stroke" is not going to be a particularly good idea because you can't see the stroke before you put it on. If you're working with really large images, five pixels mightn't be enough, but what is enough, 50? I have no clue. I'm just going to click, "Cancel", I'm going to use a different process. First of all, I'm going to fill the circle with a color. Right now black is my background color, so I'm just going to press, "Control Backspace", "Command Delete" on the Mac to fill this circle with a color. It would be better not to use white because in the next step I'm going to use white from my stroke, so a contrasting color will work best. To add the stroke, I'm going to use a layer style. I'm going to click the "Add layer style" icon here and choose, "Stroke". The reason why I'm using Stroke is that that allows me to see very clearly whether my line weight is enough, so I can just type in here any value, let's try 40, and you'll see what a 40 pixels stroke looks like. I like seven, so I'm going to go back to seven. I'm centering this. I've got position set to center, and I'm making sure I have white as my color. You just click on the color picker here and you can make sure that you have white selected. Of course white is 255, 255, 255 in the red, green and blue channels. Just click, "Okay" and I'm just going to click, "Okay". I have the stroke that I want, the problem is that I've got a fill that I don't want. Well, I'm going to come across here to the last pallet with this layer selected, and I'm just going to set the fill to zero. I can click this down pointing arrow and just drag the slider across to set the fill to zero. But there's another thing that you can do in Photoshop, and if you haven't met Scrubby sliders before, now is a pretty good time to make them. Just going to click away from here and just click back on my layer. If I hold my mouse pointer over the word "Fill", you'll see that it changes to a pointing finger with arrows going left and right. This is what's called a Scrubby slider. If I click and drag now, you'll see that I'm adjusting the value in this box by just dragging on the word. A lot of things in Photoshop are Scrubby sliders. Pretty much any time you have the option of clicking down on an arrow and adjusting a slider, you could also adjust that setting using a scrubby slider. I'm setting the fill to zero. The reason for this is that you cannot put a stroke on a shape unless the shape has a fill. We were forced into putting a black fill in our shape so that we could get the stroke. We didn't want the fill. Well, a solution for that is to just hide it by setting the fill zero. You don't want to send the opacity to zero because what that does is it affects the fill and the stroke. The opacity setting is not going to work in this case, it's the fill setting which just turns the fill off but leaves our stroke in place. Now I'm just going to get the move tool and I want to center this in the image. I could use my Smart guides, but I can also use a technique in Photoshop. I'm going to Control or Command, click on the, "Layer" thumbnail so that I have the marching ants around the shape. Now I'm going to press, "Control" or, "Command A". What that does is it selects the entire document, it looks like this shape is no longer selected, but it is. Now if I click here, I can adjust the vertical center and here, the horizontal center of my shape. My circle is now aligned right in the middle of this document. I'll press, "Control" or "Command D" to deselect my selection. To create my pattern of circles, I need some copies of this circle. I'm first of all going to drag a copy onto the new layer icon, and I'm going to start moving it. As I move the copy, I'm holding the shift key so that it's constrained to moving in a perfectly horizontal direction. It's in place now lined up against this other shape. I'm going to click on this "Layer", drag it onto the new layer icon, and repeat in the other direction. Again, holding "Shift" as I do so, so that it's movement is constrained.h With Smart Guides turned on, it should just snap into position. If you find that you're Smart Guides aren't turned on, go to the "View" menu, make sure that you have "Snap" set on, make sure that you have "Snap To set to Guides, and also make sure that in the, "Show" menu, Smart Guides has a check mark against it. With all of that selected, your Smart Guides should work just fine. I want to take another copy of this circle, so I'm just going to drag and drop it onto the new layer icon. This time, I'm going to place it down here. I'm not going to hold the, "Shift" key as I do so. I'm actually dragging this off its alignment. I'm just going to place it in position here. I can take a copy of this, drag it onto the new layer icon, and this time, move the copy across. If I hold, "Shift", I'm going to make sure that it moves in a perfectly horizontal direction so these two shapes are going to be aligned perfectly. Now let's grab these two, drop both of them onto the new layer icon, and as they both still selected, start pulling up. If I pull up with the, "Shift" key pressed down, then they're going to move in a perfectly vertical direction. The top two that I've just moved into position are going to be immediately aligned over the bottom two. This is the design that I want to use for my first overlay. Having created it, let's go back to the last pallet and see what we've got. Well, we've got a lot of circles. I'm going to roll up and click on the topmost layer that contains one of these circles. I'm going to roll down and, "Shift" click on the bottom most layer that contains one of these circles. You can also go the other way, so you can click on the bottom and then, Shift click on the topmost one. The important thing is to leave the photograph out of this. Right-click and choose, "Merge Layers". Now I have a single layer that contains my overlay. It's time to go ahead and save this so that I could reuse that later on. To do so, I'm going to turn off my photo because I don't want to save the photo. What I have on the screen right now is a series of white circles with a transparent background. When I save this, it's going to be saved as a PNG file. It'll be flattened to a single layer, but PNG saves the transparency so that this could be placed over any photo at anytime in the future. I'm going to choose, "File" and then, "Save As". It's important to select PNG as your format. Here it is, P-N-G. I'm going to call this, "Overlay 1", and just click, "Save". When you do this, you'll be prompted with some PNG options. You can just click, "Okay" the default settings are just fine. I'll turn my photo back on again. In the next video, let's see how we would use this overlay on another image in future.
3. Geometric Overlays for Social Media - Part 2: To use my overlay on another image, I'm first going to open that image. I'm going to choose File, and then open, and locate and open an image that is also in landscape orientation. I'm going to size this down so its size matches my overlay, and it matches the size that I need to use for my social media purposes. Image size, I'm going to type in 1,200. Photoshop automatically sets the height to 800. This is exactly the same ratio image as the other one. I'm just going to click "Okay". I'm now going to add my overlay by choosing file and then place embedded. Placing embedded just makes sure that the overlay is going to be embedded in the image. It's a safer way of operating because it makes sure that the content is in the file, not just linked to it. I'm going to click the checkmark. There's my photo already to be posted on social media with the overlay but you may be asking yourself, what are you going to do if your photograph isn't in landscape orientation, or perhaps if it's not in the exact same ratio as your overlay? Well, let's see how we'd handle that. In that case, I'm going to choose File and then New, and I'm going to create a 1,200 by 800-pixel document, the size that I need for social media purposes and this time I'm going to choose File, Place Embedded, and put my photograph in here. File, Place Embedded, and I'll locate an image that is in the wrong orientation for my overlay. I'll click "Place". It's going to be sized down so it fits within the document but of course, we've got a lot of gap on either side and I don't want to use all of this image. What I'm going to do is start resizing and I'm going to hold the Shift key as I drag out on the corners because I want to size this image now that it will fit in this 12 by 800 document. I'm just making sure that I've got the portion of the image that I want to use actually in the document. Now, I'm just having to pull this a little bit to line it all up, and I'm going to click the "Check Mark". Now the image hasn't been cropped at this stage. The full image is still in the document. You could come back at any later time and just move this around to line up the image in a different way. But now I'm going to add my overlay. File, place embedded, I'm going to go and get my overlay, and click "Place", and I'll click here to apply it. That's a nice easy way of managing an overlay, and also cropping and image without having to crop it for social media purposes. If you know how big the image needs to be, then create an empty document for it. Drop in the various pieces that you need, in this case, the photo and the overlay, just arrange them within the 1,200 by 800 space, or however big your document is, and then you can go ahead and save it. It just saves you from the effort of having to crop and re-size when you're exporting a document for social media use.
4. Geometric Overlays for Social Media - Part 3: I'm back now in the image that we were working on. I've hidden and locked down the first overlay. So I'm going to add a new empty layer that we can work on. The next overlay we're going to create is going to be a rotated line and it's going to give us a geometric pattern. Now, you can draw a line in a number of ways and one of them is to use the shape tool, this line tool in the shape group. You could also do it with a rectangular marquee by just dragging a thin rectangular marquee across the shape. But the problem with the rectangular marquee tool is that it's limited in length to the width or height of your document. There is a better way of drawing this line that we can use. So I'm just going to Control or Command D to select this. I'm going to in fact use a rectangle, because the rectangle tool gives me better control over my line than the line does. Curious, but it really is easier to use. So I'm just going to drag out a rectangular shape. Now, I'm using the shape options up here. So it's going to be a white filled shape. The height here in the h value is the actual width of the line. So I'm going to set that to seven. This is the line I'm going to use to start off with. So I'm just going to position it, making sure that I position it and don't re-size it about here in the document. I also want to center it, so I'm going to do the same thing as I did before. I'm going to Control or Command click on the layer thumbnail and press Control or Command A. I'm going to the move tool, but this time the only option I'm going to select is this horizontal aligned center, because I don't want to align it vertically, I just want to align it horizontally. Now you want to assign it move, but if it was not centered, it has actually moved. I'll press Control or Command D or D select to make sure that everything is D selected, and this shape is now centered horizontally on the canvas. I'm going to drag and drop it onto the new layer icon, and I'm going to rotate this shape by choosing Edit and then Free Transform. That shows these tools up here on the Tool Options bar. What I want to do is I want to rotate it around the center point of the document. So I'm going to click here on the bottom middle of these nine little boxes just to get this little marker here moving. There's a marker in the middle of this shape which you can now click and drag on. This is the center point around which the shape is going to be rotated. Now you don't have to get its position right, you just have to get it away from the shape right now. Because as soon as you drag it away from the shape, you get access to these options here. This is a tool for making sure that you position this little marker exactly where you want it to be. The document is 1,200 by 800, so the middle point here is 600 and 400 x and y. So I'm going to make sure that the x value is 600 pixels and the y value is 400 pixels, because that will make sure that this rotation point is dead in the center of the document, so this shape is going to rotate around it perfectly. I want to rotate it 60 degrees. I'll just click the Check mark. Now I want to repeat that copy and transform process. I'm going to press Control Alt Shift and tap the letter T. On a mac, that would be Command Option Shift T. I'm going to do it four more times to rotate this shape around this midpoint, effectively repeating the copy and rotation effect. So now I've got the elements for my gradient overlay. All I'm going to do is exactly what I did last time, click on the topmost of these lines, Shift-click on the bottom most of these lines, ensuring that I only have lines selected here, right-click and choose Merge Shapes. If you've just got Merge Layers, then just choose Merge Layers. Whatever you've got there, you just want to merge these to a single layer. I would then turn this off. So I've only got the grid visible and go ahead and save that again as a ping file. I'm going to do that and we'll come back in the next video and have a look at yet another gradient overlay, this one that has a cropping mask with it.
5. Geometric Overlays for Social Media - Part 4: For the next overlay, again, I'm going to add a new layer because all of these overlays have to be built on new layers. We're going to repeat the process of creating a circle that has a stroke. I'm going to again use the Elliptical Marquee tool, drag out my shape, fill it, and then add a stroke. If you're working in later versions of Photoshop, you could use the Ellipse tool and you would just drag out a circle that has a white stroke and no fill. I'm just going to go ahead with a process that's going to work in any version of Photoshop, Ctrl Backspace to fill this with black. At this stage, knowing that I need to remove the fill, I can just set the fill to zero. I'll choose the last style icon, click "Stroke". I'm going to add a slightly smaller stroke than I did last time. So I'm just going to set this to four, but all the other settings are going to be exactly the same. So I click "Okay". I'm not worried about how this circle is placed except that it has to be generally in the center of the document, but the fact that it's not in the center is just fine. I'm going to drag a duplicate of this onto the New Layer icon, and I'm just going to take the duplicate and just move it a little bit out of the way. Then I'm going to select both these layers, drag and drop both of them onto the New Layer icon and just move the duplicate out of the way. Again, what I want is this slightly off-centered circle, a scrubby circle look. Now that potentially is one overlay. So I'm going to select all these four layers, right-click and choose "Merge Layers" just to create a single overlay shape from these. But I want to take this one step further. What I want to do is to add a white fill around the edge of this shape so that it would actually effectively crop the image. It's not actually cropping but because it's blocking out the image underneath, you're getting the impression of a cropped image. If we just go back to the Creative Market for a minute, you'll see that these are the kind of overlays that are produced here, ones that crop the image into a shape. So this is the type that we're looking at now. For this, I want to be able to select everything around the edge of this shape. So I'm going to use the Magic Wand tool, going to click on the "Magic Wand tool", set the Tolerance to a really low value. I want the Contiguous checkbox to be checked because I only want to select pixels that are around the very edge of this shape. I'm going to press "Ctrl or Command D" because I actually had the marching ants turned on there for a minute. So I'm just going to click here once, and that will select every pixel that is transparent around the outside of the image, all the way up to the edge of this first white circle, well, what is a combination of white circles because they overlapped. Now if I just fill this selection with white right now, I'm going to encounter two problems. One problem is that I'll lose this current overlay because I'm going to fill the surrounds with white. Then effectively, I'm not going to have an overlay, that's just these circles. So to counteract that, I'm going to add a new layer. So my white fill is going to go on a new empty layout. Problem one solved. Problem two is, I'm not sure that my selection is right up against the very, very edge of this white. So if I fill it with white, there's a chance that there will be some partially transparent pixels around the edge of this shape that is going to see through and it's not going to give me the neat effect that I want. What I want to do is make this selection just a little bit bigger. So I'll choose, "Select", and then "Modify" and then "Expand" because I want it to start eating in to the very edge of this white shape. Now my stroke was four pixels. So if I expand this by two pixels, I'll be coming halfway into the outside stroke here. Don't want to do anything more than that, one or two pixels will be fine. So I'll just click "Okay." Now my selection here eating in to the white surrounds. You can see that it's moved in a couple of pixels. That's going to be enough to make sure that when I fill it with white, there's going to be a seamless join with the very outside of the offset circles. There's not going to be partially transparent pixels there. So I have my layer, selected the empty layer, I've got white, my foreground color or Backspace Option-Delete on the Mac to fill with white. I'll just press "Ctrl or Command D" to deselect my selection. So now I've got my white cropping mask shape on a layer all by itself. I could turn this background photo off and save these concentric circles as an overlay. Then I could come back in, turn on my white crop, turn off my photo, and save this as a second overlay. But isolating this fill to a separate layer also gives me the ability to decrease the value of the fill. So I'm going back to my scrubby slider and dragging this down to something around 75 percent. This is another potential overlay. In this case, I'd leave these two layers visible, turn off this layer and save this with partial transparency to a ping image. That ping image will have a fully transparent area, a partially transparent area, and then some fully opaque areas where these circles are.
6. Geometric Overlays for Social Media - Part 5: For our final overlay effect, we're going to have a opaque edge, but the geometric shape is going to be inset from inside that edge. We're going to start out with a triangle. I'm going to add a new layer here. Instead of using the Polygon tool, which makes drawing a triangle quite difficult because it's very hard to get its bottom edge perfectly horizontal. We're going to choose the custom shape tool. I'm going to choose the triangle shape here. If you don't have the triangle shape showing click the Flyout menu choose all, and then just click Append to add the shapes that will add them and you won't remove any custom shapes that you might have created. I don't need to do that because I've already got my shapes. I'm going to click on the triangle. I'm going to select pixels from the drop-down list. In earlier versions of Photoshop, you might have three icons there. I've got black as my foreground color. I'm going to hold Shift as I drag out an equilateral triangle. I'm going to hold the space bar as I just move it roughly into position. This is about the triangle that I want. I'm not worried about centering it right now. I'm just going to let go the left mouse button and then the Shift key. I'm going to center it, click on the layer thumbnail Control or Command A, and then just center it right in the middle of this document. Then deselect the selection with Control or Command D. Now it's more difficult than it might at first appear to create a triangle that is inset right inside this one evenly all the way around. But I'm going to show you how to do it. We're going to add a stroke to do this. With a triangle selected, I'm going to select this stroke layer style. This time I'm going to add a different color stroke. It doesn't matter what color I've just set it to red. It's going to be inside and you're going to adjust the size to whatever you want the space to be between the final geometric shape and the outside white filled border. I'm looking at a gap which is going to be the size of this red line and you can just adjust that to suit. Mine is 40 pixels wide, so I'm just going to click, Okay. You'll see that in the last pallet, the red is actually not showing. It's not showing in the thumbnail. That's because it's the layer style. What we want to do is to actually add it to this triangle. We're going to right-click and choose Rasterize Layer Style. Now, it's embedded in the triangle. This lets us now select the outside edge. I'm going to the Magic Wand tool. I'm just going to click once here on the outside transparent area. I'm going to add a new layer and then just fill this area with white. White is my background color, Control Backspace Command Delete on the Mac. Then I'll just deselect the selection with Control or Command D. There is the first part of my overlay effect. Am going to turn off the outside and just focus on this triangle right now. I want to create my geometric effect in this black area. I'm going to click with the magic wand tool on this black area. First of all, I need to select the layer and then click on the black. I've got my tolerance set to zero. All I'm doing is selecting the black bit. I want to get rid of everything except the black bit. I'm going to invert this selection with Select Inverse. Then I'll just press Delete. That's leaving me with my black triangle. I'll press Control or Command D to deselect the selection. Now, we'll go and build up our effect. First of all, we want to put a white border around this triangle, the way we did the circles earlier. Click the fx icon, choose stroke. This time it's going to be a white stroke. I'm going to make sure that I have a color which is 255, 255, 255, and the red, green and blue channels, I'll click Okay. I want it to be on the center, so I'm just going to click Center. I'm just going to wind down my value here to about seven. Now I'm a little bit concerned that I'm seeing rounded edges here. I'm going to switch from center to inside and that's going to make the edges pointed. It's just a better effect. I'm going to make a difference to our final shapes. I'll just click Okay. Then for the fill on this layer, I just want to remove the black. I'm just going to take that down to zero. I'm just going to click away by selecting some other tool. The next thing we're going to do is some lines to join these pieces together. I'm just going to go and select the rectangle tool. I'm going to set this to shape because that's going to allow me to adjust the width. I'm just going to drag down from the top of the triangle here to the base. That's going to create a perfectly vertical rectangle. I want to make sure that my width is the same width as I used around the edge here, but that has just gone in black. I'm actually just going to press Control or Command Z to undo that, flip my colors and try again. It's a little bit easier, particularly if you're working with an earlier version of Photoshop you just pick the right color in the first place. Let's check the width to seven, tab away. I'm just going to make sure that this is directly centered. I'm just going to adjust its position a little bit in the document, just make sure it's lined up really nicely with the top of the triangle. Let's go to the last pallet. Because we added a shape, it's going on a brand new layer. I'm going to take this rectangle shape layer, drag it on the New Layer icon to duplicate it. Then I want to transform it with Edit and then Free Transform. I want to transform it from its center point. I'm going to make sure that the reference point is in the very middle. I want to rotate this around 60 degrees. I'll click the Check mark. Now, I can just go and grab it with the move tool and just move it into position. It should stretch from corner to side of this triangle. Having done that, I'm going to make a duplicate of this one. Then I'm just going to flip it horizontally, edit, transform, flip horizontal. Then I can just drag this one into position. If it needs to be adjusted just marginally, just use the arrow keys on your keyboard because that's very easy way of just nudging at one pixel at a time. We're going to finish off with a hexagon. I'm going to add a new layer, I just make sure I'm working on a new layer. I'm going to select the Custom Shape Tool. I'm going to go and find my hexagon. This one over here. Now I'm going to drag it into position. I'm going to hold the Shift key as I do so because I want a perfect hexagon and I want it to just touch the very edges of this triangle. You may not get it right the first time, but if you're working on a shape layer, you'll be able to just put it down and then just maneuver it into position. It should sit just inside your triangle here, just over the very edges of it. I'm just nudging it into position here. I'm going to click the Check mark. When you're re-sizing it, you just want to make sure that you're doing that with the Shift key. It's really important to re-size it in proportion. I don't want this to have a fill, so I'm just going to remove the fill from it, but I do want it to have a stroke. I'm going back to the fx icon, going back to stroke. I'm going to use the same seven pixels stroke, but I'm going to try and put this on the center because of the way I aligned my hexagon. If I choose center, it's actually going to disappear into the lines of the triangle. I don't want a thicker line here. The center option has given me a perfect result here. If yours isn't perfect, you may want to just move your hexagon around a little bit. We'll just re-size it, but again, holding the Shift key because you want to constrain this to its regular proportions. Let's put our outside edge on. This is the effect that we came to create. We've got a clipping mask around the edge of the shape and our geometric triangle is the exact same proportions as the original triangle, but just inset from it. Of course, because this white fill is on a separate layer, we have the ability to adjust its opacity. Before saving this, I would grab all of the shapes that go to make this inner triangle and I would merge those. Then now on a single layer. I could also adjust the opacity of these if I didn't want them to be quite so dark, I could adjust their opacity and the opacity of the fill around the edge, but they're independently adjustable so that you can tweak the effect that you want. Of course, if you're saving this as a geometric overlay, you want to turn your photo off so that you're saving this as your ping file. Your project for this class is going to bay to create some geometric overlays of your own. You can use the exact same examples as I've shown here. Or you can create your own style, post the results in the class project area. I'm really looking forward to seeing what you come up with. I hope that you've enjoyed this class on making geometric photo overlays for social media purposes and also to sell. If you did enjoy this class and if you see a prompt to recommend it to others, please give it a thumbs up. This helps other people to identify this as a class that they may want to take. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
