Create a Movie Poster with Multiple Characters in GIMP

hello and welcome back to another tutorial my name is mike davies and in this video i'll be showing you how to create a movie poster with multiple characters using i'll be using version 2.10.22 which is the latest version of at the time of this tutorial before i get into that don't forget to check out my website at daviesmediadesign.com as always i have tons of and inkscape tutorials on here you can get more by becoming a dmd premium member and i have tons of free software help articles so definitely check that out you can enroll in my gym 2.10 masterclass from beginner to pro photo editing on udemy you can enroll in any of my skillshare classes by visiting gimpschool.com and as i mentioned you can get more with a premium membership to davies media design and i'll include a link to this as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video i'll be using a series of free stock photos from unsplash for this tutorial you can just click this little down arrow i went with the large size for all of these i'll also be using this free font from google fonts just click download family i do have a tutorial on how to download and install fonts for and it does use google fonts so if you're not sure how to do that check out that video here is the final result so i've gotten a lot of requests for this tutorial where you have multiple characters inside the movie poster so for starters you're going to want to open each individual image into and you can do that by going to file open and just search for the file on your computer in my case i can go to file open recent and i can choose from any of the photos that i opened recently for example let's just go with this first photo here and it might ask you to convert this to gimp's native srgb color space i'll hit convert so i did erase the background of all these images ahead of time as you can see here but coming back to the original the way i did this is using the quick mask tool i do have an entire tutorial dedicated to how to use that quick mask tool if you want to check that out but this is going to be the final result you get as you can see i do have a layer mask on here so once we have the background removed on all of our images we're going to want to create the actual composition for the poster so i'll go to file new and i'm going to change the units in my case to inches and there are a variety of different file sizes for a poster design but in my case i'll go with 11 by 17. that's one of the many standard dimensions you can use for a poster and then i'll click the advanced options drop down and for the x and y resolution i'm going to set this to 300 and hit the tab key if you're planning to print this you'll probably want to set this between 300 or 400 ppi and then finally for the background color i'm going to fill this with white and click ok you may get this warning message here saying this is going to be a pretty large file type to begin with pretty large file size i should say so just click ok and so long as you don't have a super slow computer should be able to handle making this once we have our blank poster created we're going to want to start dragging assets into our poster design so let's start with the main person here which is going to be this woman here with the curly hair so i'll start by clicking and dragging that tab over here to the tab of the blank poster and drag it on top here and release that's going to drag and drop my image without the background on top of our poster design next what i'll do is hit shift s or come over here and grab the scale tool from the toolbox and now i'm just going to scale this up and i do want to make sure if i come over here to interpolation that this is set to either no halo or low halo that may require some more time in order to scale this up but it will produce a better result and so i'm just going to scale the photo of the model up until basically she's nice and centered here and her elbow and her hand or just inside of the poster boundaries there and i'll come over here and click scale so there is the first actress or the first model here in the poster let's bring in the second person so that's going to be the guy here so we'll do the same thing we'll just click and drag him over to our blank poster composition and release and in his case i don't really like that he's facing to the right so i'll flip him over so that he's facing the other way i can do that using the shift f key which will bring up the flip tool make sure that the transform mode is set to layer and the direction is horizontal and if i hover my mouse over this you'll see a set of arrows there on my mouse pointer so now when i click on this it'll flip them over and then i can hit the m key to grab my move tool move this over into place and we can adjust the size of this guy later but for now let's click and drag him below the first model there in the stacking order and now we have our second guy now let's come over here and bring over the second actress the second hypothetical actress but i'll just click and drag her over here on top of our poster and release so this photo is a lot smaller so i'll hit shift s once again that'll bring up the scale tool and now i'm just going to scale this photo up and you want to minimize the amount of times you're scaling these photos because they will lose quality each time you scale them up or down so we'll go with about right there and hit scale and we'll drag the final actress below the actor there so i'll hit the m key and we can work on repositioning everybody something else i like to do is bring in a center guide so i'll go to image guides new guide by percent we'll change the direction to vertical make sure this is set to 50 which is going to be 50 and i'll click ok and now we have a center guide this allows us to just sort of see where the center of the composition is and adjust everybody to that center so maybe it looks a bit more even all right so that looks fine for now what i'll do next is i'm going to blend all the characters together so part of that is going to be erasing some parts that are sticking out another part is going to be adding some highlight to each of the characters so that they stand out against each other as well as against the background so let's start with erasing some parts here of the model that for example are poking out right here so what i'll do is come over here to the actor layer and let me just double click on this and name this actor and maybe we'll come over here lead actress and then rename this one by double clicking supporting actress that way we know who everybody is so we'll come up to the actor layer right click and go to add layer mask this is going to be a non-destructive way of erasing some of these portions down here so we'll go with white full opacity and click add so there we have a layer mask in the shape of our layer right here and now i'll come up and grab my paint tool so anytime you paint black on a layer mask which i'll change my foreground color to right now that's going to erase those pixels anytime you paint white it's going to show those pixels so in this case we're trying to erase these pixels down here so now you'll see that when i paint over those those will disappear and we can always bring those back if we need to and also what i did here is i sort of made this blend a bit better by just painting some of the left side there so that's going to be fine for now let's move on to the supporting actress so here you'll see this part looks a bit clunky so i'll right click add layer mask we'll go with white and click add and then i'm just going to you might want to increase the size my harness is set to 50 you can decrease the hardness for more fading and just sort of help these areas here fade out a bit like so and if you don't like something you can switch over to white and just paint it back in if you don't like the way it was erased and then hit the x key and that'll switch over to black so that's going to be fine for now i think i made this one too big so i'm going to click on the main layer there so clicking off the layer mask shift s to grab the scale tool and now we're just going to scale this one in a bit because i think she's too big right now just relative to everybody else because she is in the back so she should be a bit smaller there and i'll click scale hit the m key and we can move her slightly there all right so that looks fine for now now we need to add some highlight behind each of the actors so that they sort of stand out against one another so i'll start with a highlight behind the main actress so what i'll do is create a new layer and i'll name this highlight one we're going to fill this with transparency and click ok and we'll move this up to above the actor layer grab the paintbrush tool switch over to white and we're going to have a pretty large brush and make sure it's set to a pretty low hardness and so we're just going to paint like so around the outline of our main actress there and we can probably get rid of this guide by grabbing the move tool and moving that out of the way we can bring it back later if we want to but i'll grab my paint brush tool again hold ctrl use my mouse wheel to zoom in and then decrease the size of the brush so there's our first set of highlighting now let's create another new highlight layer so we'll just create a new layer name this highlight two fill it with transparency and we'll click and drag this below the actor layer and we'll do the same sort of thing so let me hit ctrl z we're just following the outline of the actor and that's just helping him stand out from the supporting actress there the main issue right now is we don't have the main background here so we don't really know where we need to paint the highlights to have the actors and actresses stand out against that background so that's going to be the next part is going to be bringing in that background photo i'll go to file open as layers and i know that i opened this photo somewhat recently so should be somewhere in here so it's going to be this photo here so i'll click open and convert this to gimp's native srgb color space so there is that forest image i'll hit shift s and that allows me to scale this up i'll hold the control key to scale from the center and scale it to about right there and hit scale hit the m key and we can move this into place i'm going to move it so that the path at the bottom is a bit more centered and then i'm also going to click and drag this so that it is below the supporting actress in the stacking order and we'll leave it there for now so now we'll come back up to the paintbrush tool and continue with our highlights so here we have a highlight and actually i'll hit ctrl z i actually want to get rid of this highlight here so grab my eraser tool increase the size of the brush and we'll just sort of have this fade out a bit there and then grab the paintbrush tool come back to this highlight two layer and that's going to be this layer here around the main actor so we're just going to paint that highlight there and we can always grab the eraser tool and just sort of bring that in a bit we don't want to overdo the highlight and we are going to tone this down anyway with opacity but the last thing i want to do is add a highlight behind the supporting actress so let's come over here to the background layer create a new layer and name this highlight three click okay and we'll grab the paintbrush tool make sure white is the foreground color there and just paint behind here outlining the supporting actress all right so now let's turn down the highlights so we're going to do that by dragging the opacity down i went with around 27 or so maybe 30 and i'll do the same for this version so we'll come down here to 30 for all three highlight layers next what i did here is i blended the colors and the brightness contrast of all three of these using the levels tool so that's going to allow us to adjust the brightness and contrast and adjust the colors for all three color channels i do have an entire tutorial dedicated to the levels tool so i'll link that to this video so what i'll do is come over here to the lead actress layer and go to colors levels and i'm going to adjust the levels here so she's going to be sort of the main reference for the other two actor layers so i am keeping that in mind but i'm going to work on the value layer which works on the brightness contrast then i'll move over to the red channel so that is going to allow me to adjust the color balance of the reds in here so i'm either adding cyan or i'm adding red so there's going to be more red if i go to the right it'll be more cyan so now we'll move on to the green color channel this is either adding magenta or it's adding green there you'll see we're adding more green to the highlights and we can always do a preview so there's a before there's an after and now we'll come over here to the blue so this is either adding blue or it's adding yellow to this layer so that looks pretty good so i'll come over here and click ok so now i'm going to perform similar levels adjustments to the other two actor layers but do it in a way where these two look more similar in brightness contrast and color correction to this layer that's just going to make it look like all three of these photos came from the same source or the same movie so that the poster you know looks more cohesive so i'll come over here to the actor layer and make sure i'm actually clicked on the actor layer and not the layer mask and once again i'll go to colors levels and we're not going to use the same settings from the other photo because each one of these photos is slightly different but we're going to start on the value channel so this is the brightness and contrast of the photo and we're trying to match the brightness and contrast to the photo below so we're going to leave the value channel there for now we'll move on to the red channel and so again either adding red or adding cyan and we'll move on to the green channel so either magenta or green is being added to the photo and we'll come up top here to the blue color channel so we'll tweak the highlights here we're either adding blue or adding yellow so there you'll see this photo looks much closer it doesn't have to be perfect but it does have to look like it just came from the same general environment here so i might need to tweak the brightness of this just a little bit that's gonna be fine for now i'll click ok finally we'll move on to the supporting actress so same thing we'll go to colors levels and we'll just adjust the levels here starting with the value channel and we'll move on to the red channel then we'll go to the green channel and finally we'll move on to the blue channel all right so that looks pretty close again not perfect but definitely close enough and i'll click okay on that i do think that the main actor photo doesn't have enough contrast so i'll click on that layer and go to colors curves and we'll just see if we can add a bit more contrast to that photo so there you can see that's helping to bring that together just by creating a simple s curve here in the curves tool and here's a before here's an after i'll click ok so i would say all three of these are pretty close all right so next i want to add a gradient to the background and then i'm going to add our final text and that's going to bring everything together so let's scroll down here to the background layer and i'm going to click and drag this above the background photo and then i want to come over here to my foreground color and i'm going to change this to this sort of olive color here you can copy the html notation and for the background color i have this sort of dark blue color and once again you can copy that and i'll click ok so i'll hit g on my keyboard to bring up the gradient tool and i'm going to change the shape to radial and i'm also going to change the colors here to foreground and background rgb and i'm going to click and drag somewhere near the middle and that's going to create this blue to olive color and also what i'll do is change the layer mode of this to screen so that's going to help us see the background photo there while still keeping some of the blue in all of colors and i'm actually going to come over here and just swap the colors of the gradient by clicking this icon and i'll just drag the olive color a bit closer to the edges there and i can always drag the midpoint as well there we go so now i'll hit the enter key once i have the main background in place i'm going to start adding the text here so let's come up to the very top to this lead actress layer and i'll come over here and grab the text tool and i'll just click on my composition and the first line of text here i'll type with my caps lock key on is text me so the name of this movie is text me later i'll hit ctrl a to select all the text and i want to increase this so let's go with 300 and i actually also want to change the font so it is going to be this bond shift font i'm going to get rid of the light so if i start to type bond shrift it'll come up with all the various font types for this font that i installed so let's go with the top one here and i'm also going to spread the letters out of this font so let's go to 50 over here in the tool options for the text tool now let's do the bottom line which is going to be later so caps lock key is still on i'll type later ctrl a to select that let's increase this font size so i'll go with 650 and i also want to change the actual font so i'll start to type on and that'll bring up all of the options for the bond shift font let's go with the bold option and i also want to change the color of this so i'll click on the little color icon and let's go with this pinkish color and i'll click ok and then i'm going to grab my move tool and let's move these items so you do have to click on the actual pixels of the text so we'll move that up like so and then i'm going to click and hold here and grab the alignment tool and we can just click and drag over both of these text layers align this relative to image and then just click the center align option here so there is our main text next we're going to add the actor credits at the very top of the poster so i'll come back over here and grab my text tool and let me just set this up so i'm going to get rid of the spacing between the letters there and i think this is going to be fine for the size and the font is going to be fine as well so i'll come up top here and click and with the caps lock he's still on i'll type the first name we're going to click off to type the last name and we're going to do that for all of these so each name is going to have its own line these are all fictitious actor names so once those are all typed out let's come back here and grab the move tool and i'm just going to click and drag to create a guide so that i can align all these on the same line and i'll hold ctrl and zoom in so right now this is obviously a mess i'm going to let's raise this a bit so now we're going to hover over the pixels of the names and just get these lined up so it should snap to the guide if it doesn't go to view snap to guides and so let's continue make sure we're hovered over the pixels of the text and let's move this one over now we just need to work on the spacing and actually i'm not going to spend too much time on moving those around because i do want to make these bold so let's do that first let's grab the text tool double click on the last name until it selects all the characters and we're just going to change the font here to bold i also want to change the color so i'll go from that white color to this pink color which you can copy right there and we'll do the same for all of these and you might need to zoom out so that the text box here fits inside the window so you can see what's going on all right so now we can grab the move tool and finish evening these out the spacing so i'm just pretty much eyeballing this so it won't be exact by the way if you wanted to move both of these together what you can do is click the transform lock icon here inside of the layers panel for both the layers you want to move and then now when i move one of these it'll move both of them and that will save us some time and then just make sure you untransform lock those or untransform link those and i'll hold ctrl and zoom out and then the last piece of text i had in here was the credits at the bottom so i did just create a separate document for this to save some time these were all just created using normal text layers and if i grab the text tool and click on one of these you can see the font i used was that barlow condensed but now since i made this as a separate composition i can simply click and drag this onto our poster and drag it on top of the poster and release so that's going to drop all of the bottom credits as its own dropped buffer so now i'm going to double click on this layer and rename it bottom credits hit the enter key and with the move tool i'm going to move these in place if i hold the ctrl key it'll move it down in a straight line so we'll put it right there and i actually want this text to be white so i can change the color of the text easily by coming over here and locking the alpha channel of the bottom credits layer and then simply click and drag this white color on top of the layer and that'll change all of the colors there of the text to white so pretty much the last thing we need to do is just add the effects behind the text so that the text stands out a bit better against the background so i'm going to start by organizing this i'll come to the jolie layer and i'm just going to add a layer group and i'm going to double click on this and name it actor credits hit the enter key and then we'll just click and drag these text layers inside of this text group or inside this layer group so now if i hide this layer group you'll see all of the actor names will hide as well and then i can collapse that and that helps clean that up so now what i'll do is click on the later line of text so that's this main text and i'm going to click to create a new layer and i'll just name this credits gradient fill it with transparency and click ok so with this layer we're going to add a gradient to the top and the bottom and that's going to allow the bottom and top text to stand out a bit better so i'll start by coming over here and just reset my foreground and background colors to black and white and then grab the gradient tool we'll change the shape to linear and the color will change foreground and transparent and make sure the foreground color is black if not just switch your colors up here so we're going to draw one gradient at the very top and we're going to hold the ctrl key and let's come over here and just swap this so we're going to reverse the gradient so once we have that in place i'll hit the enter key and i'm also going to add a gradient at the bottom here on the same layer so holding the control key that will draw this in straight line mode at the bottom and i'll release hit the enter key and i can come over here and adjust the opacity of this to just sort of bring that down a bit so about right there looks good i'll come over here and grab my move tool and just move this guide out of the way and finally i do want to add some effects to the main title text here so all i did for the top layer that says text me is i clicked on it and came up here to the layer mode option and i'm going to change this to lch lightness so that's going to help this top line of text interact with the layer below which is going to be our actress but that doesn't look great so what i'll do is click on this lead actress layer and click to create a new layer and i'm just going to name this black fill it with transparency and click ok what we're going gonna do is paint some black behind the text here so grab my paintbrush tool make sure my foreground color is set to black we can increase the size make sure the hardness is pretty low and just paint some black behind both layers of text here so this is just helping this stand out and finally to help this blend in a bit better i'm going to change the layer mode let's go with overlay so there you can see that'll help minimize that and also what we can do is grab the eraser tool and just sort of erase anything that maybe goes too far outside here like so and the last thing i did was just add a bit of a glow to this main text so the way i did that was came over here to the text layer and i'll just duplicate this layer and now i'll go to filters light and shadow drop shadow instead of going with a black drop shadow i'll change the color of this to white and click ok and i'm also going to change the offset here by middle clicking on this number with my mouse and i'm going to erase the two hit the tab key so that will align the glow so that it is directly behind the lettering here as opposed to being slightly offset and i can also increase the blur radius and then i can increase the opacity and click ok and i can either move this below the original text and actually move it all the way below the black layer or actually i don't mind this being up top above the black layer so that it stands out a bit but maybe we can just tweak the opacity so it's not too overbearing there and that looks fine to me so now if i click on the background layer there is the final poster design and i can export this by going to file export as and i'll just navigate to the folder where i want to export this there are a variety of file types you can export this to i'll name this movie poster multiple characters there are a couple of different file types i recommend using so jpeg is going to be if you plan to upload this to the web for example on a website or somewhere on social media if you want to save this with minimal quality loss i recommend going with something like a tiff file or you can go with a pdf tiff or pdf will probably be best for print so in this case let's just go with jpeg and i'll hit the enter key and i'll just keep the quality set to 70. you can turn that up if you want i'll hit export and there we go all right so that's it for this tutorial hopefully you liked it if you did like this video and subscribe to my channel don't forget to click the bell icon to be notified each time i have a brand new tutorial you can also check out any of the links to my resources in the description of the video but thanks for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: Davies Media Design

Views: 10,317

Rating: 4.9899998 out of 5

Keywords: gimp, gimp tutorial, gimp for beginners, how to gimp, GIMP 2.10, GIMP, basics, GIMP 2020, movie poster, GIMP 2.10.22, marvel, avengers, poster design, flyer

Id: UR-P9Sgiu2A

Length: 29min 58sec (1798 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 21 2020