Photoshop Workflows - Editorial Design

1. Introduction Editorial design: Welcome to the most hands on photoshop course you've ever seen. This isn't your typical feature tour. We are diving straight into exciting creative projects, and you are encouraged to create completely unique designs. This time, we will be working on an editorial design project, specifically, creating some visual assets for a magazine spread. First, we will be working on this exciting composition for the drop cap, the letter N, combining multiple images together. Then we will create the smaller composition, which we will use as an additional image on the other side of the spread. And finally, we will put everything together using Adobe in design. Whether you are an aspiring graphic designer, photographer, marketer, or simply an individual with a passion for visual storytelling, mastering photoshop provides you with the tools to bring your visions to life. This course is perfect for you if you are new to photoshop, or if you are self told and any to get more confident and effective using it. I am Martin Purina, a certified Adobe expert and instructor, with a design background spanning over two decades. Throughout my career, I collaborated with renowned clients such as Disney, Mattel, Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, and BBC. Learn to use photoshops latest features together with the fundamental building blocks, like layers, adjustments, selections, transformations, masking, smart objects brushes, and so much more. You can also future proof your skills by mastering photoshops amazing generative AI features. I am not just teaching photoshop. I am empowering you to express yourself, tell your story, and create designs that resonate with your unique style. This is your chance to create work that is truly personal and worthy of your professional creative portfolio. You can follow along with each project and replicate my designs, or you can use the workflows and techniques I show you and create something completely different and unique. So are you ready to revolutionize the way you learn photoshop? Your creative adventure with Photoshop starts right here. Oh. 2. Adding the main character for the Drop Cap composition: The first design that we will create is the Drop cap, which is going to be the main feature on the magazine spread. And for this, I'm going to create a blank new document in Photoshop. 2,500 by 2,500 pixels should be high resolution enough. Resolution I set to 72 PPI, and I set this to RGB color mode. And then let's create this new blank document. So we will be working from scratch here, and we will place in all the images. But the main component or container for this composition is a character. And in my case, because of the title of the magazine, is going to start with the word nature, the first letter is going to be n. Now, I'm using the Havits font, which you can find in the Mill Note board and you can download it. It's a free font. But of course, you can choose any other fonts that you prefer. The reason I like to work with this one is because it's really thick and bulky, but I also like these nice rounded corners. So it makes it a bit more approachable, even though it's quite dense and heavy. And of course, it's a sunsey font, so there are no serifs on it, which again, makes it easier to create these type of compositions. Now, if this is the first time that you are using the type tool, you can find it here in the toolbar, and you just simply have to press anywhere on the canvas and then type in what you need. In this case, I type in n. And then from the control bar, which you can find here on the top. In case you don't see it, make sure you go to the window menu and choose options. So from here, you can choose the phones that's currently installed on your computer. And in case you are using a font often, you can even mark it as a favorite. And that way, you can filter your favorites much faster, so you can find them quicker. Once you choose your font and you typed in what you need, you can accept these changes with this icon here, or press Commando Control Enter. And that way, this text layer is created for you. You can see it here on the right side. With the move tool, you can move the layer around. And with the free transform tool, which is commando Control T, you can very quickly resize your text layers. Whenever you are done with the transformation, just press Enter to accept the changes. Let me jump back to my larger layer, which I prepared here. And I'm actually going to change the color of this soon, but for now, I'm going to keep it this darker green. We will actually keep it completely white eventually once we have enough elements inside it and around it. 3. Creating a Clipping Mask - Portrait: The first element I would like to bring in is the main image, which is this portray of a man. I am going to drag this into Photoshop, drop it in here, and then press enter to accept the placement. Whenever you drag and drop an image into photoshop, it automatically becomes a smart object. The first thing I would like to do is to use the contextual Tis bar and choose select subject. This bar, by the way, most likely will appear under the image by default, but I like to move it out of the way, and you can even pin this tis bar wherever you want it to appear. So I'm going to keep it up here. So I'm going to choose select subject, and that is going to create a very good selection, maybe apart from these very fine hair details here, but that is not going to be necessary for this composition anyway. I am going to click on the mask icon now. Turn this selection into a layer mask. And then we are ready to place this into our composition. I am going to drag it here on the right, and I would like his head to come out of the character slightly, something like that. I think that works actually quite nicely, so I will leave it here, but now I'm going to use a very useful feature called clipping mask. Notice how we have these two layers on top of each other. So we have the text layer, and then on top of it, there's the man. And what you need to do is to hold down the alar option key and click directly between these two layers. So imagine there is an edge there. You have to make sure your cursor is there. And while you are holding down the altar option key, the cursor will change. And this special cursor indicates that we are creating a clip. So what happened here is that the image on top will only be visible inside the layer underneath, which is the text layer. So the boundaries of the text layer became a temporary special mask, which we call clipping mask. The great thing about this is that I can move this image above around and I can reposition it easily. But I could even change the text itself. If I double click on the thumbnail of that text layer, I could select it and maybe change it to R, for instance. So it's a completely non destructive workflow. What I would like to do here is even though I would like to constrain some parts of this portray inside the text, there should still be some important details extending beyond the texts outline. And to be able to do that, I am going to duplicate the image, so that's command or Control J. Now we have two instances of the same image, and this duplicate that we created is by default, not clipped onto the text layer. As you can see, there is a little arrow indicating here that this one is being clipped while this other one is just completely free. Now, make sure you don't move this around because then you will end up having placement issue. So make sure that it's kept exactly where the other layer is. But now what we will do is to select the layer mask for this one. And using the brush tool with a large hard edge brush. I am going to paint over using black as my foreground color on all of those areas, which I don't want to extend beyond the original outline. So I feel like that looks great. However, I don't want to conceal too much of the original outline. And I feel like we could easily remove this section here as well and still have a good visibility of the portray. But now we can also see the character itself much better. Maybe one thing that we can do is to have this feather be more visible and extend beyond the outline. And to be able to do that, I will stick to using the brush tool and the layer mask for this t uplicate layer. But this time I'm going to paint with white. For this, I'm going to press x on the keyboard, and I will change the brush size, either with the square brackets on the keyboard or the control option, click and drag technique. That we used in other projects already, which is control all right click and drag on PC. So once you have the white color as your foreground color set up, you can start painting and reveal any details that we hid in the original mask. So I would like this feather to be visible again. I am going to extend it out. And it actually cuts off here, so we will have to be clever about this. I'm going to press X again on the keyboard and paint over the edges, and I will paint over these details here. This I am using my stylus, which makes it a little bit easier to create these more natural organic lines or outlines. Painting over the edges a little bit more here. And then I'll do the same thing on the left side. When you use a stylus, you can create selections almost like the way you would draw or shade. When you have a pencil and a paper. This makes it much easier to create these organic outlines, and make your selections more realistic, much faster with less effort. And like I said, to be able to get rid of this harsh edge that we have here at the bottom, I'm going to create an outline, make it feel like the feather was ending here, something like that. Maybe make my brush a little bit smaller. Add a little bit more visual interest in it here. So no one knows what the exact feather was in the original image. So we can be more creative creating some imperfections on it like. If I feel like I took too much away, I can press x on the keyboard and draw it back. Feel like that looks very realistic now. Maybe we can just paint away a little bit more in some sections here around the edges. Again, just adding a few imperfections on both sides. As long as the general shape works, we can have these little details added. I think that looks great. Maybe here a little bit more, we can remove from the strong edge. All right. Let's zoom back and see how that looks. I think that looks great. And maybe now it's time to change the color of our text. So first of all, I'm going to delete the background layer, select it, and then press back space, and then click on the adjustments icon at the bottom of the layer spanel and choose solid color. This is going to create a blank new layer. And this layer I'm going to set up to be maybe gray, like a midtone gray value, neutral color, and drag it all the way at the bottom. Now we can double click on the text layers thumbnail and change the color of this from the control bar here on the top to white and click Okay. Also accept these changes by clicking on the commit icon here on the top. 4. Adding more assets - Stone and fox: Okay, now we can move on to add some additional details. Let's bring in another image. This time, I am going to bring in the rock. So let's drop that in here. And I don't want this to be clipped, so I am going to drag this all the way to the top of the composition and drag it down here. Now, this sometimes can happen that depending on which layer was selected, You might end up losing your clipping, which was created between these two layers. So we just have to go back and hold down Alter Option key, click there again to create that once more. So that was an easy fix. We can select the rock image. And like before, we need to separate this from its original background. You can either use remove background or select subject from the contextual task bar. Let's just try remove background, thing that worked really nicely. And the good thing about this is that it automatically also adds this as a mask. So it saves you one step compared to the select subject feature. Zoom a little bit closer. And while the layer mask is selected, I'm going to use the brush tool and just paint over a little bit around here. I feel like these details are not necessary. Just tidy up around the edge a bit. There's a few additional details there, maybe this one here on the right, and I feel like that is looking good. Here, I can see a bit of a soft edge, and that for a rock is not the best. So I'm going to use again the brush tool and create a shape that I prefer for this rock. Something like that. That's much better, much neater edge. And for the soft edges that we have here at the bottom, we can actually use the refined mask option. So double click on the mask thumbnail. And here we can change the view to be on black, for instance. And with the refine edge brush tool, we can just paint over this section here. Maybe anywhere else, we see the moth, maybe there as well a bit. I feel like that's enough. Maybe a little bit of a detail here on the right. We can refine, and then we can click Okay. Now we can move the rock here at the bottom of the left side of the character. And I'm going to use the free transform tool on this commando Control T and drag it down and set it up somewhere around here, right at the bottom. So I try to align the bottom to the original baseline of this character, and I think I can make it maybe slightly bigger. Let's just increase the size a bit. And then can move it down. I can use the arrow keys on the keyboard to align it better. Yes, I think there is going to work nicely. I can move it to the left a little bit. And then let's accept this transformation. That looks good. It doesn't interfere too much into the outline of the character, so it's still recognizable. And now we can bring in another image. This time, I'm going to use this fox. So let's just drop that in here. And this fox is going on the rock. So I will make it smaller. And then use again, the remove background option from the contextual Taz bar. And I think that did a brilliant job. It looks great. I just tested here on the gray background, even on the softer edges like the tail. I think it did a brilliant job. So now we can use the free transform tool and make it smaller. Now, one thing worth mentioning, when you are resizing up and down quite a lot, so radically making something smaller or bigger while using a smart object. You should also pay attention to the mask, whether it's inside the smart object or outside. Just to show you what happens, I I have my original mask created with this size, when we look at the quality of the masque or the outline by alter Option clicking on the masque thumbnail, we can see that it's fairly detailed, and it looks quite good. But then if I resize this layer with the free transform tool and make it much much smaller, something like that, then I resize it again, so scale it up with the free transform tool. Notice what happens around the edges. The layer mask itself wasn't preserved within the smart object. So when I accept this change, the edge detail is going to be really bad. So if I alter option, click on the mask again, you can see what happened here. So while the image itself was a smart object, the layer mask was outside the smart object, meaning that it couldn't preserve the quality of it while I was changing the size back and forth with the free transform tool. So to avoid this happening, I'm going to undo a few steps. So what we need to do here is to right click on this layer and choose convert to smart object. Even though it's already a smart object, this is going to preserve the quality of the mask as well. So you can see that the thumbnail of this layer is now showing transparency, which means that now the mask is also going to work perfectly, even when I do this, resizing down and then increasing the scale again. You can see that the edge details are just as good as it was originally. This is an important technique worth remembering. And in case I need to change anything on the mask, I can just double click on the layer thumbnail, and then I can still access the mask inside. So I will just close this document now and move the fox down here. Let's make it smaller, probably something around that size, can make it a little bit even smaller. Yeah, something like that. I feel like that looks quite good. So I created the detail again that comes out of the original silhouette of the character, the N, but I feel like it's not distracting too much from it. So it's still legible or recognizable. 5. Using Select & Mask workspace - Tree: Now, I am going to bring in another bigger element. This time. This is going to be the pine tree. So let's just drag and drop that in here. And this one is a little bit more trickier to separate from its background. Because if I just choose remove background, you will see that there's quite a lot of white details still kept inside. Now, in case you want to make this perfect, you can go through a couple of additional steps, but I like to always keep things more in a draft state until I'm 100%, I'm going to use something. So in this case, I'm going to drag this here and see whether it's going to look good. I will move it down in the layer structure below the FC and maybe use the free transform tool to make it slightly bigger. Something like that. Let's place it here. I actually want this to be aligned to the original edge of the character n, somewhere around there. And for this, I'm going to select the boulder and make it a little bit bigger just so it can connect better to the tree and maybe move it down at the same time. Yes, I think that works quite nicely. Now I can see some of these wide details coming outside here. And of course, if we were to use a different color on the character, it would also show up there. So let's just fix the edges a bit. By double clicking on the layer masks thumbnail, we can go back into the select and mask work area. The view I still keep on on black and the opacity I have it set to 50%. This way, I can really nicely preview what is happening here. And using the refine edge tool, I can paint over the edges very quickly. So I will try to eliminate all these white details. We have soft edges all around here, so I want to make sure that I go over all of them. On the left side as well. I avoid painting over the trunk of the tree that should stay solid. And I feel like this is looking already much better. But there is one additional thing I'm going to do here, and that is the decontaminate colors option. When I turn that on, it's going to help to maintain that nice, rich, green color that we originally had here. And maybe just one additional thing. I'm going to use the selection tool within the toolbar. And just to make sure we are not losing any details of the trunk, I just paint over a bit that part. Also here at the bottom, just to make sure that stays solid and also here in the middle. I want that to be solid. Okay? I feel like that looks great already. So let's click. And by the way, whenever you have the decoontaminate colors turned on, you can adjust the amount of that. Sometimes maybe a little bit less than 100% is enough. 60 70% is already good in this case, and the result that is going to be generated should be set up as a new layer with a layer mask. And once you click, you will see this new layer here. So we can actually delete the original layer in this case. I'm not going to work with that anymore. However, don't forget to turn your new layer that was created into a smart object because now that is just a normal layer. So I right click on this and convert to smart object. This way, I can move this around easily. I can see that the selection is beautiful, but I actually like to keep it here where I wanted to set it up originally. Now, I feel like the tree can be a little bit smaller, so I'm going to use the free transform tool. Something like that, and maybe we can move it up a bit and also the fox can go higher just to get everything in place. Yeah, I feel like that looks good. 6. Refining layer masks - Feather and owl: Now I'm going to bring in another feather. I actually would like to have another detail coming out of the frame here at the bottom. For this, I have another image. I am going to double click on this to open it as a separate document because I only need one of these feathers. I actually like this feather a lot. So I will use the rectangular marquee tool and make a big selection on this feather right there, and then press Commando Control C to copy it, then close this document. And then in our composition, I use Commando Control V to paste this image in. Now, we can do the usual remove background option on this. And let's see how that turns out. It's quite good. I can just fix some details on here. By double clicking on the layer mask. We can use our refined edge tool, paint over the edges a bit, where we have the soft details, and I think we will have a much better result, especially here at the bottom. There was a lot of detail missing. And I feel like that is looking much better already. Can have some soft details here on the top as well. And then we can click to accept these changes. And if we alter option, click on the layer mask, the only thing I notice is that some of these white dots disappeared or became see through, and that something that I'm going to fix quickly with the brush tool, just painting over them with white is one quick way of fixing it. And if you want to avoid any transparency within the feather itself, there is a very useful tool for this, the Doug tool, you can find in the toolbar. And if you set the range to highlights. So out of the three options, you want to use highlights and the exposure to be around 30%, you can paint over your selection and very quickly refine it. So inside, there shouldn't be any gray details because white shows black heights. That's a much better result already. And similarly, if you see a bit of a halo outside of the feather, that shouldn't be there. That can be eliminated by using the opposite version of this tool, which is called burn tool. That should be set to shadows for the range. Exposure again, can be set to around 30%. And then just click a couple of times around the edge where you see most of that halo that I mentioned, maybe a little bit more here on the right as well. Now we have a much neater edge for the selection. And maybe I'm going to use the Dodge tool a little bit more here on the top. Now alter option click on the layer mask. We can jump back to seeing the actual image itself. So let's move this over here and just testing how this works. I feel like the edge looks good now. So it's time to turn this into a smart object, right click and choose convert to Smart object. And we can turn it around with the free transform tool and align it here to the other feather. Maybe something like that. We can may make it a little bit smaller than the other feather. And feel like we can make it look like it's aligned here. Maybe rotate it a little bit more line there. I feel like that looks good, and even from a distance, it looks good. It doesn't distract from the outline of the letter. Now maybe we can bring in another animal, just to make things more interesting. I will bring in this owl, drag and drop it into photoshop, place it all the way to the top of the composition, and then use the removed background option to separate it. I noticed that although the selection looks good, we have some issues here with these feathers, and in some cases, it's just easiest to fix this with the brush tool. So I'm going to quickly paint over them using white as my four grand color, making sure that I'm working on the layer mask and just paint over these details quickly. So there we have this feather, another feather. Another one, and then maybe these whit details here, we can remove it painting over with black. I'm not going to spend too much time on this because it's going to be such a small detail. I don't think anyone will notice. Of course, if you are perfectionist, you can really be pixel perfect with your selection. I am actually happy with the way this looks already, so I'm going to turn this into a smart object. Again, remember, because we want to maintain the quality of the mask. So I right click on this and choose convert to smart object. And then let's resize it. Drag it all the way down here. I want this to be here in the corner, b even smaller, something like that. Align it to the edge can be slightly in front of the tree. And to make things more interesting, we can actually clip this also to the outline of the character. So I drag it all the way down here and notice as soon as I placed it above the text layer, because there is already a clipping mask created there, this automatically also becomes part of that clipping group. So the l now is only visible inside the outline of that text layer. But I will duplicate this once again, alter option, drag it all the way up to the top. Then add a layer mask on it. This is an additional layer mask, not the one that we use for the selection itself. And now I will just zoom a bit closer and paint over the tail feathers. Which will help us create the illusion that the owl is coming outside of the frame. So the tails that are further away are still inside that frame, but the wings are now spreading outside of it. So it's a nice out of bounds effect, a bit similar to what we created here with the portrait, but on a smaller scale. Last, but not least, I would like to also have some watercolor details as a backdrop for this text layer. So I'm going to bring in one of these. I quite like this green one, so I drag and drop this in here and drag it all the way at the bottom below the layer. And just like before, this automatically becomes part of that clipping group. So I can move this around and you can see how it appears only inside the text layers boundaries. So I want a detail here, which is going to be stronger. I just use the free transform tool, make this a little bit bigger. Something like that. Then I'm going to hold down the alter option key and drag this here on the right, just to create another version of this. And to avoid overlapping between the two layers, I will change the blend mode of this one to multiply. I didn't even bother creating a selection here. Since these details are only appearing in the background. I think this is enough to work with. Yeah, just a little bit of blue green detail there at the bottom. And then I'm going to create another copy, drag it up to the top, and again, find a good placement for it here. Maybe something like that that looks quite nice. Can also have some additional color here on the top left. Again, I'm using the free transform tool on this additional duplicate layer. And again, I would like to highlight those edges, because what I'm going to do now is to change the background color of this composition to white. And here, I rely on a design principle called closure, which means that even when something is not completely continuous, our mind will close those gaps and be able to recognize something as a unified shape. So in this case, even though we have some visible gaps here in some parts, so the outline is not continuous. As long as we've done a good job, not interrupting the shape too much, the viewer will be able to recognize what they are looking at. I feel like it works really well, so we can turn off the background layer and save it like this because this is the way we will need it in the in design document at the end. So let's save our work as a photoshop file, and now we can move on creating the other smaller compositions that we will need for our spread. 7. Creating additional compositions: I'm going to start with another blank document exactly with the same values as before. It can be slightly smaller if you want, but there is no harm having a higher resolution format. So I will create this, again, a square format. And first, I am going to use the ellipse tool out of the shape tools, and I make sure that it is set to shape mode here in the control bar. Then we can hold down the shift key and draw a perfect circle. This is going to be filled in with a color, which we can easily change by double clicking on the thumbnail in the layer span. I'm just going to change it to something more neutral for now. I feel like that looks good. And now I'm going to drag and drop this landscape image on top of this circle. Holding down the alter option key, I increase its size a bit. And then I will create a clipping mask just like in the previous composition, by holding down alter option key, click between the two layers. Now, this image is placed inside the circle. I actually want it to be almost symmetrical, and that's why I like this image because we have the mountain here in the middle, and then we have this deep in the forest, which looks quite good, so almost symmetrical. But I don't want the sky details and that mountain in the background. So I will try to hide those. Having this layer selected, we can try to go to the select menu and choose sky selection. Which most of the time will do a good job selecting the sky. And we can extend this selection by using the Quick Selection tool, which is like a brush. We can increase the brush size and just paint over a bit more these mountains here. Maybe tap one more time there, and I feel like we got a really good edge now. We can actually leave these details here or maybe select those as well and remove them. I think that's a good selection there. But before we turn this into a mask, I am going to click on the invert selection icon here in the contextual task bar, and then click on the mask. Because remember, whenever you use the mask option, whatever is inside the selection will be kept visible, and everything else will be hidden away. So in this case, we were selecting the sky at first. But then we inverted the selection because we wanted to keep the mountain and the forest visible. The good news is that even if you forget that last step, you can always invert the colors of the mask, select the layer mask thumbnail and press commando Control I. So that does the same thing, and you can go back and forth flipping the colors around. Now I'm going to change the color of the circle to white. So I double click on the thumbnail. And set it to white then click Okay. Now we just need one additional image. I'm going to double click on the Bird's image, and I'm going to make a quick selection with the eso tool around this bird. I believe it's an eagle or some kind of birds of prey. So there's the selection there, and I press Command or Control C to copy this and close this document, and here I'm going to paste it in, but before I do that, I make sure that the layer on top is highlighted. This way, when this new layer is pasted in, it's not going to end up inside that clipping mask. So now we just have to separate this from its background. So I will click on Remove Background, and we can see that it's done a good job apart from some minor details here, which we can fix very quickly with the brush tool. I just have to make sure I have white as my foreground color so that way I can reveal these details again that were hidden by the moss was created. And when you have details that are along a straight edge, you can also use this technique, just click once with the mouse, and then hold down the shift key and click again on the other side. This way you can create these straight shapes very easily. That essentially connects the two points that you create. So now we have a much better selection there, and we can turn this layer into a smart object to preserve the quality of the mask. So right click on the layer, convert to smart object, and then reduce the size with the free transform tool. I would like to have this somewhere around here. And again, I love this image because it just reinforces the symmetry in this composition. So we have almost like a V shape with the wings and accept the transformation. And actually, I think that's all we needed to do here. So we can just delete the background layer and save this as another photoshop file. I'm going to call it circular comp. And last but not least. I am going to open this second landscape image. Which I will use at the bottom of the magazine spread. And here, all we have to do is to use the sky selection option. So go up to the select menu, choose Sky, which should create a really good selection already. We don't even have to do anything about it. Just simply invert the selection, and then turn it into a mask. And save this also as a photoshop file. So just go to File menu, save S, and from the format, make sure that you have photoshop selected. And I'm just going to call this Mountains. So now we have all of them ready. It's time to bring them into in design. 8. Putting everything together in Adobe InDesign: Now, for this part of the project in case, you don't have a DBN design, you can just use the exported JPEG and actually put the composition together within Photoshop. And the end result will look very similar to what I'm going to do here. Maybe apart from some of the text wrap features that we will utilize. But first of all, I'm going to make sure I'm working on the images layer. So I have that already prepared here. In case you don't see your layers, just go to the window menu and choose layers, and then go to the Pi menu and choose play, so press commando Control D. First, I'm going to select the main composition. Let's drop that in here on the top left. And I'm going to drop into this, so we just have a little bit less empty space around it, something like that. Maybe a little bit more. Simply just dragging the edges. I can do that. And the holding then command shift, the control shift on the keyboard. I can increase the size of this until it fits the composition. And let's just zoom a little bit closer. I already have a ruler here so I can align to that. So the baseline of this text is aligned to the baseline of that intro paragraph. I feel like that is looking good already. Maybe we can just move it slightly to the left. Something like that. Now, it's important that we need to remove this first character because we don't want it to be repeated. Since this is supposed to function as a drop cap, so it's like a large initial of the title. So now it reads as nature, having the first letter here on the left. Nature's prescription is the main title. I feel like that works quite nicely. Maybe we can make this a little bit even bigger. There is space here for it to be bigger and then just align it a bit more at the bottom, like that. And maybe it can come a little bit closer as well on the right. So let's take a closer look. Okay. I feel like slightly to the left will work better. And now we can drop in our other composition we created, so we go to the place command again, and then we choose the circular comp, which I will click and drag to place here on the right side of the spread. Again, I'm going to make this bigger command or control shift drag to enlarge it, maybe a little bit even more, something like that. And now what we can do is to go to the window menu, choose text wrap, And within this panel, I will use the third option, the wrap around object shape, and the type, I'm going to choose Alpha channel, which relies on the transparency in the composition. And we can just increase the offset to make the legibility better. Something around 7 millimeters, I think will work well. So we can see how the copy is being pushed to the right. I probably will move this a little bit further to the left, so it doesn't interrupt the flow of the text too much. Now, whenever you use this type of feature, you want to make sure that you apply it on the side of the text where it's aligned to because that's when you get these nice even edges, which follows the shape of the image better. Just to show you, if I were to put this image here on the left side, where the text has a ragged edge. So again, it's aligned to the left, on the right. We don't have that even edge. It's not going to be as effective or it's not going to be that interesting compared to what we could create here on the right. Last but not least, let's place in the mountains, which again is saved as a separate photoshop file. I will click and drag here at the bottom. And then I'm going to just move it a little bit higher. Like that. And from the transform controls in the property s panel, I reveal the flip horizontal option with which I can have it set up like this. I feel like it feels in the bottom part of the composition much better. And there we have all of the three details we created placed into in design, and it's just time to add the finishing touches. Some additional little images, similar elements that we used in our composition will tie everything nicely together. 9. Creating a mockup with the final spread design: Now to really be able to showcase our hard work that we put into this project, let's turn the final design into a beautiful mockup. For this, I have the perfect template here already in Photoshop. You can find this file in the Exercise five folder, magazine mock up template PSD file, which will have two smart objects, one for the right side of the magazine that's on top, and the other one is for the left side. So we will need two separate J packs to be able to bring in our final composition from in design. In case you put them together in photoshop, you can just copy them directly from there. But I'm going to jump back into in design and go to the Fi menu, choose Export, or Press commando Control E. And then here I will choose Format JPEG, choose Save, and then make sure that I have the export set to all end pages. The quality should be 300 PPI already, which will give us good high resolution output. Now we can jump back into photoshop and double click on the first smart objects thumbnail. So this is the right side of the magazine. We open this up. Now we can find those JPEGs on our computer. So let's choose the right side and drag and drop it in here. And notice that the SPEC ratio is slightly different, but no problem. We can just hold down the shift key and drag this down to the bottom and then perhaps enter to accept the transformation. Because the mockup is in perspective, this distortion is not going to be noticeable. Don't worry about it. Let's just go to the file menu save these changes and then close the Smart object to see it already in the mocap itself. Let's repeat these steps on the other Smart object. Double click on the thumbnail, open that up, and then drop the other image in here. Again, holding down the shift key, we can drag the top and then the bottom out and press enter to accept the changes, file, save, and then close to have the final composition put together. And it's ready to go directly into your creative portfolio. I hope you had fun with this project, and in case you followed everything exactly the same way that I created or what you can see right now on the screen. Then in that case, I would recommend to go back to the beginning of this project and try to work with different images, create different elements, different composition, and even in in design, come up with a slightly different layout, if you want to, to create something completely unique using the same techniques that we covered. Just remember to experiment, have fun, and create something amazing in photoshop. 10. Conclusion: Well done for finishing this course. I hope you had just as much fun going through it as I had recording it. And of course, don't forget about the class project. Because remember, practice makes perfect. I can't wait to see your work, so make sure to submit it. And in case you like this course, and you would like to learn more from me, then there's plenty of other courses that you can find here. Go ahead check them out now. I can't wait to meet you in the next one.