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Social Media Promo Project

Lesson 50 from: Practical Adobe Photoshop Basics

Khara Plicanic

Social Media Promo Project

Lesson 50 from: Practical Adobe Photoshop Basics

Khara Plicanic

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Lesson Info

50. Social Media Promo Project

Lessons

Class Trailer
1

Class Introduction

08:02
2

Tips for Success

05:53
3

How To Undo Mistakes

06:05
4

Adobe Workspace

16:01
5

Using The Brush Tool

03:33
6

Using The Zoom Tool

04:25
7

Adobe Preferences

02:27
8

Correcting Exposure

19:15

Lesson Info

Social Media Promo Project

let's now take our same pattern and we're gonna mock it up into other different scenarios. So in this case, we have this shirt and we are going Teoh, place the pattern into the shirt. We could do that on the black shirt, and that would be fine. But often times I mean, the reality is when you work with designs and you're creating mock ups, you often want to be able to change the color, too. And that's fine. We're going to do that. But in order to do that, we need T Need to change some things about this shirt, because when it's black like this, we can't shift the color or fill in a color. Really, Um, and maintain any of the texture and folds in the shirt because it's just black. So if we want added color to this, we have to not have it be black, and we're going to do that by making a levels adjustment. So first we're going to select the shirt, which is easy enough with the quick selection brush. But I've already done it because there's some navigating to be done around the fingers, so I ...

spared you the time but will come up to select menu and choose load selection and for channel will choose shirt. Remember that when we saved selections and Photoshopped they get saved as Alfa channels. So that's what this is referring to. Channel and I've named it shirt, so we'll click OK, and we're going Teoh, create the adjustment with our friend the Levels Command. And of course, we'll do it non destructively by using adjustment layers so will come down here and click and choose levels. And we see here are levels and I need to basically make this just lighter so we can see more tones in here to be able to change the color. So I'm just gonna grab the Midtown slider and drag it to the left so we can see the shadows and highlights a little bit more. So that's pretty simple. Okay, then I'm gonna change the color of all of that by bringing in a, uh, hue saturation adjustment layer so we can load the selection back by repeating what we did the select menu and choosing load. Or we also have that same selection here in the layer mask we just created, so we can just load it back in a jiffy by holding down command or control and clicking on the layer mask, and that will reload the selection. When will come down to the adjustment layer button again, click and we will choose hue saturation. And now we can click this cull arise option. But remember that if we click, this colorized option photo shop will just fill in with our choice of Hughes. So you can decide what you want this to be. Maybe kind of like a nice blue or greenish color. Maybe Google back Lika. I like the green. You can adjust the saturation. You want to tone it down, berating it up. So just do something kind of mellow. Maybe like that, and I'll close that. Okay, so we have our original image. We selected the shirt. We did a levels adjustment, which brightened it up so that we could shift it. We had to do that. Otherwise, if we just did this hue saturation shift by by itself, you can see that it's barely noticeable because anything that's pure black, you can't shift it. It's just black, so we had to brighten it up so we can shift it and getting green. Okay, now we're ready to put the pattern in. So again, we need our selection. So I'll command or control click on one of these masks. I will go back down here to the adjustment layer icon down here and shoes again. Pattern. Now, this time, the 100% scale is looking way too big for this document. That pattern, the tiles air so big that it's, like, bigger than her whole shirt. So make sure we have the pattern that we want selected and will come up here to the scale setting. And I'm just going to scale that down. Not quite that small. Maybe something in the 50 56% range. And remember that as long as we have this open, we can move our cursor here and shift the surround within the design. So I kind of like this big thing over here on this left hand side, but we can, you know, shifted around, tell you like it, and when we're happy with it will click. OK, and then maybe we'll change the blend mode here from normal to not multiply. What did I choose before screen overlay? Um, I forgot to mention that you can cycle through these blend modes in a couple of different ways, and this is a super handy trick. So this is a perfect example of when you might want to do this. You on a Mac, it's a little more complicated. So PC people first, you would just click in here to select normal. And then you get to just use your arrow keys on your keyboard and just spin through this huge long list to preview what all those most likely on a Mac. It's annoyingly more complicated. You have to have the move tool handy. This is so weird. You have to have the move tool, and then you use your keyboard and you press shift plus and then you can scroll through. We're going to be kind of limited because we're talking about a design that has a white pattern, and we're putting it on a darker background. So a lot of these just won't work or they'll just looked like normal. Soft light is really nice and subtle, but, ah, we're back. We are back, Teoh, basically where we started. So once you get to the end, it'll just repeat and you're back to normal. So basically all of the layer, all of the blend modes for this particular combination of white on top of her blouse. They all look like normal or they look like just normal reduced. So I think I'll just stick with normal, and we'll just maybe drag it down a little. So it's not again glowing on her shirt. Okay, so, uh, that's close. We're, like, pretty close. But if we want to be persnickety about it, or if you have dreams of mocking up more things on more shirts, the whole thing is they need to look more real. This shirt. I think we could leave it like this, and it's probably fine because her shirts like Pretty just flat. It's not having like, a ton of folds. And our design is also such that it's not really hitting on the folds that she has in such a way that it makes a big difference. But wouldn't it be cool if we could make the pattern look like it's wrapping around the folds? It turns out that we can, but we need to create a template to use toe warp it, in essence, so that whole thing is called a displacement map. So what I'm gonna dio is turn off all these layers, temporarily click the background layer, and I don't know if this has changed over the years, but back in my day, the displacement maps, maps had to be you black and white. Maybe that's changed. I don't know. We can experiment on our own time later for that. But we're gonna press. I'm just gonna do a quick dis accurate to make this black and white looking. So I'll press command, shift you or control, shift you to just de saturate that I might actually keep the levels on because otherwise there's nothing to really displaced because you can't see the folds. So to see the full, they'll keep the levels adjustment turned on. Okay, so we're looking at this image. It's black and white. It's got the levels adjustment. Now we're going to save this as something called a displacement map. So we'll choose file save, as put it someplace we can find it. So somewhere we have our little folder that we've been saving some things in us, and I'm just gonna call it map and I'll save it as a PSD, so I click safe. Now I can undo all of the stuff that I just did and return back to where we were. OK, so we temporarily got rid of everything except the shirt and the levels adjustment. We made it black and white. We saved it as a map. Now, in order to affect this design, I need to rast arise this because I can't run the displacement filter. I don't think on a pattern adjustment layer like this, because there's nothing really actually there. So I'm gonna take, um this pattern layer and I'm gonna rast arise it to do that. All right, click and shoes. Rast, Arise Lear That just turned it into pixels. Now I can do stuff like warp it or displace it to do this. Then we'll go to the filter menu and shoes distort, Displace. So what's happening is the tonal values of her shirt. The highlights and the shadows will be used to displace the pattern essentially like warping it, based on whether it's a shadow or highlight. So a hit displaced. We have to enter a value here, like how much do we want to displace it? And you really have to experiment and try different things. The higher the numbers you put here, the more extreme the distortion. So I don't even remember what worked in my testing of this. So I'm just gonna type in 30 and see what happens. 10 is what it always says by default, but I know that there is. It doesn't do a whole lot of her shirts, not super full. Be so for you to just even see what's happening. I'm going to try to exaggerate it. We'll see if it works, we'll leave stretch to fit and repeat edge pixels, and we'll hit. Okay, Now it's gonna ask us what we want to use for the distortion map. Well, we creative file for this purpose called Map, so I'll select it and click of Open. And it did it. And now it's like, really anti climactic. But let me do you see what it did? A little. It's basically, and this image is really quite grainy, actually. So that's why we're getting this grainy look. But it's putting her putting this design on the actual shirt. So this is super handy. If you were like, let's say you were gonna put a design going to do mock it up on like a burlap bag. There's a lot of texture in the burlap bag, and it should be slightly warping the design. So you this would be one technique to make that happen. I think this was maybe a little much, but you can see how it adjusted it for Blake around the folds and things. Um, I think it was too much, so I would undo that, and I'll just return back and tried again. We'll do filter, distort, displaced. And maybe this is a case where the 10 is plenty or maybe even five, and we'll click. OK, choose the map click open. That's probably a little better, so it's very subtle and, yeah, it's really subtle. You can kind of see it down here. It's getting a little curved, so it's more noticeable on shirts where there's a lot of folds and a lot of mock ups will choose images. People who are selling these kinds of designs choose images with a lot of folds, cause then when you mock it up on an image with fold that really looks riel, when you distort it, when you displace it like that. So, um and that just looks really cool. But in this case, we have this image. So that's what we're working with. Okay, so that was filter distort. We have a question. Yeah, just curious. People who design, for example, cloth and everything uses thistle. And they applies this to text deals, for example. Well, ceramics or anything? Noise, cubing. I mean, you can some of them might. If you are making a living as a pattern designer, you are probably using something like illustrator where there is ah, whole panel and a whole tool kit for creating patterns. So it's a little more robust, and it's actually over the years. It's changed quite a bit, and it removes a lot of the trial and error. But in photo shop, um, it's a little more trial and error. So this is how you do it in photo shop? If you're doing this all the time making your living from designing patterns, you might wanna look at illustrator for that. Yeah, so it just kind of depends. There are. This is one of the areas where Photoshopped overlaps a little bit with illustrator um, this and simple vector stuff but illustrator is still a whole separate animal. Um, and Photoshopped and illustrator are not competitors. They're quite different programs, but they do overlap a bit, which is nice, because if you are a Photoshopped person, but you just want to, like, try your hand at a pattern for a specific project, you can do it in photo shop. You don't have to, like, learn illustrator for that one thing. So it's nice that they overlap a little bit, But obviously, depending on the work that you're doing, you always want to choose whatever tool is going to be the best. So you want to keep that in mind? All right, let's pop over to our last example here where we're gonna put some word art on this coffee cup. And, um, this is another just fun mock up. So some of this will be review, but also slightly, a little bit different. I was gonna put some word art on here, So just talking about smart objects and how we use them in in this case, this is another example. So I'm going to grab the shape tool again. Just the rectangle shape tool, and I'll set it up here in the options bar so that it is set to shape, not path or pixels. Just shape the fill color. Doesn't matter because, as you saw in the previous example, I just used Brown because it went well with seen without being jarring. But ultimately it's going to get replaced with your artwork. So in this case, maybe I'll just choose like mint green, because we'll see it. Um, And it won't look too obnoxious for our eyes while we're working. So I'm just going to now click and drag out some sort of shape that is the same sort of scale. Is this coffee cup? So about like this? I mean, you could go all the way down to if we wanted to fill this with the pattern, Then we should probably go all the way down. So let's just do that. So we have this almost square, but not quite. Then remember, we want to change this to a smart object before we do anything else. So I'm gonna come in my layers panel and all mouse over here and right, click or control, click and choose. Convert to smart object. Now, any distortions that we do to this to wrap it around the cup will be remembered and applied to any designs that we would want to put in here, so to bring up free transform. Actually, before we do that to be able to see the coffee cup behind this layer, I'm gonna temporarily reduce the opacity because we're gonna be transforming this to wrap it around the cup. And I need to see, like, what's happening and where it's going. So I'm temporarily lowering the PSA pass ity. Okay, Now we'll bring up free transform. So command or control teeth, And this time, instead of right clicking and choosing or control clicking and choosing distort, which is what I usually do. In this case, we're gonna warp it because we're curving it around the mug and we don't have to warp it much, which is kind of a bummer, because it's fun. It's fun when you work on like something that you get to really warp. So this is sort of a little anticlimactic, but this is also reality. Sometimes it's not that big of a of a transformation, but I'll come down here and choose warp. And remember when we put the tiger we cut out the tiger, we put him on top of the surfboards. Warp was how we sort of wrapped him. So he was like on the surfboards instead of perfectly like the rock that we took him from. So here we are again at warp. So this is a good review of all of these things. Now that we have this loaded, this is basically a mesh that's on top of our smart object. So we can take the corners and just drag them to the top of the design here or where the I don't know if this is a sleeve or if this is a coffee cup that has, like, two tones going on, we'll just pretend it's a sleeve and we're designing a sleeve. So we need this to follow the line of the sleeve so I can take these little handles and pull them down to curve exactly to the curve of that sleeve. And then these corner points here, I'll bring this in to where I can't see it. But I'm going to guess the corners rate about there and bring this one in, and we have it a little boat out here, so I'll fix that by taking these handles and pulling them in. So this is a grid and it's got these points. And then it's got handles, just like what we saw when we were drawing with the pen tool and I made that cloud and we were pulling. We were pulling things with it. So the handles here work the same way, so I'll pull this. Pull this in, and now I need to curve it out at the bottom. So we'll grab these handles and just pole until it's lined up here with the edge. So this is a really subtle transformation. It's not like groundbreaking or earth shattering, but that's what this document calls for. So when we're happy with it will press, enter or click this check Mart to commit that transformation, and it does not have to be perfect. It just has to be close enough that when we distort the artwork that the artwork looks realistically like it belongs there. So now we can restore this back to 100% and now we're ready to put our artwork in. So remember that this is a smart object, so to put anything in it, we double click the thumbnail right here in the layers panel. So I double click it. And now we get this mind blowing like fifth Dimension who were in a new document that came, like, out of nowhere, seemingly. And we can hide this because we don't need it, so we'll just turn it off and we'll go get the artwork to put in here. So in the course files, for those of you who are giving the course and get the course files, it's in a separate folder called Word Art. Here I have it in my library, so I'm just going to click it and drag it and drop it into the space. And it says, Reusable is beautiful And I thought, That's great because I don't like when I see disposable coffee cups, so we'll pretend that that's like a reusable sleeve. Maybe it is, um, so this actually fits, like right on the money. It looks like if we wanted Teoh, I could scale this down by holding shift to keep in proportional, and I'll add alter or option to scale from both sides inward just so that I make sure we're not cutting any of this off and then I'll approve that. And I can decide if I want this to be sort of in the middle of this document or at the top. I don't know. I don't know where is gonna look best We can adjust it later and I'll show you how we do that. So we'll just say that that looks good. So again, we just saved this. We don't even worry where we just hit Commander Control s save it, Commander. Control W close it. Now, here it is in our peace. And obviously it has a problem where it's appearing on her hand. No problem, because we know how to use layer masks. So before we do that, let's just change the blend mode to multiply. So multiply is ah, good blend mode that you use a lot when you're wanting something to appear like it's really on something else. So it lets us see through it a little bit. If there's any texture in there, it will show through, and it just looks a little more realistic. Maybe we want to just the capacity. Probably not. Um, but we do need to mask it, so we'll come down here to the bottom of the layers panel and click that little mask button that some people think looks like a camera. Click on that. Well, press B to get our brush tool. And remember that masks work by black paint on the mask blocks. Whatever is on that layer from showing. Right. So if we want to cover up this part where the letters are on top of her fingers, we want to block that, we're gonna paint with black. So I've got black Pete, I've got my brush. I'll make it smaller by pressing the left bracket key. That's the key next to the letter P. And my brush, I can see is very soft. If I look up here, I can I could see that. So I wanna harden it a little bit. So I'll hold down shift and just press the right bracket key a few times. Remember that up here. That's what's happening. Shift left and right. Bracket key is adjusting our hardness and the left and right bracket keys by themselves are adjusting the size. All right, so now that I've screwed that up, let me do this over. Okay? And now I'll just paint with black anyplace where that needs to disappear from. And if I go too far, leg loops. Then of course, you compress Commander Control Z. Or maybe you don't realise that till later. Then you just press X to exchange your foreground background. Swatch. So now we have white on top and guess what you can paint held back with white, which is pretty awesome. So masking is is similar to erasing, except that it's salvageable. If you make a mistake, you can change it later. Or if, let's say we take this type player and now we decide we want to move it down. We would maybe need to change the mask so it gives you that flexibility. So what if we did want to move this down? Well, we could. In this case, we might be. We'll just grab the move tool. We'd want toe unlinked the mask so the mask stays where it is. Oops. Target the design, not the mask, but the design itself. And then we could We could move it if we go too far, will have to adjust the mask, but we could do that. But because this object is loosely warped to fit around the mug. Ah, better choice would be to just edit the smart object itself. So to do that, we just double click the smart object again. Double click right here. We're back to this file and I can use my move tool and just click and drag down. Maybe we wanted in the center of that whole area. Then we just save it again. Close it. And now it's here. Now we have to just the mask because obviously that doesn't look good, but I think it looked better up at the top. So I compress toe, undo that a few times. Um, commander controls the only undies and re does the last thing. So to go back multiple times you hold down command or control and alter option C. Or, of course, we have our history panel here, so you can always go back to the history panel and go back all the way like that. But I think I'll just I think this was good. I liked it like up there. Maybe even in fact, I might even move it up. So I double clicked the smart, uh, object, and I'll just move it up. I think it should be up a little higher. I'll save it. Close it and it's updated. So that's what's so great about those smart objects is that you are able to maintain sort of a document within a document, and it just it makes it easier to edit. It makes it easier to do these sort of mock ups. So if I maybe I make a whole bunch of these designs and I want to mock up something else in here, I don't wanna have to recreate the warp distortion. I can just take my design and replace it in the smart object, and it will automatically update and replace right there. So what questions Dio do the folks at home have cause Mark ups can be fun, but little mind. Warby at first could carry Use the crop tool to edit the smart object to make it straighter across. If she wanted to top told smart, I wonder if she means, like, make it narrower, you could. They mean the answer is yes, you could crop the smart object. It's just a is just a document, right? So I mean we can document, like straightening the rolling the words Um Well, in that case, you wouldn't mean to crop it. You would just go back to the smart object again by double clicking right here. This little icon which will open that document within a document. And you could just then press command or control t to bring up free transform. And again, if you hover your cursor in the corner, you get that fabulous macaroni noodle with the double headed arrow, and you could just click and drag to spin it. So if you wanted it straight, you could do that. Um and I don't remember if I made it crooked or like I must've because the font doesn't just become crooked. Yeah, I made that crooked, but I can't. I liked it that way. So But you maybe you want a more or less cricket, you could just rotate it with free transform. If that's hopefully that answers her question. We had a question from Jim Sanders, who was wondering what you used to what product you used to create the word art. So is that something you made in photo shop for me? Not ever design you bet. And guess what? This is the same Funt that we played with earlier when we did our lemonade, How to make the best lemonade or whatever our example was way back two segments ago. I guess when we worked on this file, this was the before the before version. But we took that fund and we used all the glitz and the glyphs panel to convert all of these letters into fancy letters. And it was beautiful. And that is the same Funt that you see here. It's called Suki Squash, and, um, these fun characters can all be found by using the glyphs panel. So you definitely want to check out the section on type where we covered all of that, right? Yeah, it's super fun. I can't talk about type all day. I know I love it so much, but yeah, absolutely any final questions in studio lots to learn. Are there any other questions about any of the other? I mean, a like review type of? Well, I think. Okay, let me say Kristen, More questions. Air coming in. Okay, lie, Krysten says. What is the purpose of the linking a mask to an image when it is on the same layer? Well, that's a good question. We saw that a little bit. When we try to move this, if they're linked, that means that I can move the layer and the mask will stick with it. So maybe we've masked this because we decide we don't want it to say beautiful. We wanted to say beautiful, whatever. That's a really bad example. But sometimes you mask things because you want to just get rid of something that is on that ob that layer. Sometimes you mask things because you want to change the way that that layers interacting with the rest of your graphic. In this case, we're masking it to hide it from her fingers so we wouldn't want the mask to come with it because her fingers are here. So in that case, we'd want Teoh unlinked this cause me, we we want to adjust this, maybe pull it over. Now, if I go too far, I have to re mask it. But maybe we're just adjusting it like this a little bit, so the mask stays the same, and we can just talk this a little bit further, so sometimes you want it to be linked on. Sometimes you don't so It's nice that we have the ability to turn that link on and off. One thing you just want toe notice or keep be aware of, I guess, is when you're on this Lear. Just because you've selected this layer doesn't mean you've selected the mask. Um, so if you're ever in a situation where you just want to move the mask itself, then you'd want unlinked this and actually click on the mask and then you can just I mean, this is all it is. It's hiding stuff, right? So we can just move it around wherever we want to hide stuff. But it's in this case. It doesn't apply to much, but there's definitely times where you want to move them independently, so it's a nice option to half

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Photoshop Keyboard Shortcuts
Photoshop Resource Guide
Practical Photoshop Basics (PS action file)
Word Art
Course Files

Ratings and Reviews

Kim Williams
 

I tuned into this class hoping to glean what I cold since it was free. I ended up purchasing the class because it is FILLED with so much great information in a fun and easy to understand format. Khara is an amazing instructor - I thoroughly enjoyed every minute. Worth EVERY penny. Thank you Creative Live for offering such great material, at even more amazing prices.

smurfy
 

What an unbelievable teacher Khara is. I have wanted to learn photoshop forever but was intimidated, overwhelmed, then I watched this course. OMG I learnt so much, more then I imagined. I am so excited now to start using Photoshop, I can't wait to try out everything she taught us. With the skills we learnt over these two days I think this course provides everything I need to know to feel and more. She was outstanding, the absolute perfect teacher for someone who has never ever used Photoshop. Also great moderation by Kenna. Thank you for this awesome, amazing, wonderful course. I am sure anyone who watches this course will agree it is incredible. I couldn't recommend it more. This course was just Smurfy!

Roz Fruchtman
 

I would highly recommend Khara Plicanic's Practical Adobe Photoshop Basics. The name of the class, implies that the class is for beginners, but that's not exactly true. Most of us learn Photoshop by the features we need to know at any given time. As many will agree, there are a number of ways to get to the same end. I can only speak for myself, but... I would bet that many of us don't know all the strategies that are taught in this class! Check it out, I doubt you'd be disappointed! Khara brings a fun and relatable approach to everything she does. She is very entertaining, while being a superb instructor. Last, but not least... This class brings with it a ton of useful bonuses. Warm Regards, Roz Fruchtman aka @RozSpirations

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