Lessons

Lesson Info

Illustration Tools and Presets

now we're gonna doom or of illustration kind of projects. So if you want to see some examples, here's one. Just a fun little, uh, illustrative Look, here's another one. That's actually what we're gonna make. And you could do web interfaces, that kind of stuff. But the main thing is, we're gonna create something from scratch that doesn't involve any photographs. And therefore, we could get used to how to think about it if you want to create logos or just graphics in general. So my wife, Karen, she actually made this. Uh, I think she made it last night, remember? Uh, and we're just gonna recreate it in a new document. So I'm gonna create a brand new document. I'm gonna make it five by five inches. Need just need to pick some size. And resolution of 300 would be fined for printing. You know, click. OK, I'll take command. Zero is what I type all the time to fit in window. If you go to the view menu, you'll see fit on screen is command zero controls there in windows. I just hate the newer v...

ersions of federal shop when you create a new document or open a document. It no longer fits it within your window. It always leaves space around it, Which to me, doesn't make much sense. All right, so this is what we're going to start with. We're gonna make everything from scratch. I'm gonna start by using the shape tool near the lower left of my screen. You're gonna find an icon. Just looks like a rectangle. If you click and hold on, it gets this shape tool where you can choose between creating all these different kinds of shapes. I'm gonna come in here and start off using the Ellipse tool. Remember, anytime you choose a tool from the toolbar at the top of your screen spanning the top edge will be the settings for that particular tool. And before I start using this tool, I'm gonna just look at what's up there First. This, when you're using the shape tool determines what kind of end result will you get. And if I click there, we have three choices. We have a shape, a path or pixels, paths or beyond this class. Ah, a path of something that doesn't do anything all by itself but could be used to limit where layer shows up could be used to draw a line around itself or that type of thing. But it's not something we're gonna cover in this class. Pixels would mean it would be the equipment of painting this where it doesn't have any special features that would allow me to scale this maintain quality. What I want to use is something called a shape. The shape is something that has a very crisp edge on it, and at any time I can scale it to make it much larger or much smaller in the quality doesn't change. So if I made a circle and I made it absolutely tiny, I made it the size of the tip of my pinky. I could later on scale it up literally to the size of this building, and it would still have a nice, crisp edge on it if, on the other hand, I made this out of pixels, pixels means little squares that make up your your image. If I made it tiny the size of my pinky, and I lay it later, scale it up to the size of this building, it would look like a crude, blurry, semi jagged terrible looking and resolved I wanted to shape to get the most out of this. Next to that, we have a filling, a stroke, the fill. If I click on it, it will give me various presets where I could choose particular colors here. And I could just click on one and stroke me and shoot it out a line around the edge. And if I click on that, I could choose what color the line is, and right next to it. It tells you how thick the line would be. If there's a red line through this diagonally, it means accepting nothing. So right now we get a fill of dark blue, we get no stroke at all. And if we had a stroke, this over here would indicate Is it a solid line or the dashed? And you have a bunch of weird sightings below that we're gonna leave the width and height over here alone because that would control big of a circle we get. I'm gonna control that by dragging. And then later on, we might play with some of these things, but we probably won't get to all of them. All right, so let's just say I'm in this shape tool. Remember, it's found near the bottom of my tools right above the hand tool. I clicked on it and I grab the Ellipse tool so we're not gonna create a rectangle we're gonna creating lips and I'm just gonna click on the image in drag. Now, you remember there's a weight it to constrain. Things were before when I was scaling an image, I could easily squish it one direction or the other. But if I held that special key, which was the shift key, it would constrain it Will. Shift is universal for constraining things. So I'm gonna bring this out and make a big circle for the body here. You want to let go, I get a filled in shape and this little thing pops out, which is kind of semi redundant because it has a lot of the settings that were at the top of my screen as well. But if I wanted to change things like the fill color or some of the other settings, I could do it here if I didn't need this. This little pop out thing is a temporary panel. And to get rid of it all you have to do is click on the icon. That's kind of attached to it. If I click here, it would make it go away. If I click there again, it would make it show up. So if that pops out on you, you don't need it. Just click on its icon. It'll go away. So that's gonna be our body. Next, I'm gonna create some eyeballs. And so before I click and drag with this tool again, I need to just check one setting. And that setting is right up here. Do you see this icon? This icon means that when I click again to create a new shape, what should it do to the shape that's already here? Should it just combine with it? So it adds on to it shouldn't poke a hole in it, you know, make a big hole in the middle of so it looks like a donut. For instance, should it on Lee show where the two shapes overlap? Uh, or should it make a hole where the two shapes overlap? But the very top choice means new layer, which means he's charmingly use this tool instead of adding to or taking away from the shape that we already have. It's gonna create a new layer, which is what I want. Right now. I'm gonna go over here and drawn eyeball. I'm holding shift to make sure to circle, and I have it. But it used the same color that I had before. So when this pops up, I'll click on its little blue rectangle. It's here, and I'll just choose a preset for this will use white, and then I can draw out another one. Or I could try to clone the one that's already here because I probably want eyeballs unless I want this look overly quirky where they have two different sized eyeballs. What I could do is used to move Tool Now the move to will remember moves layers around. But do you remember when we were working with layers? Before I had some layer styles? Those were drop shadow in stroke, and I moved it from one layer to another. But in order to copy it to the other layer, I had to hold down. A special key was the option key Ultima windows. I'm holding down that key right now, and when I'm in the move tool. If I move something. Well, I have the option key held down. It moves a copy. All right, so therefore, I know I have two eyes of exactly the same size. If I were to drop by hand, I might end up with different size. I'm gonna go back down, then to the shape tool because I was in the move, told us now and I'm gonna draw the blacks of the eye here. Something like that. Again, I'll change the color. Remember that little rectangle here? I'll change it to black, and then I'm gonna grab the move to will again. Because if I use the shape tool and click with him, I am a junkie, drawing a new shape. I need photo shopped to know that what I want to do instead is use the move tool to reposition this layer. It's just gonna move Whatever layers currently active usually just move if I dragged it over here. But if I hold option, it means move a copy. So now we have our eyes then with a shape tool. So far, we've only used one shape, which was an ellipse. If we hold shift when we drive it makes it a circle. But if you look here, there's actually a bunch of different shaped tools in here we can you rectangles, rounded corner rectangles and so on. But this is really a limited list. There is a nice choice, though. At the bottom. It's called Custom Shape Tool. And if I choose that instead of being list limited to that list of shapes, I can go to the top of my screen. And right up here is a choice called shape. If I click on this little arrow, you're gonna get a whole list. You can even expand this list by grabbing the lower right corner and pulling on it so you can see what's there just expanded way out. You see all those shapes we could use all they had to do to access those is go to the normal shaped tool in the left side of my screen, click and hold on it, and then choose the bottom choice. It's called Custom Shape tool, and that means allow me to choose from this thing at the very top of my screen called shape. That usually wouldn't be there unless I was in that tool. So Let's see what's in here that we might be able to use for other parts of this owl in this case right now, I think what we need on the all might be a beak. So I'm looking in here for something that might resemble a beak. We're going to use this little arrow now when you just click on it. This doesn't go away because it thinks you might want to switch to something else. If you wanted to go away, either click up here like where the title bar is, or menu bar just away from this. To dismiss it like that or double click on the actual icon that you want. The first click will select it. The second click will make it go away. Now, the only problem with this is the Arrow icon is point towards the right. So when I click and drag like this, we're gonna get a right pointing arrow. And if that's gonna represent a beak, I need to point down. So if that little panel didn't show up, you know the panel that let me change the colors before remember, it's on the right side of my screen over here it's called Properties. I could click on it to make it show up or on the top of my screen I have. The choice is right up here. This is where I'd usually change them, fill or stroke. So I'll click on Phil and let's just choose kind of an orangish color. But unfortunately for this, the beak sideways Well, we can rotate the beak the same way we will rotate or scale a picture. That means I can go to the edit menu. And there was a choice called free transform. And there was a keyboard shortcut. It was command t. You're gonna use it so often Used to command t for transform control T and Windows. I'll type it right now, Command t. Now with that, you can grab these corners. And just like when we had a picture, we could scale it. Hold shift if you want to retain the proportions. But the other thing you can do and you could have done with a photo as well is move your mouse away from these handles outside the image and it'll change. So if you look at my mouse changing, you see, it looks like a little curved arrows. That means rotate. All you do is move outside of the image out here and now I can click and drag and rotate this to any angle I would like, but I would like it to point straight down. So wouldn't that be like constraining it to maybe a 90 degree rotation? Wasn't there a key you could hold down to constrain things? It shift. I'm holding it down right now. Shift will end up making this happen, I think, in 15 degree increments, although it might be slightly different these days, it used to be 15 degrees Turner enter, and then, if I need to reposition it, I don't in general want to use this tool. The one called the Shape Tool. It would draw new shape. I need to get to the move tool so now I can move it. Those little pink lines. You see, those are the smart guides saying, Hey, it's snapping to these things in all that. Now let's add some little kind of wings coming out of side. So let's go back to our shape tool. Go back to the top of my screen where it's a shape and we gotta look for something that looks anything like a little wing, and I'm actually going to use this thing that might look like a drop of water with it. I'm in a click and drag, and that's gonna end up being a wing. I'm gonna change the color of it. So go to the upper left where I can see the color that's currently being used. We used kind of a darkish scion ish color and I'm gonna type command t remember, transform Manti. I'll move my mouse away from the handle Some out here. I should be able to rotate this also, when you're transforming, if you don't click on any of the handles Yeah, and you just click where the images, you could move it. Let's say that's gonna be our little wing, but I don't want it to look so much like a water drop. Well, if I go up to the edit menu, you remember that choice called free transform. There's actually something else right below it called transform, and it allows you to choose a bunch of different things to Dio. Look at all this stuff skewing perspective. All that one that could be fun is warping. I'm gonna just choose warp. And what that does is it puts this kind of grid on top of the image. I could actually grab the corners now and pull on him. You see what it would do? I'll choose, undo. Instead of grabbing the corners, I could grab the sides, and I might come in here just kind of distort that a bit, so it doesn't look exactly a water drop. Instead, it feels a little bit more like my stylistic wing. Now this is on top. It's like covering up his eyeball, and not simply because of my layers panel. It's on top. And if I want it to be underneath, I click on its name. I drag it down in my layers panel, and if you drag all the way to the bottom, it will scroll layers, panels. And once it's girls down, so I get it below that big blue circle. Put it down there. I'm gonna use my move tool now, and I want a copy of it over on the other side. Do you remember when I used the move tool that I could hold on a special key to get a duplicate the special key was the option key. Alton Windows. I'm holding that down right now. I'll click on this and I'll drag it over this way. Mm. But now I need to point the other direction. So I go to the edit menu. I'll choose Transform, and I don't know if you noticed or not, but one of the choices within the menu was to flip it. Let's just flip it horizontally, so it's like a mirror image of the other. Here we go, and I'll use to move to a just kind of pull it in. There were gonna be our wings. Grab the other one. What? All right now let's just add more pieces all in Trying to show you is not how to create a Now. I don't expect that's what you need. I'm just trying to show you how to create a complex thing from simple pieces, and this could be a logo. This could be anything. Could be a bar chart. Could anything you need, The main thing is there some things would be nice to learn about, and we need a project to do it with. Okay, so now let's create some more pieces let's put some legs in. So what I'm gonna do is go back to the shape tool and I'll go back to the top of my screen. I'll look for a shape that might be appropriate for a leg, and I'm looking and I'm not really seeing anything. So let's see if we can cheat. Where is to me a second to look close enough to find it? I'm gonna use a snowflake. How can I use a snowflake to create a leg? Well, I could come out here and draw a snowflake, and in fact, there's even a better one than that. See if there's one that's simpler. Take me a moment to find it. That one. I'm just gonna delete this layer, click on the layer and drag it to the trash can at the bottom of my layers and will use this one. The reason I like it better is because the little, um, when I'm calling legs of the, uh, stuff like don't touch each other. The other one, they touched a little more. Now here's one little tip. Anytime you're drawing one of these shapes, if it's not positioning exactly where you want hit the space bar. The space bar allows you to reposition it before your end up letting go of the mouse button so I can still making it. I'm still determine its size and everything, but space bar just allows you to reposition it and Onley let go of the mouse when its position where you want. I'm gonna change the color of that. Let's make this more of a red dark red. And now let's learn how to modify this shape. I'm gonna zoom up on this and remember command plus and minus you can use to zoom up. The other thing is, if you need to move around, hit the space bar space bar when you are not. Clicking with a different tool like I was just now gives it a hand tool. Space bar is simply a shortcut that says, Give me the hand tool for the length of time I hold it down. Alright, let's try to take away a part of this shape to simplify it. I'm gonna go over here in switch to the rectangle tool and before I click with it, I'll go to the top of my screen and up here it says what should This due to the shape I'm currently working on when I click in the default setting is don't do anything to that. Instead, create a new layer. Well, in this case, I'm gonna tell it to do something else. I'm gonna say subtract from the front shape. Or I can come over here and say combined shapes, but watch what happens. So haven't said to combine shapes. Right now I'm gonna click and drag like this, and I'm gonna cover up one part of that snowflake like that. Here it is. It's just combining with shape. It's already there. It did not create a new layer, But what I want is not that I wanted to subtract from the shape. Take away from it. Okay? And I'm just gonna draw another rectangle over on the left side. Take away that part. I wish that wouldn't show up. Off. Now, this little these little outlines, they just show you where these pieces are. You've drawn, and you could actually go to this little arrow tool that's over here and grab the individual shapes and reposition them. We shouldn't need to, though. I'm going to instead go to the move tool so I could move that entire layer. But you see that that's just one little part of one of those snowflakes. It's gonna be our little leg, so I'll use the move tool. There was the key that duplicates things. It's option. I'm holding it down right now. Pull that over here. Then I'll go to the edit menu transform and you remember, flip horizontal. We'll flip that and then I'll just move it in a little bit. There's our legs, but no, that's actually Snowflake. So all right, let's, um, start adding some layer styles to make this not look so flat right now it looks so flat. So I'm gonna go over here and click on one of the white to the eyeballs and to make sure that I'm on the layer, I think I'm on. I'll turn off the eyeball and turn it back on. Did you get that? I'm turning off this eyeball, but it's literally an eyeball over here. With that layer active, I'll go to the bottom, my layers panel, two letters, FX, and I'm gonna choose in this case one we haven't used yet. It's called an inner shadow. So with inner shadow chosen. This comes up. I can bring up the size which controls how soft the edges and I can click on my image. You see, moving around here. It's a shadow inside of that shape, so I might come in here. That's to be interesting looking like that click. OK, then you remember I could move. This were copy it more accurately between layers. If I click on the words effects right here and then drag it to another layer that moves it. I need to hold down the special key option Alton Windows when I drag it here to move a copy so that now I have it on both of the layers and you can see it showing up there and then want the body to feel a little bit more three D. So I'll click on that particular layer and let's go back to the letters FX. Let's look at some other effects we have not used yet. We're going to use another one this time instead of inner shadow, which is what we applied to the eyeballs. We're going to choose inner glow with inner glow. Let's see what happens if I bring up my size you see, it's adding glow on the inside of the shape. The only thing is, I don't want a yellow glow like that. I wanted to look more like shading is if it's darker on the edge. So it feels more three dimensional, like almost a ball. Although it looks kind of fun in here, you can probably guess where you change the color. It's that little part right there, cause that's the color I see being used by. Click there I get a color picker and I'm gonna choose black to add some nice dark shading. The problem is, it doesn't seem to show up sometimes in photo shop, certain features that are there to try to be friendly and useful get in your way. One of those features in this particular case is something called a blending mode. A blending mode, in this case determines how this color that's being applied affects the layer that it's being applied to in screen mode can only brighten things. The opposite of screen mode is called multiply mode, and it can only dark and things, and so I need to change that. So when I changed it, you can see now being applied, and I'm just gonna find tune the size and the capacity to control how dark that is. But then I wanted to feel like it's got even more dimension to it. So let's try another one that we haven't used yet. Let's go down to the letters FX again to the bottom of my screen in In Here there is a choice called Grady int overlay in all radiant overlay does is it replaces the contents of this layer with a Grady int. Integrating is just something that goes from one color to another. It's kind of funny there. Uh, let's take a look. Here's the great and that's being applied. And there's a choice here of what style we want. Linear means. It goes in a straight line, in this case, from the top down, where you can see a lighter color being applied at the toppings. Darker and darker is it goes down. If I click here, though, we have other choices. We have a diamond shape. We have we have. I wanted to go here, reflected, which does it twice. We have an angle, which it goes around like a radar. Who's gonna fund and we have radio, which is what I want, but right now it's adding white in the middle, and it's fading out to black us against towards the edge. I want to change that, and here you determine what's being applied. If you click on this little icon on the side, I'm gonna tell it to go from whatever my current foreground color is to nothing. Checkerboard means nothing, so that means go to whatever is already in this layer. So now we can see that it's applying my foreground color on the outer edge of this image, and it's fading out whatever it was already there in the middle. If I want the opposite of that, there's a little check boxed already turned on, in fact called Reverse, which would have put the color in the opposite spot. And that's what I want. Now I can't really go over here on thing can change my foreground color at the moment to change the color being used, so I need to do something else to edit. This had a planned ahead of time. I could have changed my foreground color before coming in here to add this, and I would have been nice for me to choose the color. But instead, since I have to do it in here, I'm gonna click right on this thing. The thing on the right lets you choose a preset. That's what these are clicking within. The preview actually lets you see what it's made out of. This looks somewhat complicated, but ignore all of it. And just look at this bar right here. That's your radiant in these little square show. You what colors Aaron It Well, you see that color? I'm gonna click on it. If I double click on that little square, I can choose anything I want. And I'm gonna choose a more of a scion ish color that's being used. But this takes a while to get used to. The main thing is, if you go into it, these little squares determine the colors being used. I double click on the squares and I can change them. Well, would have been better for me. It's just choose my foreground color. Before I ever came in here, I can mess with these settings or something called scale. You see how it controls going on? I think something about like that. So I think we're getting a little bit more dimension in there now. I could give, keep going and going with this, adding more and more features, but I'm not gonna. Instead, I'm only gonna add things that we haven't talked about yet. And then I'll show you the end result of my wife, Karen made, which would give you a more refined looking on results. I want the background to look a little different. I would like there to be something other than white back there, because the white looks more like there's a hole where the eyes are that's going back to the white. So I'm gonna go to the bottom of my layers panel. There is a menu we haven't used yet. It's this one here. It's 1/2 black and half white circle. Usually when you click on it, you have a list of different adjustments You could apply. It will end up looking at some of those adjustments later on today, but then, at the very top, there are three special choices, and these would fill your screen with either a solid color, a Grady int or a pattern, and we're going to try out those Let's try the one called solid color. When I choose it, it'll ask me what color to use, and I'm just gonna tell it to use maybe a gray. Just so there's something behind this that makes it so that the I'll separate so the eyeballs don't look the same as the background. Now, when I do that, if you look at my layers panel that created a brand new layer right there, that's called a fill layer and you can see this shade of gray that's being used right there. If I double click on this at any time, it would let me change it. So it's something I can always change at short notice. All they would do is double click on the little sample, the color. Now the next thing I'd like to do is add some texture to the image because just feels too much like blatant shapes. So let's go back down there to the same icon, the half black and half white, one in this time. Instead of choosing solid color, let's choose Pattern Pattern is just a repeating image that, like you, tiling a bathroom wall where it repeats it over and over again. Just hopefully it's a seamless pattern where you can't see the the breaks in between them. If I click here, there are some preset ones. The only thing is the preset ones. They're designed for lower resolution images and there's a setting called Scale here. You might need to bring it up so they don't look microscopic. I'll bring it up to maybe 200 percent. Now, can you see a little bit of that texture? So anyway, let's click through here. As far as we know, these textures come with photo show. I can see if I'm fine. Wanna like? I kind of like the one that looked a little bit like a burlap bag that I saw earlier. Where to go? Come on. It was that one. I'm gonna use that texture and I will click. OK, so now what we have is a layer that is completely filled with a texture. This is what it looks like. And if I ever want to change the texture, all I need to do is double click on this part. If I do, it'll bring me right back to where I Waas and I could change the texture to anything else that like, But I didn't want a blatant texture like this. I wanted a texture that just suddenly applies to the image as a whole. I can do that. But in order to get it to apply to the entire image, I'm gonna need to move this layer to the top of my layers stack. The reason for that is the layers work is if you're standing at the top of the layers panel looking straight down. And so if this texture is near the bottom, all the pieces, all the laters that are sitting above it, are just obstructing your view of the texture. I need to do something to get the texture of the very top of my document. So I'm looking through the texture to the other pieces. So what I'm gonna do here is in my layers panel. I'm gonna click on the name of this layer and I'm gonna drag it up. Once I get to the top of my layers panel, I'll just pause and it should scroll until I get to the very top of my layers stack and I'll let go when I get up there. So right now that texture is completely obscuring our view of everything that's underneath, because if you're standing with the top of the layers panel looking down and you're trying to look through this, but it's opaque, you can't see through it. Two choices and how I could make it so I can see through the first is I could lower the opacity setting. If I lower the opacity, you're going to see less and less of this and more and more of what's under it. So that would be one way or the other thing that I could do is I could change the menu that's right here. That's called the blending mode menu in In determines how the layer you're currently working on interacts with what's under it, and you have a whole bunch of choices in there. All the choices in this general area are pretty good for textures to apply them to what's underneath. Let's try and here's overlay. You see how that supplying the texture but not completely obscuring our view. You're soft light. Here's hard light David Light. All we need to do is cycle through these and see if we can find one that we like knowing that if something's a bit too much, we can always lower the opacity, that layer to make the layers show up less. So I kind of like overlay, and I'll just lower the opacity, bring it down a little bit. So you get the sense for how we're applying a texture that could just as easily be any texture you want being applied to a photograph. Well, question from over here. Yes, awesome. Nicole K would like to know. Can you change the color of the texture? Can I change the color? Not directly in that. The texture that was there was just gray, but I can apply color later on. One way I could do that is with the layer that contains the texture active. Go to the bottom of your layers panel and you remember the letters FX, where we could add drop shadows, strokes and things like that. Well, one of the choices within that is just called color overlay. Color overlay just means put a color on top of whatever is in this layer in when I choose that it wants to know what color to use. I could pick it here. Just click on the little rectangle, I'm gonna pick kind of a mellow, brownish color. And then the problem is, it's set to normal. Normal means that it would completely replace what was in that layer to begin with, meaning we no longer have a texture. We now have a layer that looks like it's full of this color. But one of the choices in here is a choice called color. And what color means is whatever it is I'm applying. In this case, a solid color should affect the color of what's in that layer but shouldn't affect the brightness. And if it can affect the brightness that we should still have that texture, the let me set the color there, so it's not the most straightforward thing. But if we have a texture and a layer, we want to change its color. I went to the bottom of the layers panel clipped in the letters FX, and I choose a choice. It was called color overlay. I chose the color that I wanted by clicking on this little box, and then this menu allowed me to say use this color, but leave the brightness that was in that layer the way it was before, and therefore we still have the texture. So hopefully that answers What, uh, she was talking about now. Um anyway, that is pretty much how we can put this together. If we look at my wife's version of it, I think it's a little bit more refined. She spent a bit more time on it. She made her texture more subtle. But do you see how she has blurry stuff in the background? So let's just do that part of blurry stuff in the background. Here's mine. I'm gonna turn off my texture. It's way too much, especially one sided brown to I want to do something underneath. So I'm gonna scroll down in my layers panel so that I work on something that's underneath, and I'm just going to click right here on the thing called color fill. What happens is if you create a brand new layer like you're going to use this shape tool to create it, Possibly the new layer usually appears directly above whatever it is you were working on. So if I want something to appear below all these body parts, I need to have a layer that's below all the body parts active. And then what I'm gonna do in this case is something we haven't yet. Which is I'm any just paint on a layer freeform painting to create a brand new empty layer, one that doesn't contain anything at all. You click on this icon here just to the left of the trash. If you watch my layers panel directly above the layer that I'm working on should appear a new layer. There it is. If you look at the thumbnail for the new layer, that's nothing in it, because checkerboard indicates that something's empty. And I'm gonna now go to my tool panel and I'm gonna grab the paintbrush now. Any time you use something like a paintbrush or the text tool or the shape tool, you need to know what color to apply. And that's usually gonna be your foreground color. So I'm going to click on my foreground color, and I'm gonna choose maybe a brownish color. Then before you paint with the paint brush tool, you need to tell it how big of a brush and what kind of edge should be on that brush. And you do that just like with any tool where after you have clicked on the tool, the options for that particular tool. They always span the top of your screen. So there, across here and right there is a preview of my brush, and if I click on this, it will let me change its settings. We haven't really used brushes yet, so let's just take a quick look with default. Setting is the first time you choose a brush. It'll be a round brush, and here you controls how big it is with the size setting. And if this edge of it has a soft edge or a hard edge by adjusting the hardness setting. Or you can go below that and choose a preset, and with presets, you can get weird shaped brushes. It looks like blades of grass or leaves or various effects in here. I'm gonna stick for now, since where the fundamentals class with just simple round brushes, you gotta get started with something. To be honest, I never used this pop up that's here. Never because there are keyboard shortcuts for changing the size and the hardness in since you have to paint with a brush so much Photoshopped to do a lot of different things. You'll get used to this similar getting used to typing command T to transform things. So let me share with you the keyboard shortcuts for changing the size and hardness All right on your keyboard, in the upper right, right near the return or enter key are the square bracket keys. They look like to kind of half squares. If I press the right bracket key. If you look at my brush, you'll find each time I press the right bracket, my brush gets bigger. You'll also see in the options bar at the top of my screen. There's a number that shows up here, which is how many pixels my brushes in size. You'll find that number changing as I get this larger or smaller. Then you can see in that preview also, if it has a hard edge or a soft edge. This is a soft edge because you can see that it's not Chris badged here. To change that, I use the same two keys, the brackets and I add this shift key. So right now I have shift held down and I'll press the right bracket key. You see it becoming a harder edge in the preview or on the left bracket key. So that's one way of changing your brush. Size is to use the square bracket keys and then hold down shift. If you want to change how soft the edges and use the same square bracket keys. The one problem with that is the preview you're getting of how soft the edges is that tiny. And when you're changing how soft the edges, I think you have a total of five settings. You have 100% 50 25 0. That's all you got. So here's an alternative method that they added in the newest versions of Federer shop that wouldn't be available if you had a much older version. And that is I'm gonna hold down to special keys on my keyboard. The two keys I'm holding down at the moment, Uh, and this will be different for Mac or Windows on a Macintosh. I'm holding down the control key and the option key. The control key is not a key used very often on the Mac control and options on Windows. The control key on a Mac is the equipment to the right mouse button and windows. So what that means is the equivalent to this is holding on the ultra key on Windows in pressing the right mouse button. All right, muscles. Kinda hard to remember. You have to write it down on the Mac. It's really because the two keys are right next to each other, so it's easy to just put your two fingers down. But now, if I drag one direction, which is vertical, I'm gonna change how hard the edge of my brushes and it's not stuck a 25% increments. I can get to a really fine control over it. If I drag the opposite direction, which is horizontally, I'm gonna change her big. My brushes in the red that's in there simply shows you a preview of how soft the edge would be. And so that's one method I could use for changing my brush size. So I'm painting with my foreground color, which is kind of a greenish brown. I've got a big, soft edged brush, and I'm just gonna paint some blobs in the background. Ah, that's not soft enough. I don't think it's got will choose undo. I'll get a softer edge. All the way up there. Smaller brush about like that. I was gonna put some blobs in the background like this. I don't want those blobs to completely show up, though, so I'm gonna lower the opacity of this layer. The top of my layers panel click on the word opacity. Dragon left. It'll take whatever's in that layer and make it show up less and less. So now I got a little bit more varied background. I can also draw shapes in there, and there's a setting in the properties for the shape number. That little side panel that showed up where you can actually soften it. Uh, so you can have a softer edge. So my wife's here. You see how she drew with Brown in the background, like right here. And then this is a shape from the shape tool that she brought up the harness on. She also did a little bit in the middle that we're not gonna do. Ah, the little hair part up here that was just using the shape, tool and going to the shape, custom shape, tool and the shape she used look like a plant or some flames. I don't remember either this one looks like a plant or one of the others that has a similar shape. Ah, and she just threw it and put it underneath the body so that it looked like a little that hair had been one of eye popping with questions. Go for eso camera. Mom would like to know says I don't have as many shapes. Where did you get them all? But she doesn't have as many shapes. Where did I get them all? What's happening is when she's using the shape tools. She did not most likely have this right up here set a new layer where it create a new layer every single time. She used her shape. Instead, it was probably set to this where each time she used this shape tool, it added to the later she already had in so that the individual shape showed up on one layer instead of on separate layers. So this was most likely what she had to set differently than what I did. I think she meant when you go to your shape presets, great presets. Okay, win the shaped all the shapes. I understand when you go to the custom shape tool up here and you have all these. If you don't see all of these, I reset my preferences. So I hope this is what you'd usually see. If for some reason you don't, you can go to the upper, right There's a little gear and you can load even Mawr. You can choose all you can choose Animals, arrows, banners, film shapes, all sorts of different things in here. And if I choose all I'll say OK, it will replace all this stuff. Ah, no, I don't want to save. And this must be all of them. Them? I don't know if I didn't know that I had them all loaded. When I reset my preferences in Photoshopped, it must not have reset this list. So anyway, you go to the upper right Once you've clicked on this little drop down with shapes and here you can load in mawr. And if you want to get every single one of these, you could you could choose all to get them all. Let me reset my shapes which should show me what you would get with deep by default. Okay? You don't get that many. So when I reset photo shop said to it's default. It didn't resurface parts, so they were asking. That solves a question. Thank you. All right, So anyway, hopefully that gives you a sense for how I can use this with multiple layers in build something from scratch instead of having to deal with photographs, we could make logos. We make all sorts of things, and we can take away from shapes. We can add two shapes where we can have it create new layers now a couple things that can make it easier to work with with. This is a couple little tips when using the move tool. One thing is going to mess this up, though in this particular case is my pattern that is on top because it fills the entire screen. It thinks that the top most layer fills the entire screen is gonna mess it up. So I'm gonna turn off the eyeball in that temporarily when I show you this. Remember when you were in the move tool? I mention this only once, very briefly. That's why I want to mention again. There's a choice at the top called Auto Select, and if you don't have that turned on you have to click on the layer. You'd like to move in your layers panel before you start dragging around. But if you turn on auto select when you click, it will grab the top most layer that contains something there and allow you to move it. And so, if you want to be able to very quickly move things around with move tool Auto Select could be really nice to have turned on one of things about using that feature called Auto Select. You have to be in the move tool and you turn it on Is that if you want to move more than one layer, hold down the shift key shift in photo shop often means work on more of something. So right now I've just clicked on this area here. I'm gonna hold shift and I'm gonna click on this area. Watch the layers panel. You see how now both are selected so I could move them both so I can shift. Click a lot of these things to get a bunch of these layers moving around if I want to. And if you just let go of shift and then click, it'll just get one layer. So that's something that I find to be helpful. Eso shift clicking when you have auto select layer turned on when you're done using out of select layer than turn that off because I find it gets in my way, I'll click and I'll accidentally make a layer that I didn't expect to be active. Other things is in your layers panel when you're done, if you think anybody else will ever use this document or you are going to come back to it and you might be confused as to what are all these layers? Well, to change the name of a layer. Just come over here in the layers panel and double click on it and I can call this beak. No, that's I do it. Hit tab. I can call this I balm tab cycles between the layers. That's the same key we used in Bridge when we were renaming files and went to the next trial. The next file it was Tab. So go in here and be nice to yourself in Name your layers when you're done. I'm just double clicked on one to start naming it, and then I'm hitting Tab to go to the next one until I get all these and therefore, when you come back to it in future might be a little easier to Cypher What it is you have. One final thing about this particular project is if I come back to this, it just might be too many layers to look at. Sometimes they want to organize my layers more, and so let's see if weaken organize these so dust doesn't look so busy in our layers panel. I'm gonna click on the bottom. Most layer that makes up our all the bottom most layer that actually makes up the all is the hair. Then I'm going to scroll to the top. Most layer that makes up the all, which is the beak, and I'll hold down, shift and click on it. So I get all the layers in between and then I never do this from the menu. But I know what there is a choice for it. Here it is group layers. The keyboard shortcut for grouping layers is very easy to remember. It's logical. One command G for group control GM windows, and what it does is when I grew players together watching my layers panel. It's gonna put him in a folder, see Little folder. I can double click on the name of the folder and call it all. And now all those layers are inside that little folder. There's a little arrow next to it, and if I click on the arrow, it will expand it to show you all the layers that are inside. If I click on the triangle again, it will collapse it so I don't see the individual layers it's made out of. And what's nice is when that folder, which is called a group, is active. And that's all that's active. If I used my move tool, it moves everything that's inside of it. So I don't have to select them all again and that kind of stuff. Or I can expand that folder by clicking the arrow, and I can work on any individual layer, just like I have in the past. It's just if I have the folder itself active. Whatever I dio. If I typed command T to transform, for instance, when the folder itself is active, it's gonna take every single layer that's in there in transforming an Internet to selectable and so sometimes putting things in folders can be nice. I'm gonna take these two. I'll take command G. That is what groups them. Put them in a folder. I'll call it background. So I might simple find my layers like that if I have an overly complex document so that the next time I get into it, I don't get overwhelmed the moment I look at my layers panel instead, it's a little bit easier to digest, and I just need to expand them. You can tell which layers air inside the folder in which ones aren't. You'll notice that the layers air indented so that they line up with the name of the folder. That's where they begin. If they weren't in that folder, it would look like this one, where it's not indented in the way I created. Those is a first selected the layers I wanted to put into it, and then I either went to the layer menu, and that's where I found a choice called group layers. I don't have any layers selected right now, so it's great out or I typed command G. The group. Yeah, I tried to use the move tool right now complain because it doesn't know what I want to move. Nothing's active, all right,