Transcripts
1. Prepare Images for Social Media, Blog posts, eBooks and more - Introduction: Hello. I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this graphic design for lunch class, preparing images for social media and blogs 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 preparing images for blog posts, Instagram and more in Photoshop. We'll look at how you can obtain the images that you'll be using for social media, blog posts, and even books, including how to take photographs of your computer or phone screen. You'll see how to crop and size your images appropriately for the destination that they're targeted towards. You'll see how to add annotations, how to close up excess spacing in an image, and how to stitch two screenshots together to make one long image. By the time you've completed this course, you'll know how to prepare images so they look great and they inform your audience. Now I'll be using Photoshop CC 2018 for this video, but the technique shown here are applicable to pretty much any version of Photoshop. As you're watching these videos, you will see a prompt which will ask if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you are enjoying the class and learning from it, would you do two things for me. Firstly, answer yes, that you do recommend the class, and secondly, write even in just a few words, about why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help other students to see that this is the class that they too might enjoy and learn from. Now, if you see the follow link on the screen, click it to keep up to date with my new classes as they're released. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now, let's get started preparing images for blog posts, Instagram and more in Photoshop.
2. Pt 1 What this class will cover: Before we open Photoshop and get started, let's have a quick look at some of the things that we'll be doing in this video. This is a Lightroom e-book that I wrote. One of the images here is obviously a screen capture. But this mouse pointer here has been added after the image has been captured. You would also never see a Lightroom image at this size, placed immediately opposite the part of the Lightroom Develop module that we're actually focusing on. What I did was take a much larger image and then paste the things back together again so that the elements that I wanted to draw attention to were directly opposite each other in a nice small space, rather than having an image which took up half a page. Nobody looking at this image is going to say, "That's not what Lightroom looks like." It's close enough, but it's a better presentation of the information in a really small space. Let's have a look at a blog post. Here I've got a screen capture. I've used a swash to draw attention to the command that's most appropriate. You're going to learn how to do that in this class as well. Let's have a look at this site because we're actually going to be using this. This page on free stock image website is absolutely huge. There's obviously over 40 sites here. What if we wanted to show people a representative sample of the images that are accessible here. If I wanted to use, for example, two or three pages of these images, how am I going to screenshot that? Well, I'll show you how you can take a couple of screenshots of two successive pages and then stick them together in Photoshop so that they look as if they're screenshot of a single-page. We're going to see how to do that. Finally, let's go to Photoshop and I have an image here that I use on my YouTube channel to advertise my Skillshare classes. Now if you go to my profile on Skillshare, you'll never see it looking exactly like this. It looks pretty much like this, but not exactly. Now the reason for this is that I've created this image by putting together a series of screenshots. This is one screenshot showing some of my classes. Then I put the extra bits around the edge and then I cover it up with this bit at the bottom. Finally, I neatened up the scroll bar here. These little elements all go together to create a single image that looks pretty much like it did on Skillshare, but it's just a lot native for my purposes where I want to give a lot of information to my viewers and not have a whole lot of ancillary information on the screen that I don't actually need. That's a general roundup of the things that we'll be doing. Of course, also looking at making sure to size these images and save them in formats that are appropriate for wherever it is that they're headed to.
3. Pt 2 Capture Screenshots on a Windows PC: Quite often the content that you want for social media or for a book, for example, will come from the web and so it helps to be able to create screenshots. A screenshot is just a picture of what it is that you see on the screen. Now if you're operating a Windows machine, there's a key on your keyboard that is Print Screen or PrtScr, something like that and if you press it, you're going to take a picture of whatever it is that's on your screen. Now I've just done just that. I'm going to Photoshop and when I choose File and then New, Photoshop is going to know that there's something on what's called the Windows Clipboard. That capture of the screen has been copied to the Windows clipboard and Photoshop is going, there's something on the clipboard. Maybe you want a document that is that size, so it's defaulting to that size. When you choose File New, just click Create because Photoshop is helping you along here and then all you do is choose Edit and then paste and that pastes in whatever it was that you took a photo of. Now, give me a second to reset my screen and I'm going to show you a different way of taking a screenshot in a different circumstance. What I have here is my Microsoft Word window open over the top of my Photoshop screen. Now when you've got stacked windows like this on a Windows machine, sometimes you may want to just take a picture of the topmost object, not everything. Well, for that you can hold down the Alt key and tap the Print Screen key. Now let's go back to Photoshop and see what that gives us. This time that Clipboard is much smaller. It's not 1920 by 1080, which is my screen size. It's much smaller. I'll create a document that is that size and then choose Edit and then paste and you can see this time we're only pasting in the Word screen. We haven't brought in that entire Photoshop screen. Print screen and Alt print screen are the two keys that you really need to know on a Windows computer. There's also a tool called the Snipping Tool. Now, this is shipped with Windows and it's still in Windows 10. I'm not using Windows 10 here, but it's been in versions since Vista forward and it's still there. When you click on the Snipping Tool, the entire screen gets grayed out and then you can just drag over the area that you're interested in capturing. Let's just capture this piece of the screen. The Snipping Tool operates a little bit differently to the Print Screen key because it actually gives you your image in an interface here and if you want to save it, you can save it from here. If you want to take it to, for example, Photoshop, then here you'll click on the copy and that makes a copy of this. Now let's go to Photoshop. Let's choose File New and this time we'll have an even smaller clipboard because the image itself is much smaller. I'll click Create and now let's choose Edit and then paste and now we've pasted in this image element from the Windows snip interface. You can capture multiples, you just click New and that'll get rid of the existing one and you can go ahead and do a new one. It's also got some annotation tools that are quite handy to use. Although we're going to look at how we annotate inside Photoshop. That's how you do it on a PC. In the next video, we're going to have a look at doing this on a Mac because things are bit different there.
4. Pt 3 Screen Capture on a Mac: I'm over here now on my Mac and I'm going to show you how to take two different types of screenshots. Now there are lots of keyboard combinations that you can use on a Mac. But I'm going to teach you two of them because I think that anymore is probably way too many to try and learn at one point if you're not already familiar with doing this. The first one is, how do you take a screenshot of the entire screen? You're going to hold down the command key and the shift key and press the number 3. When you do that, you're going to hear a camera click. That's telling you that your Mac has taken a shot of the screen and there's, this shot has now been saved on your computer. I have mine set to save to the desktop, and that is the default. If you've changed that setting, for example, then you'll need to go to wherever it is that you've saved them too. But let's go to my desktop. Here are the screenshots that I'd been taking with that keyboard shortcut, that command, shift three. Now there's a second one that we can use. The second one is Command Shift 4. So it's very similar, but with Command Shift 4, you can actually select the area that you want to take the screenshot of. So I'm going to hold down command and Shift and press the number 4. I get this little crosshair cursor. So I'm going to click and drag from the top corner all over the way down to the bottom corner here, and as soon as I let go, the left mouse button, I'm going to take a picture of just that area of the screen. Let's go back to the desktop and let's have a look and see this is the image that I just captured. It's much smaller image because it doesn't have the other excess content around it. So there are two shortcut keys that you can use on the Mac. One for taking the whole screen and the other one for taking just a portion of the screen.Unlike Windows, when you do it on a Mac, if you just use those two commands, it's going to be automatically saved for you so you don't have to go ahead and do that yourself. I think those are the two key strokes that are the most useful, although there are other keystrokes. That, for example, copy the image to the Mac clipboard and you can do something with it then. But I think the safest one is to learn the one where the MAC is doing most of the work for you. Now in some instances, of course, the content that you want will come from your phone. So to take images, for example, from an iPhone, then you're going to hold the power button that's on the right side of the iPhone and click the home button that the exact same time to take a screen shot. You can do it on an iPad. So on an iPad, again, you're going to be pressing the on-off button and quickly click on the home button at the same time to take your screenshot. How you do it on an Android device is going to depend on the Android device that you're using. So quickly Google that work out how to take a screenshot from your device. Generally, those screenshots will be saved automatically to your photos collection, which then makes it easy for you to get them onto your computer. You can email them to yourself, you can air drop them, you can do whatever it takes to get those images from your device to your computer that has Photoshop installed so that you can get to work on.
5. Pt 4 Stitch two images together: Earlier in this course, I took an image of this particular page. I just pressed the print screen key, went to Photoshop, created a new document for it and pasted it in, and you could do the same from images that had been taken from the Mac but in that case, you will be opening it in Photoshop because it would we already saved on your disk. Let's go and get the bottom half of this image so that we can stitch them together to make a single image. Back to the website. You'll see that find a photo is at the very bottom of this image. We want it to also be at the very top of the next image so that we have some overlap to work with. That's going to be important because that's going to help us work out that these two images are correctly aligned. With that placed in position, I'm going to press the print screen key again, go to Photoshop and paste this into the exact same document with edit paste. I've got both pieces, going to rearrange these so that the top element from the page is at the top of the layers palette. When I turn that off with see the bottom element. We've got our document ready to go ahead and do the stitching. Before we can stitch these documents together, we really need to enlarge the document because we don't have enough document space here. By the time we add this bottom part, we're going to have a document that is almost twice as tall as it is right now. Let's go and enlarge our canvas, I'll choose Image and then canvas size. I know the height and width of the image, while the width is not going to change, but the height is, it was 1080. Let's just double that 2160. We're going to make sure that the element that we have already in place that's going to be placed at the very top of the image and so any additional space is going to be created around and below that. The canvas color, I'll just set that to white and click okay. Now when I press control or command zero, you'll see that I've got a double height image that just helps me space everything else nicely. Now let's go to the second page which has this layer here, and go to the move tool. I'm going to drag it down roughly to where I think it's going to be and then I'll click on the visibility icon for the top layer so that I've got my two layers in place. Now I just need to work out this overlap and there's a really cool trick for doing that, and it's a blend mode. To do this, I'll click on the topmost layer because blend modes have to be applied to the top most layer and they affect layers below. I'm going to set this to what's called difference blend mode, it's a blend mode you'll hardly ever use, but it just really works well in this situation. I'm going to zoom into the area where that image overlaps. I'm going to see the overlap in this area. Then I'll go to this layer here. I'm going to start moving it down. I can drag it down, hold the shift case so it goes in a perfectly vertical direction. You're seeing here two instances of find a photo. I'll continue to pull that down and watch what happens to the words find a photo when they get in the exact same position, they disappear. That's what the difference blend mode does, as soon as two things are identical, they disappear. We know that these two layers now are perfectly aligned with each other because that word find a photo is in exactly the same place in the image on both layers. Having done that, I'll just go back and set the blend mode to normal. That's all I need to do. These two images are perfectly lined up here when I turn it on and off, you can say that the word find a photo does not move. That's the first step. Now we've got a piece in this top image. We've got this status bar across the bottom of the browser that we don't need. To get rid of it we'll select over it. I'm going to select over this area. I can take a little bit of the area that is in find a photo because we already know that we've got that content twice so I can hit into it a bit and make sure I have the top layer selected and just press delete, and that removes that area. Again, we get this smooth look to image. I'll press control or command D to de-select the selection. Now, I'm just going to work out which pieces I want of this image while I don't want the bottom part here so I'm going to carve that off and I can carve it off with the crop tool. I'll go to the crop tool and then just drag this up. I'm just going to place it over here. We get a nice bottom edge to image. The other thing we need to do is to clean up this. What's happened is that we've captured the scroll bar twice, and that looks incorrect if we're being fussy, We need to get rid of the second instance of the scroll bar, and I want to do that because there's a little trick here that I want to show you. We've got the scroll bar here so I'm going to the selection tool. I'm just going to grab a small piece of the side of this image, the element that I want to use to cover this up. Now it doesn't have to be the exact same size as this and I'm doing it deliberately small because sometimes you've only got a very small piece of the image that you can actually sample to make a larger piece from. I'm going to sample that. I'll choose edit and then copy merged because I want to take this content. I'm not sure which layer it's on, but I want it from whatever layer and appears on. I've just done that, edit copy merged. Now I'll press control or command V or I could do edit paste to paste it back in. I'll control or command, click on this layer so I highlight the area that is the pasted area, go to the move tool and this is what it looks like. Let me just zoom in cause I want you to see exactly what's going to happen here. What we'll do is we're just going to stretch this. Now, normally you would not stretch a pasted piece of artwork, but it doesn't matter here because all it was was white and blue and if you stretch white and blue, you just get white and blue in exactly the amount of length that you want it to be. I'll just click the check mark. Sometimes you can stretch things and it makes sense to do it. Here is the scroll bar before and here is the cleaned up scroll bar. Now at this stage, I'm happy with that image, so I would go ahead and save it. We've managed to assemble something that looks like it's been captured from a web browser but in actual fact, although it has been captured from a web browser, it's been stuck together to be made to look like a longer image, than it would be otherwise possible to obtain and of course, it's got the high quality of a regular screenshot. If we come in here, it's very easy for us to read this content because it hasn't had to be shrunk down to be captured.
6. Pt 5 Close up spaces: This is the image that we captured on the Mac earlier and I want to clean this up so I could put it inside a blog post, for example, what I want is these words across here because they're indicative of Lightroom. I don't want the histogram, I do want the detail panel. I want the image, nothing else. I'm going to start with the rectangular marquee tool, and I'm going to select the bottom half of this image because I want to jump it to a new layer and push it up. I'll choose layer new, layer via cut, and that cuts it to a brand new layer and then I can grab this layer and start moving it up and that will cover up this histogram. Let me take that all the way up there. I'm going to drag it across as well to get rid of the scroll bars. That puts a detail panel and all these words exactly where I want them to be. The next thing I want to do is enlarge this picture because I want it to take up this space opposite the detail panel. In an ideal world, I would go back and recapture that picture, but let's just see how we would do it since the world is not ideal today. Let's just go and grab this one. I'll go to the rectangular marquee tool, target the layer it's on, which is this one here and I'm just going to grab this image. I'm going to take a little bit of the gray around it, but not much at all and I'm going to jump that to its own new layer, with layer new, layer via cart. Now, I can isolate this image and with the move tool, I can hold the Shift key and just drag it out to make it quite a bit larger, just size it up against this detail panel. This is roughly where it's going to sit and it's coming pretty much down to the bottom of that panel, so that's looking pretty good. The problem is that this is going to be the area I'm going to crop to in a minute, this area here and you can see that we're losing a lot of her face. In particular, the element on her face that's reflected in the sharpening dialogue here. I'm not really happy with that right now, let's see what we would do. What I want to do is to remove some of the black here, so what I'm going to do is carve off a piece here and put it on a new layer. Again, go to this layer and work out just how much I can carve off. I could carve off pretty much most of this, so I make a selection over it, choose layer, new, layer via cut and that jumps that to a new layer all by itself. Let's just say what we've got here. Well, what we want is this edge but not the middle, so let's go and grab it. Let's select over the bit that we want to get rid of, which is on the left-hand side here and just press delete. It's this gray edge that marks out the edge of the image that I want left. Now let's turn everything back on again and just reassemble the image. What we need to do is to take the face and go and join it up to the edge of the photo. Now, with this image we had just black so it was really easy for us to carve out that extra little piece. In some instances, if you've got a lot of content out to here, you might just want to cut off the gray edge and use that to sort of reassemble the image but this is working pretty well here, except that it's all over a pixel or two out. Let's just double-check that, yes, that's nice and smooth there now. Now I've got everything that I need, it's just a case of cropping the image. I'll go to the crop tool, make sure I have selected delete cropped pixels. Let's run up here to the bottom of the sharpening panel. Let's drag down here to just above the words and dragged in from the left, get most of the face and certainly all these titles that are indicating that this is Lightroom and I'll just click the check mark. I'll generally take a more generous crop to start off with and then maybe just bring it in a pixel or two if need be. At this point, I could go ahead and save this image and then I could use it inside a book or a blog post. It looks like the Lightroom interface. It's just a rejiged version of it, that allows us to get rid of extraneous content and focus on what is really important and that is the settings that we're using to sharpen this image.
7. Pt 6 Create a Swash: Let's look, next, at how we would create an element that we could use such as a round, swash to highlight something in this image, to draw our reader's attention to it. I'm going to create a swash shape. Going to do this in a new document, because I'm going to save it as a separate element that I could use anytime I need it. I'm just creating a document that is the size of my entire Windows screen, just for reference. I want to create a smallest swash. Going to do this using the pen tool. Know lots of people are scared of the pen tool, but if you follow along, it's going to be pretty easy to make it. What I am going to do is create a swash that's of this shape, so it's going to be a circle with an extra little bit. I'll start the shape by clicking and dragging and heading in this direction here, and I'll come over about a third of the way round and click and drag, not a very big drag. Another third click and drag, and then I'm going to come here, click and drag, and then I'll just finish off my shape with another click and drag, and I'll press 'Escape' to finish. Now, if you need to fix the shape up, you can easily do this. You'll go to the path selection tool, here, select over the path, then go to the direct selection tool and that'll allow you to select on an individual point and then you can just work on that point. I'm going to straighten that out a little bit. I'm going to straighten this out a little bit. I can make a smoother point by making slightly longer handles. This one's not going in a particularly good direction, and neither is this one. But once you've got your shape in place, you can fine tune these handles and just place things where you want them to be. Click away and just double-check, that it's looking as you want it to look. Now that I've got my basic shape and it doesn't have to be perfect, it's a swash. It's supposed to be drawing attention to something else, not attention to itself. I'll go to select it with the path selection tool. I'm going to make a new layer for it, because ultimately I want to get rid of the background layer. Because I just want the swash by itself, so it'll be transparent behind it. That will allow me to then take it to this document, and place it over the word 'Detail.' I don't want it to have a white background because that would block out what's underneath it. With it selected, I'm going to the brush tool because I'm going to use a brush here, open up the brushes panel and I'm using one of these legacy brushes. Let me just say where they are. Here's the legacy brushes. When I open them up, there's a set of calligraphic brushes and I'm using this 20-point brush here. If you don't see legacy brushes in your collection, go to the fly out menu and just click on 'Legacy Brushes' and you can add them to your collection. In earlier versions of Photoshop, these won't be legacy brushes, they'll actually be your brushes. You'll have these calligraphic brushes. They called legacy in later versions of Photoshop. I've got my brush selected and I've got my brush tool selected, double-click here and choose a red color to use. I'm on a brand new layer, so I'll go to my paths palette, again, you can get to that by choosing 'Window' and then 'Paths.' Make sure that you have your path selected and click here on 'Stroke path with brush,' and that strokes the path with this brush. Now I think the brush's too thick for this, so I'm going to undo it. I'll go back to my brushes panel and let me just select this 15 pixel brush. I think that's going to be a better size and let's try that instead, much better. Then we'll go to the layers palette, and I'm going to turn off the background layer. I'm also going to crop this, so I'll press 'Control' or 'Command zero,' just to zoom back out, I'll go to my crop tool, just going to bring my crop rectangle in close around my shape. We don't want a lot of excess in this image, but we do, obviously, want the entire swash shape to be inside this image. At this point, I'll choose 'File' and then 'Save As.' I'll select 'PNG' or ping as they type of file because that is a flattened file and it also has transparency. Let me call this swash and I'll just click 'Save.' Medium is just fine for the file format options. Now I can just trash this file. I don't need it any longer. This shape is easy enough to re-create if you ever lose this one. Going to zoom in, here, to this file and I'm going to go and add my swash by choosing 'File' and 'Place Embedded.' Here is my swash. I'll click 'Place.' It's placed large inside this image, so I'll hold 'Shift and Alt,' that would be 'Shift Option' on the Mac, to just size it down. If I want to smoosh it up a little bit, I can do so. What I'm going to do, here, is just place it over the word 'Details.' I'm drawing my reader's attention to the fact that we are working here in the Detail panel in Light-room. It looks a little bit pixelated, here, if we zoom back out, so that we have this image at more like a 100 percent zoom instead of 250 percent zoom. You'll see it looks pretty smooth. Now I will go ahead and save this image because it's got the additional annotation that helps me show somebody exactly what part of this image they should be focusing on.
8. Pt 7 Annotating with Icons: In the last video, you saw how to create a swash like this, and if you need other elements like a selection arrow or perhaps a move indicator, it is easy enough with some basic Photoshop skills to create those. Save them as ping file so that you can use them for your own annotations. But there is another alternative that I want to show you. So let's skip to the web, to a site called icons 8, that's I say O-N-S 8. Now there are a whole series of icons here. So for example, if we look up the word selection, we'll see icons that relate to selection and there are selection arrow icons here. So if I click this past selection tool, it appears over here in the icon area and we can download that icon. You might need to register at the site but downloading small versions of these icons is free. So it's easy enough to get individual icons as Ping images, but you can also build up collections of icons. I actually built up this collection a little bit earlier and have another collection here. What you do to build up a collection is just to click create and then add your icons to your collection. So you might grab a few icons that show various things that you want to be able to use for your annotations. So for example, I might go for a move tool icon. Here's one here. I'm going to add it to this collection and I might want just a plane left pointing arrow as well. Now you might want some other some is going to take a few so that you can say how we are going to work with them. So that's all that you want one to build up your collection, you can now get them as a font. So I'll click on get font. This is now created as a font and it's being downloaded automatically. So when I double-click on this, you'll see that there is a font here. By double-click inside it I'll see the various font files, and it's the 2.tff that I'm most interested in, because this collection 2.tff font has my characters in it so I can install that, and I'm saying these characters here, but I'm going to install this collection 2 font. Now let's head back to Photoshop. Inside Photoshop, I want to use the font that I've just installed. I'll go to the type tool and click once on my image and that starts a type object. Now, there's no real point in selecting the type face from this list because it's going to be really hard to see which of those characters belongs to which letter and the typeface. So instead I'll choose window and then glyph. Now I'll go and locate the collection to font here. So I'm just going to start by pressing the letter say, which should get me to the sea area of the font list and here's collection tool. Here are the four glyph that are in that font. Because I've got the type tool already selected, I can just double-click here and that will add that character as a type object to this illustration, and because it's a type object, we can color it whatever we want to color it. It's also movable because it's a big font character so I can move it into position to show whatever it is that I want to show in this image. So if you're doing a lot of this kind of screenshots, I suggest you have a look at a site like icons 8 in particular, because of its ability to create a font where you can make a whole series of characters in your font. For example, that I've got a right mouse button click and a left mouse button click here and [inaudible] pointer, some other various characters that would be helpful to me as I create annotations for images, for a book or a blog post or some instructions or whatever. So there is another option. Of course, you can also find these icons on stock sites and in that case, we might just grab each icon and save it as a separate file. So you could use file and then place embedded and just embed that shape into your document. There are lots of different options that you can use. These are a couple that I like to use.
9. Pt 8 Text Overlays: Another element that you may want to add to an image like this is a text object. Let's see how we will go ahead and do that. Now I'm going to add a new layer. I'm going to type tool. Then choose the color of text I'm going to be working with. In this case, I'm going to be typing in black and I'm going to make sure that they know to click this little triangle, so I'll type, click triangle to the right of the detail option. I'll click the check mark. Now, obviously this is on the range of being unreadable right now. I just need to make a few changes to it. I'm going to the type tool. I will always choose to type in a very plain fonts so I'm using Myriad Pro here, got about 36 points, I think it probably be a bit smaller. Thirty is probably a good value here and it seems like the space between successive lines is really small. I'll go to the character panel and I'm just going to increase this value here. Let's take it to about 30. That looks a whole lot better. Now I still have a readability issue here in the black text over a dark background is almost unreadable. But if it was white, it wouldn't be much better because it wouldn't be visible over the lighter areas. You have a couple of options here. One of the options is to add a life of drop shadow. When you're working with black text, you would add a sort of white drop shadow. If you're working with white text, then you would add a darker drop shadow. It's the contrast that helps things be more readable. With that text object selected, I'll go to the fx icon and I'm going to create a drop shadow. Now the default drop shadow is dark but that doesn't have to be the case. I'm going to select white as my drop shadow color. Now multiply is not the blend mode to use when you're trying to lighten something, you would use screen. You'll use the multiply blend mode if you're trying to work with a dark shadow and screen blend mode when you're trying to work with a light shadow. Now, I like my shadows to be down and to the right of my text and the distance is too big here, so I'm just going to bring it back to probably something like about one pixel. If you're happy with that, you can click okay, and so these sort of offset shadows will help readability of your text. Now there's another option that you can use. I'm going to turn off the drop shadow here. Let's add a new layer. I'm going to move it underneath the text layer. For this I'm going to add a shape, so I'll make sure I have the shape tool selected. It's going to have a white fill and it's going to have no stroke at all. Let me just draw a rectangle. This is a rounded rectangle, that's fine, but you may want to do just a regular one and it's going to be placed immediately underneath the text. Now that's also going to help with the legibility of the text. You can say that the text is far more readable. You can also decrease the opacity of this because it doesn't have to be fully opaque. It could be something like about 65 or even 50 percent opaque and that's still going to be readable, but you still going to be able to see some of the lightroom interface underneath it. You just want to make sure that you sort of move it into a good position. That's another way of dealing with a text overlay. Often those text overlays are valuable, to again, impart information to your reader so they know what it is that they're supposed to be doing.
10. Pt 9 Save and resize: Once you've finished annotating your screenshots or the other images that you want to use, and removing the content, in other words, when you've done all the editing work, the question is, what are we going to do next? Well, the first thing to do is to save them as a PSD file. I always do that so that I've got all this rich layer detail in the file, in particular because that would allow me to make edits to it. So if, for example, I wanted to put a full stop in here, I can just come in and put in my full stop. It's fully editable because the type is still on a layer or by itself. If you flatten the image, the chances are the day that you only have the flattened version of the images is the that day that you say that you've got a monumental spelling error in your document or in your image, that you just can't do anything with because it's all been flattened. Save the PSD file, even if you save them to a folder called Delete Me. I have a Delete Me folder, it's full of stuff that every soft and I'll go through and just delete the old stuff. It's there if I need it, but for most cases, I don't and I just delete it periodically. Having saved as a PSD file, then you can work out how big it needs to be for whatever purpose that you want. This image, I'm reading off its size just down here in the bottom left corner, and if I click this triangle here, you can see that I've got it set to document dimensions. I find that a handy setting to use in Photoshop; allows me to read the image size. Often, this image is 493 pixels wide by 351 pixels tall. For a blog post or a book, that's a really good size. Let me just go to one of my blogs, and this space here on my blog page is about 550 pixels wide. So a 493 pixel image is going to look really comfortable in there. It's going to be just the right size, not too big or not too small. If you do need to re-size your image, then you go to image. In image size, you're going to make sure that you click this icon here, so that the width and height are adjusted the same amount. So if you make it bigger or smaller, both dimensions are going to be sized to the appropriate size. The image is not going to be mushed up, if you like, you can go a little bit larger. I wouldn't recommend much more than about 50 percent larger, you're going to start losing detail, and obviously you can go quite a bit smaller. If you are re-sampling, resizing the image, you do want to check the correct re-sample option. You would have a look at these enlargement options and inspect the image to say which is going to give you the better result, when you're reducing size by cubic reduction is a good option. I'm not going to re-size it because this one is a perfect size. What I would do at this point is, once I have sized it and if it does need sizing is I would save it then as a JPEG or a PNG wherever you want to take it. JPEG has compression applied to the image compression that is slightly destructive, but provided you keep it at a fairly high quality, that's just fine. PNG is not a destructive compression. I'm going to save this as a JPEG. So I'll just go to File, Save As, I have to use Save As because at the moment it's a PSD file. If I went to File, Save, it would just be re-saved as a PSD. I'm going to select JPEG as the option, just going to call this Lightroom screenshot. Let's take finished off that. I'll just delete that and I'll just click "Save". Now, here's where I select quality and this is the trade-off. This is file size versus quality. At maximum, you will get the least amount of compression. There will be some compression. You'll get a larger file size for something this big, and that would be fine for a blog post or a book. If you're trying to keep your images smaller, for example, then you might come down to high and you're still not going to say a huge degradation in quality. So I'll just click "Okay". Now, if I want to take this straight to a book, for example, if I've got my book open in Word and I'm working on this image and I've saved it as a PSD file, I'm already go, then I could take it directly with me. The way I'm going to do it is I'm going to choose layer, and I'll choose flattened image because I'm going to flatten the entire image just down to a single layer. Now I'm going to copy and paste it into my book, so I'll choose Select All and then Edit copy. Now, you can do that with key strokes, that would be Ctrl or Command A for select all, and Ctrl or Command C for copy. Because we flattened it to a single layer, we just need to do Copy. If you didn't flatten it, you would have to do copy merged, otherwise you wouldn't be copying everything. I've got this copy to the Windows clipboard. It would be copied to a Mac clipboard if you were working on a Mac. I'll go to the Word document, I actually have this Word document open. So I'm just going to paste this in. Let me just delete this image and let's put this one in that we have on the clipboard. I'll drop down the paste option here and I'll go to Paste special. I don't want this to be an Adobe Photoshop image object. I just want it to be a plain or bitmap. That means it won't be linked back to the Photoshop image. That's a much better way of importing an image direct from Photoshop through to, for example, Microsoft Word. I'll click "Okay". Now you can see that this image is actually quite a bit bigger than the images in the book. So I want to size it down. Make sure I size from a corner when I'm in Microsoft Word, and let's just go and put it in position. I don't want to be teaching your Word, which has got some really revolting habits here when it comes to making things look neat. You can see I had to size it down quite a bit to have it look about the same size as the other images in this document. At 400 pixels wide, and it was still really, really large for a document like this. The other document that we created earlier, this one that is a sort of mock-up of my web-page on free stock images. Then this is huge, it's 1,920 pixels wide, so it's a full screen width wide. It's enormous and much bigger than it would need to be, obviously for a blog post, much bigger than it would need to be for a book. So at this point would save it as PSD file and then think about what you need it for and how big you need it. If you're sending it to somebody else, you may need to give them a higher resolution image. Sometimes people that you send or ask for images, they're a little bit fussy and they don't always know how to work Photoshop and know how the relationship between image dimensions and resolution work. Sometimes if they need something, for example, like a 300 pixel per inch resolution image, then this is what I would do. This is the image width and height. I'm not going to change that, but somebody has said to me, I want this at 300 pixels per inch, then this is what I'll do. I won't type 300 into here because what that does is just enlarges it. Let me cancel out of that and let's go back into it. This is what we're going to do is, we're going to turn off re-sampling. In other words, we're saying to Photoshop, "Don't touch the image size here." We don't want it to be enlarged and we don't want it to be shrunk, but what we want you to do is to set it as a resolution of 300 pixels per inch. Nothing's going to change in the document, except that magical setting that this is now a 300 PPI image. As I said, some people want an image at 300 PPI and don't realize that they could go and make that themselves by just changing the resolution. If you have to send something out at 300 PPI or a 150 PPI, that's how you do it. Image, image size, make sure you turn off re-sampling so that you're not going to change the size, of the physical dimensions of the image will not change. It's just that the resolution is going to be altered to whatever it is that that other person happens to need.
11. Project and Wrapup: Your project for this class will be to create an annotated image that you could use somewhere online. It might be for a blog post, it might be an Instagram post, it might be an e-book or a set of notes that you supply with materials that you're selling online, for example. Something that you could use, post the image and also a brief explanation as to where that image is going with what you prepared it for as your class project. I sincerely hope that you've enjoyed this Photoshop class and that you've learnt things that you didn't know previously. Now as you were watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt which asked if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoy the class and learnt something from it, would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes, that you would recommend the class and secondly, write even in just a few words why you enjoy the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. Now if you see the follow link on the screen, click it to keep up to date with new classes as they're released. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, 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™
