Make & Sell Scrapbook Paper Designs in Adobe Photoshop - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Make Scrapbook Designs to Sell in Photoshop Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley, welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, Make and Sell Scrapbook Paper Designs 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 looking at making scrapbook designs to sell. We'll start by looking at the technical details of the file sizes and formats to use. We'll make a simple set of designs. We'll save them and create our marketing materials. Now, as you're working through these videos, you might see a prompt which lets 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, just like you, who want to learn more about Photoshop. 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. If you're ready now, let's get started on making scrapbook designs to sell. 2. Make & Sell Scrapbook Designs - Part 1: Before you get started making scrapbook designs to sell it's wise to do a little bit of research. This is because many of the sites that sell scrap booking papers will have predetermined requirements. They'll tell you exactly how big your files need to be, what kind of format they need to be in. And if the site doesn't have any specifications then you want to sell your product in what is a typically acceptable format for people on that site who are buyers to buy in. So for example, if you wanted to sell on Etsy, you should do a little bit of research on Etsy and just see what other people are selling. The site that I sell my scrapbook papers and scrapbook designs on requires a fairly standard size paper. What they want is the background papers to be 3,600 by 3,600 pixels in size at 300 PPI. Now that would translate to a 12 by 12 inch sheet of paper printed at 300 PPI. That's probably a bit larger image than most people typically need but that's the requirement of the site, so that's what I provide. Now these images need to be saved as high-quality JPEG files, and they need to be in sRGB format because that's what the site tells me I need to provide. And for the elements, for the loose pieces that will go with the scrapbook background papers if I choose to sell those, then they need to be saved as PNG files. So armed with the knowledge of what your site needs you to provide or what you decide you want to provide because that's what everybody else is doing, you can then turn around and start developing your scrapbook designs. 3. Make & Sell Scrapbook Designs - Part 2: I'm going to step you through creating a few simple background paper elements to go with an embellishment that I've already created and then we'll create the marketing materials for it. I'm going to start by opening my embellishment which is this scooter, which you might be familiar with from another one of my classes. I'm going to borrow the colors in the scooter for my patent paper. I'm going to create my pattern and for this I'm going to choose File and then New. I'm just going to create a very simple striped pattern because I have other classes on creating patterns that will show you how to make them. This class is more about the scrapbooking paper side of it than the patterns themselves. I'm going to make a document that's 200 pixels by 200 pixels in size, RGB color. The resolution itself does not matter, but it is going to be transparent and I'll click "Okay". I'm going to create a rectangle that is half the size of this document. I going to have a little bit of difficulty selecting that, so it's probably easier for me to put a guide into help. I'll choose View and then New Guide. I'm going to put a guide in at 50 percent vertical and it's halfway down the document. This is going to be much easier to line up against. I'm going to the rectangular marquee tool, I'm going to drag over this side of the document so I have my rectangle half the size of this document. Now, I'm going back to my color scooter for a minute because I want to borrow one of the colors from the scooter. I'm going to click here on the eyedropper tool and click on the green color. It now becomes the foreground color in my color swatch. This is a persistent color in the sense that when I go back to this other document, it's still the foreground color. Because it's the foreground color, I can press Alt Backspace or option Delete on the Mac to fill the selection with the color. Of course, you could always dump the color in there with the Paint Bucket tool. Now I need to select this entire paste to make my pattern from. I'll choose, Select All, and then Edit, Define Pattern and I'm going to call this green stripe and click "Okay". Now I'm ready to create my background paper. Usually, I would just trash this document, but I'm not going to this time because we're going to come back and use it again in a minute. For now I'm going to create the document that's going to be my scrapbook paper document. I'll choose File and then New. I'm going to make this 3,600 by 3,600 pixels in size because that's what the site that I sell my papers on requires. I'm going to use a resolution of 300 pixels per inch again, because that's what it requires. I'm going to choose RGB color mode because that's what it requires. If your site requires something different, put in your specifications here. If your site doesn't tell you what you need then this is a good sound file size for scrapbooking papers. I'll click Okay. Now I'm going to go ahead and add that pattern. I'm going to do it with a Fill Layer. I'm going to choose Layer, New Fill Layer, and then Pattern. I'll click Okay when I see this dialogue and the stripes are put in automatically. The reason why I use a Fill Layer is because this allows me to scale my stripes if I want to. I want this to be a bit smaller, so I'm going to type 75. Actually, a bit smaller still, 50 will be good for this. I'll click Okay. Now it's really hard to see this design, so I'm going to add a white filled lab below it. I'm going to the last palette, I'm going to Control or Command, click on the New Layer icon. A new empty layer appears below my pattern, and I'm going to fill it with white. White is my background color, so I can press Control Backspace, Command, Delete on the Mac to fill the layer with white. This is the first of my pattern layers. I'm going to call this green pattern. Now let's go and make a different stripe pattern using a color from the scooter. I'm going back to the scooter and I'm going to sample this color here. It's my foreground color. I'll go to my Pattern Pace. I'm going to select all of color here and for that I can just use the Magic Wand tool. I'll click on the Magic Wand tool, I need to deselect this selection, so I'll press Control or Command D to deselect it, and then click to select just the green color. I'll fill it with pink. I'm going to press Alt Backspace option Delete on the Mac. I'll deselect the selection with Control or Command D. Select everything by pressing Control A or choose, Select All, to just select all of this here. Edit, Define Pattern, and this will be pink stripe. I'm going back to my paper document. I'm going to turn off this layer because I don't need it right now. I'm going to choose Layer, New Fill Layer, pattern, click Okay, and I'm again going to put this in at 50 percent size and click Okay. Now I'm going back to do that step all over again. This time I'm going to sample using the eyedropper tool Again, this color. I'm deselecting the selection. I'm selecting the pink color and filling it this time with the green color. I'm going to select everything. I'm going to make this a dark green stripe pattern. I'm going back to my background paper document, Layer, New Fill Layer, Pattern, Okay, 50 percent, Click Okay. I'm going to turn the Patent Layer off, and make one last stripe pattern. Control or Command D to deselect the selection. I'm going to re-select the color that I want to replace with my yellow. I'm going to select everything and I will make this into yellow stripe. I now have all four of my striped patterns created. In the next video, we're going to go ahead and save these and then create our marketing materials. 4. Make & Sell Scrapbook Designs - Part 3: I find it really handy to build up background pages like this in a single document. It means that they'll all be eventually saved together, and if I want to come in and make alterations to them, for example, if I decide I want to make a set of background papers for this particular embellishment again, but with a larger stripe, for example, then all I need to do is to double-click on each of these thumbnails in turn, enlarge the stripe, and then everything is here and ready to save out. I'm ready now to save out these papers. I'm going to start with the yellow one. I'm turning the yellow striped layer on. I'm turning the other layers off so that they don't impact this document at all, and I'm leaving my white background layer intact. I'll choose 'File' and then 'Save As'. Now it's going into a folder all of its own, let's choose 'New Folder' and let's call this scooter paper. I'm going to save this as a JPEG image because that's what the site I sell on requires, and in fact, most sites are going to require this for scrapbook paper. If you're not sure what to use, JPEG is a really good choice. I'm using ICC Profile sRGB, that's critical because again, my site requires that to be used. I'm going to call this yellow stripe. I'll click 'Save' to save it. Now my site also requires me to use high-quality JPEGs. I'll be using something like maximum. That's a very large file size, but it's also very high-quality. My site will take really large files if you're a little bit stuck because your site won't take such large files, or if they're going to be costly for you to store, you might want to take it down to just high quality. The file size will be a little bit less and the quality will be a little bit less, but probably not highly visible to anybody anyway, but I'm going to use large file size for mine. click 'Okay'. Now that site, I'm going to go ahead and turn the yellow layer off, turn the next one on, and go and save it 'File', 'Save As', and save it as a JPEG file, here is the old file name. I'm going to borrow that. I'm just going to call this dark green stripe. Click 'Save', click 'Okay'. It's defaulting to the same settings I used last time, go ahead and save the pink one, and now the pale green. As this is my background paper document, I'll also want to save it so I may turn back on all layers, I'm going to save the original PSD file. I'm giving it a good name, it's the Scooter Stripe Papers Master File, it's going to be easy for me to identify later on and making sure that layers is selected, because I want to save all these layers in the document and I'll click 'Save'. We don't get a quality choice here because PSD files always saved the original document is no compression required. I've got my master file now saved away, I've got my scooter, which I'm going to save in a minute so it can go out with this entire project, and I've got my original pattern swatch. Now, this is a very simple pattern swatch and you might think there's no point in saving it, but what if I wanted to create another color pattern that's going to be a whole lot easier for me to use this stripe to create another pattern color for this scooter line if I want to later on, if I've got the original swatch. I tend to do this as well and save my swatches. 'File', 'Save As', again, it's going to be a PSD file, and this is good ascribe papers, pattern swatch, and click 'Save'. It's a really small documents, you're not wasting a lot of disk space by saving it, but think it's a really good idea to, just so that you can come back later if you need to make more papers with it. I can close that for now. Now, for the scooter embellishment, you can say that this has got a transparent background, and it's critical that we retain this transparent background when we sell it to somebody, because if we were to save this as a JPEG, the background would be created to be white, and if it has a white background, when you put it on top of the pattern paper, it's going to look pretty ugly. Let's just say what it would look like. I'm just going to add a new layer here and fill it with white, and I'm going to select everything. Choose 'Select', 'All', 'Edit', 'Copy Merged', because I want to copy absolutely everything here, and let's just pop it into this document with 'Edit', 'Paste', and that is what it would look like if we were to sell this scooter as a JPEG image, it just does not work. I'm just going to delete that, and back in the scooter, we're going to turn off this layer, we're going to sell it with transparency. Now, the way that you sell images with transparency, typically online is to save this as ping format files, PNG. I'm going to choose 'File', 'Save As', and going back to my scooter paper folder, I'm going to select ping as my format. Here it is here, and I'm going to call this scooter. Again, it has the same ICC profile. It's important to do that, and I'll click 'Save'. Here we are confronted with some choices, but really can just click 'Okay' to save it with the defaults. Now, that image is now a transparent background image. Just got to close this one down, and let's go and open the one we just saved so we can prove to ourselves that transparency is retained. Here it is, and you can say it's still transparent. When we take this, let's just select it all and let's copy it, and let's go and put it into master paper file. You can say that the background is transparent, it's not going to look silly when it's used as an embellishment for a piece of scrapbook paper. I don't need that right now, I'm just going to trash it. We've now got our background papers saved away the way they're supposed to be saved, and we saved our embellishment the way it's supposed to be saved, but when we put this up for sale on the web, we have to create some marketing materials to show people what it is that they're going to buy. Next up we're going to create an image that's going to showcase the elements that we're about to sell to someone. 5. Make & Sell Scrapbook Designs - Part 4: For the marketing materials for your scrapbook papers, you'll need to provide the document of the size and specification so that the site that you're selling on requires. If the site doesn't have any specifications, then typically, the white scrapbook papers are shown is as a square image with the elements all displayed in it. So that's what we're going to create here now. I'll choose File and then New. My document is going to be 500 pixels by 500 pixels, but you'd make yours whatever your site requires. This is a pretty good size document for web use, although you might want to make it a little bit bigger if you want to display it at a larger size. We're going to click OK. So here is my document. Just size that up to fill the screen. Next up, I want to get my papers, and I can put these in using File Place. So I'll choose File, and then Place Embedded. I'm going to go out and get my paper and click Place. It's placed into my image. I'm going to click the check mark here. I'm going to go and get the next one, and then the other two. Now, I want to display all four sheets of paper, so I need to rearrange them. But before I do, it would be helpful to add some guides. I'm going to choose View, New Guide, and I'm going to make one at 25 percent vertical, and I'm going to make one at 50 percent vertical. I'll make one at 75 percent, and I'm done. Next up, I'm going to move these papers around. I'm going to get the Move tool. I'm going to click on the yellow stripe paper, and I'm going to move it over. I'm going to move it so that it snaps into position along my 75 percent line here. Then I'm going to my pink stripe, and I'm going to move it across until it lines up with the 50 percent line. I'm going to the green stripe. I'm going to do the same thing, but this time to this 25 percent line. I'm just looking for my smart guides to appear too, so that this is all nicely lined up. If you have a bit of trouble with the smart guides lining up the top and bottom of these shapes, then don't worry. Once you've finished lining them up to the vertical lines, you can select over all of these layers and just click here on this icon here. It's the Align top edges. It's just going to adjust them so they're all butted up against the top edge of the document. We don't need our guides any longer so I can choose View and then Clear Guides. Now, what would be nice would be if we could see some edge effect here, because these papers are running into each other. If you want some edge effect, then you can create it. I'm going to start with this pale green stripe. I'm going to click here on the Effects icon. I'm going to choose Drop Shadow. I'm going to add a drop shadow that is on this side of the paper. Now, it's not going to be very much of a drop shadow, but just enough to distinguish the difference between these two elements. So I'll click OK. Having created the drop shadow on this layer, I can right-click it and choose Copy Layer Style. I'm going to select these other two layers. I am going to right-click and choose Paste Layer Style.That just pastes in the last style. So now we've got some visual distinction between the edges of the scrapbook backgrounds. We're going to add a banner across the middle here. I'm going to need a new layer. I'll click on the New Layer icon. I'm going to drag over this with the rectangular marquee tool, and I'm going to fill it with black. I'm just going to click on the Default Colors or press D for default, and then because black is my foreground color, I'll Backspace Option, Delete on the Mac, to fill the rectangle with black. Then here, I would add my marketing materials. I might have a logo. I may have some element that is consistent across all my designs that brands this as my design. But you can put whatever you like in here. Now the last thing we need is our scooter. I'm going to choose File and then Place Embedded. I'm going to go and get my scooter image. Now, it's come in much larger than we were expecting it. So I'm going to Shift, drag on its handles, and just move it into position, and click the check mark. Once this was all completed with my branding details, I would go ahead and then save it. I'm going to save it first of all as a PSD file, because if it needs any alteration, I need to be able to break out the elements in it. So I'm going to call it, "Scooter Stripe Papers Master File Sales Image," and I'll click Save. Then I'm going to save it as a JPEG image because that's how it's going to go up on the web: File, Save As, this time, I'm going to choose JPEG as the format, and it's going to be "Scooter Stripe Papers." It's not a master file any longer because this is actually a compressed JPEG. Sales image, sRGB, because going to the web, click Save. For the web, it doesn't need to be such high-quality, because this is only an image that's going to sell a product. It's not the product itself that somebody has paid for and downloading. I'll click OK. So now we've got the basic bits and pieces. The last thing to do is to go and put all of these together in a Zip file. In most cases, people will download a Zip file that has everything in it. So let's go and open up Windows Explorer and see how we'd do that. 6. Make & Sell Scrapbook Designs - Part 5: Here we are in Windows Explorer and this is the folder of images that has not only the scrapbook papers that I'm going to sell and the embellishment, but also the marketing materials and my original PSD files. To create the zip file, which is the way that people will typically download your images is zipped into a single file, I'm going to click on the first one and control-click on each of the papers, and the embellishment. On a Mac, you would click on the first one and command-click on everything that you want to put in your zip file. We won't be putting our marketing materials in there because we are not selling those. The other thing that we're going to use to sell on, but we're not selling it per se, I'm going to right-click, and on my PC I'm going to choose "Send to", "Compressed (Zipped) Folder". On a Mac, you would right-click and there's a compression option there on the shortcut menu. I'm going to rename this. So this is the zip file that I'm going to upload to this site that I sell on in the manner that they tell me to upload it. Of course, if they need special file names, you'll need to make sure that you comply with those requirements as well. Then this is the marketing materials that you'll upload into the portion of the site where you upload images with photos or images like this that show people what it is that they're going to buy. We're not doing that part of it because it's going to depend on the site that you're working on. What we came here to do was to show you how to create patterns, how to put your marketing materials together, and how to zip everything up so that would be all ready to go ahead and sell. Your project for this class is going to be to do exactly as I have done and to create four background papers and an embellishment that has some transparency built into it. Using those, you are going to create your marketing image. It'll be the marketing image that you'll upload as your class project. Of course, you're free to create more than four background papers, and more than one embellishment. But think of that as a minimum that you need to do so you get some good practice with putting it all together into your marketing materials. I'm really looking forward to seeing what you come up with. I hope that you've enjoyed this course and that you've learned quite a bit about creating scrapbook designs for sale in Photoshop. If you did enjoy this course and when you see a prompt to recommend this class to others, please do so. 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.