Adobe Photoshop CS5 – A Project Guide

Adobe Photoshop can be used and integrated with many other Adobe software programmes such as Premiere and After Effects. It can also be used for many other things from creating magazines, to creating customised titles for your Video Project.

As we start up Photoshop, you should probably know already what you want to achieve at this point – as it determines how you set up your project. For example; if you want to create a front page of a magazine you’ll have to set it up as an A4 page, for a double-page spread you’ll need an A3 page.

Your project size is the first thing you’ll choose when you click “New” in Photoshop. To choose between preset Paper Sizes select “International Paper” in the Preset window.

Make sure you’re resolution is somewhere between 90 and 150 – this determines the quality of and resolution of your project. If you’re going to use a lot of high quality images in your work you might want to turn the quality down a bit so your computer runs the project more efficiently.

1. Working with Text

First lets run through where all of your options are.

Select the Text icon “T” to begin, then draw a box where you’d like to add text to your project. Each time you do this will add a New Layer to your project.

After you’ve written your text in the box, you edit it by changing Colour & Font/Style/Size

Colour

Font/Style/Size

Use the Positioning Mouse Setting to move your text around your project, you can squash and stretch it by pulling the corners too.

If you don’t find a font that you like or that matches what you’re going for, try dafont.com – here you can download any fonts you wish to use for free. To install them you must first save your work and close Photoshop, then download and save your chosen font as a .zip file in the same location as your Photshop document is saved – i.e. TESTER.psd

After you have downloaded the .zip file from dafont.com, if you now double click the .zip file and drag and drop the .ttf file [or whatever filetype your font file is] and extract it to your chosen folder you should get something like this. If you notice here the font file is now external to its .zip folder

Now double-click the font-file, and it should open a preview window of the font.

Re-open Photoshop, and your font should appear in the selection window with the other fonts. As long as you keep the font file in the same save location as your Photoshop .psd file, then your fonts will always work.

2. Layers

From one image and one title, we can already see some kind of magazine coming together...

Think of layers as a digital stack of pieces of paper. Our text that reads “Experiment” is the top layer, meaning it is on the top of the pile. In the middle of the “layers pile” we have “image1” we have our background image. On the bottom layer we have a plain white layer called “Background”.

This layer is the default layer in each new Photoshop project, you can’t see it because it is completely hidden by the layer above [image1]. That’s how layer’s work.

You can make an image more transparent by changing the “Opacity” level. Make sure you have the correct layer selected before doing this.

You can also add filters, effects and blending options to each individual layer.

To summarise so far, the layers at the top are visible over the layers underneath unless you influence them otherwise.

When we have our layers in order, we can influence them in the following ways...

3. Blending Options – Glow Effects/3D Effects/Shadows

By clicking the Layer tab, then Layer Style you can choose from some of the some advanced styles you can apply to both images and text layers.

You may want to add a Glow effect to your Text, make sure your chosen text layer is selected then click “Outer Glow” after following this file-path. For Drop-Shadows or Inner Glows follow the same process but select those options instead.

Layer>Layer Style>Outer Glow

This should bring up a new Menu Screen.

By playing around with the options, you can achieve the desired effect you want.

For a general Outer Glow effect, change the Blend Mode to “Normal”,

and the opacity to 100.

You can change your Glow’s colour by clicking this box

Finally you can change how the Glow fades and attaches to the chosen layer, by changing these settings.

Your Photoshop document will preview all effects for you before you apply them, when you’re happy, just press OK.

You can add multiple effects to your layers, here is the same Text layer with a Drop-Shadow and a 3D effect called “Bevel and Emboss” added to it, on top of the Outer Glow effect.

Don’t be afraid to experiment with them!

4. Image Adjustments

“Filters” can also be applied to both Text and Imagery in Photoshop. A Filter is a built-in effect [that you can apply also more than one at once]. In this example we’ll add a few effects to our background image.

Lets start with the basics. By going to Image>Adjustments you can edit your Brightness & Contrast. There are many other cool options in this section but the most basic and most commonly used is this one – again make sure the right Layer is selected before you apply any changes.

You can also edit the Red, Green & Blue levels by Following the same file-path but selecting Curves.

Image>Adjustments>Curves

Here you can move points on the graph to change how your pictures are filtered.

In the same Adjustments drop-down, you can also edit things like Exposure, Colour Levels, and you can invert the image – and wash your picture out in Sepia and Black & White.

This is a really interesting way of influencing your imagery that will really make it stand out.

5. Multiple Layers of Imagery and Arranging

Now we’ve got a Title, a Background Image, and maybe even some sub-titles and captions dotted around. We should look at adding additional images and thumbnails – much like they do in professional magazines.

I’ve started to add some extra imagery around the edges, and using everything we’ve learned so far managed to make all of colours and filters work together. I added both an Outer and Inner Glow to both images, I also rotated them and overlapped the edges of the magazine for a professional look. The colours of the pictures didn’t really match my background image and text, so I used Adjustments>Curves to filter them a bit more purple.

That’s literally all there is to it. Obviously the positions will move around when we add more text etc.

To save your image as a finished .jpg just click File>Save As then change the settings to .jpg or whatever format you wish to save as. Now we know how to use Photoshop on a basic level.