GIMP Tutorial: How to Make a Movie Poster

[Music] hello and welcome to yet another tutorial by Davies media design my name is Michael Davies and today I'm gonna be showing you how to make this movie poster in this is a fictitious sci-fi movie called space time a lot of cool effects used in here I've got an astronaut floating here I created a black hole we've got a galaxy in the background then we've got the names of our movie stars up here and then we've got the release date down here and then we've got a nice vignette around the outside of the image so a lot of cool effects all easy to do and I'm going to show you how to do that in a second but before I get started of course check out my website at Davies media design.com slash tutorials we've got tons of video and text tutorials on here you can also enroll in our photo editing course on udemy and I'll include a link to that in the description and we've also got a brand new patreon page if you guys want to help support us help us grow go ahead and become a patron on patreon and you're gonna unlock a bunch of rewards like an open source or all-access pass to some of the behind the scenes content that we make on here some of the extra content we put on here then we've got other levels bronze silver gold platinum and diamond and depending which one you're in you can get a variety of rewards including being listed on our videos as a contributor and even being mentioned directly in our videos as a contributor and having a tool named after you so a lot of cool rewards there go check that out on patreon I'll include the link in the description and then today I'm using a free font called Exodus and you can download that from this link here which I'll also put in the description and it's a really cool fun as you'll see a lot of cool stuff you can do with it so I'm gonna go ahead and dive in so to start you just need to know what size you want your composition to be what size you want your poster to be I've seen a variety of dimensions 27 inches by 40 inches was 124 by 36 is another and that's actually the one we're going to use today so go ahead and once you choose your dimensions go to file new and you'll get to create a new image dialog box and I'll change this to inches and I already have this set to 24 by 36 now if you click on the Advanced Options you've got your X and your Y resolute if you set this to 300 PPI that's actually better for print it's just gonna print it at better quality higher quality but it will be a pretty large image size larger than it's already going to be so if you increase this to 300 PPI that's only gonna increase the file size so for the sake of this tutorial I'm gonna keep this at 72 but just keep in mind that if you increase the resolution on this you will get a better final product when you're printing so click OK and now I have my blank canvas here the next thing we want to do is go ahead and bring in that background image which is the image of the galaxy here and so I downloaded this on pixabay this is a free image so I'll go ahead and include that link in the description same with this picture of the astronaut we're gonna be using that'll be in the description as well and by the way real quick I just want to mention I am using two point nine point eight this is the newest version of it's called the development version because they're still working on some bug fixes but it's got a lot of the new features that are gonna be coming out with the new 2.10 version so once you download this on pixabay you can go to file open and locate that file on your computer and click on the file and then click open so you've got it open in here go to edit copy and then come over here and go to edit paste and that's going to bring your image in as a floating selection layer and this image is also really huge so if I grab my zoom tool and then I hold ctrl and zoom out you can see this is the full size of the image and this is the canvas now to get the image at this size what I had to do was create a free account on pixabay didn't cost me anything it was pretty quick but it did allow me to download the full size version of this versus only being able to download the 1920 version and they're not paying me to say that by the way all right so now what I'll do is click on that floating selection layer and click create a new layer and that's gonna put this on its own layer and I'm just gonna double click and rename this galaxy and the next thing I want to do is rotate this just because I think it looks cooler to have the various gases and stuff going up and down versus from left to right the star dust I should call it so I'll go over here these are my transform tools up here I'll grab my rotate tool and I'll click on this and I'm going to come right here and change the angle to 90 and that's going to rotate this by 90 degrees and now we've got this cool look here so I'll click rotate okay that may take a few seconds I sped that up but now we have our image rotated here and now obviously this image is way too huge so I'm gonna grab my scale tool and click on the image and you can see here the current size of our image so remember our composition is 24 by 36 this is 47 by 84 now you have a chain icon here make sure that's locked and you could change your units here make sure they're set to inches and so since I know that this is 24 by 36 I wanna size this image so that it's just a little bit larger than the full canvas size but not too much so I'm just gonna set this to 25 and then this will automatically adjust to 44 and so that gives us a little bit of wiggle room here while also shrinking down the image and making it a little bit more manageable and now what you can do is you can click on the center here there's there's four boxes right here if you click on those that allows you to click and reposition this image so I'm gonna reposition it so that it's centered a little bit better on the canvas and then I'll click scale and now that image has been scaled down I'll grab my zoom tool and zoom in a little bit here and so you can see it's still larger than the canvas itself but it is a little smaller and it's a little hard to see the edge of the canvas because it's white so this is a little a little off but what we can do is grab our alignment tool and click on that image and then choose a line relative to image and then click align center of target and align middle of target and that's going to Center our image on the canvas here alright so the next thing we're going to do is create our black hole and you can see the black hole here in the original composition will hide the astronauts so you can see it better but we applied a few effects here to make this happen so I'm gonna come back over here to my main galaxy image I'm going to go over here to our original image here and I'm going to duplicate this twice and then what I'm gonna do is click on the top layer here and then I'm going to go over here to filters blur circular motion blur and that's going to make our image appear as if it's basically spiraling and I'm going to increase the angle here to about 5 and then this is going to take a little while to generate because it's a pretty large image but I already know that this is what I want so I'll click OK and then I'm gonna hide that layer and come over to the galaxy copy layer below it and then do the same thing go to filters blur circular motion blur but this time I'm going to change the angle to 1 and again I'm not gonna wait for this preview to generate so I'll click OK because they already know that that's what I want and so now you see what that's done is it's created that circular motion blur again but it's not quite as intense as the first one so there's the first one and there's the second one so now what we want to do is create that black hole so I'll go ahead and create a new layer and we'll name this black hole make sure your fill width is set to transparency click OK and then I'm going to drag some guides over so I'll drag this first guide and I'm looking at the numbers down here and I want to drag this until it's at the center of my image and by the way I grabbed the move tool real quick so I know that this is 24 by 36 which means the centers at 12 so when I see 12 on the left number here that means I'm at the center and then I'm going to drag a guide from the top and since it's 12 by 36 the center is going to be at 18 so I'm going to look for that second number at 18 which is right there and now we've got the guides in the center of our image and now I'm gonna grab my lip select tool and make sure feather edges is checked and then turn the radius up to 50 and then go ahead and click in the middle of those guides and then hold ctrl and shift to make sure you click first otherwise this effect won't work and then I'm gonna make the size of this about 750 here and then release and making sure I'm on that black hole layer I'll go ahead and grab my bucket fill tool and fill this in with black and so now we've got a nice black hole here and now what I'm gonna do is go ahead and grow this twice and the first time is gonna be for our first galaxy layer here and then the second time will be for the second one and I'll show you why we're doing that but I'll go to select grow and change the pixels and we'll grow this by a hundred pixels and click OK and then we'll come over to our galaxy copy number one layer right click on it and go to add layer mask and initialize layer mask to selection and that's going to erase everything outside so now you can see that everything outside of this selection area has been erased but it's a layer mask which means it's non-destructive editing so if we ever wanted to go I can add that in we can and then I'm gonna go ahead and go to select grow again and this time I'm going to grow this I changed the units of pixels grow up by a little more by two hundred and then I'm gonna do the same thing except I'm gonna do it on my galaxy copy layer so I'll right-click on it add layer mask and initialize layer mask to selection and click add and now that erases everything outside of this selection area so go to select none and now it looks like we've got a black hole here where the light is starting to bend around what's called the event horizon and then we've got sort of the light bending a little less as you get further from that event horizon so it does look like a pretty realistic black hole but now what I'm gonna do is go ahead and create that event horizon so I'll come over to my black hole layer create a new layer and name this event horizon and drag that underneath the black hole layer come back to my black hole layer right click on it and go to alpha to selection and that'll create a selection area again on that block that we had and then we'll go to select grow and we'll grow this by 50 pixels and click OK and that'll create a selection area a little bit larger than our original black hole there we'll come over to the event horizon we'll choose white as our foreground color and then make sure we have our bucket fill tool selected there and go ahead and fill this in and then go to select none and then I'm going to grab my paintbrush tool and choose a soft brush so this brush is set to hardness 0 to 5 and go ahead and decrease the size a little bit you can also use the bracket keys on your keyboard to decrease this and then I'm just going to draw control Z some random things like poking out of here and it looks kind of goofy right now but we'll fix it in a second and this just makes it look like bursts of light or trying to escape here and then we're going to go to filters blur Gaussian blur and we're going to turn this blur way up and I'll turn this up to around 50 or so and so now looks like we have an event horizon with again some light trying to escape here so click OK and then I'll just turn the opacity of this down a little bit so it's not so intense all right so now we have our black hole here so because I know that this is the look I want for this black hole here what I'm gonna do is right-click on this and go to apply layer mask and again once you do this you're not gonna be able to edit this anymore but I'll right click on this again and go to apply layer mask and then I'm gonna come over to layer crop to content and that's going to shrink my layer down layer crop to content and this is just hoping keep the file size a little bit more manageable and I can do it for these two as well so layer crop to content layer crop to content and you'll see the boundary shrinks as I do that it's going to shrink to the size of the outermost object on that layer all right so the next thing I'm going to do is add my main text so I'll grab my text tool and I'll just keep this set where it's at right now so I have my font set to Exodus and actually I'm going to change this to the second Exodus here and the size I'll increase to about 150 for now and then I'll keep the color at white and I'll go ahead and click on my canvas and type the fictitious name of my movie here and I can't see the text because the text layer is below our background layer so I'll click and drag that to the top and now you can see our text here and I want to increase the spacing between my lettering here so I'll highlight the text and come over here to my kerning and just increase this until I get the look I want so I'll stop at 35 there and now I want to go ahead and Center this on the guide and go ahead and move it into place so I'll grab my move tool and you'll see there's a plus sign in the middle of the text box here which this will snap to then I can just click and drag this up till I get to the spot where I want this at and that looks pretty good right there so that's our main text and what I want to do is add something behind this to help it stand out so what I'll do is grab my free select tool here and then come over here to my layers panel and create a new layer and I'll name this layer main text diamond because this is gonna be like a diamond shape and I'll drag this behind my main text layer here and what I'm gonna do with my free select tool is go ahead and just draw sort of a polygon shape in this case it's sort of a diamond shape and I'm clicking to create what's called a node and so my second node is up here and it's pretty much aligned with the top of the e and then I'm just eyeballing this to make sure that this is the same height as this node I created over here it may not be exact and then I'll come over here and put this note at the bottom of this e and then make sure that these nodes are connected go ahead and hit enter on your keyboard and that'll turn that into a selection area switch your foreground color to black and then you can also click on this to do that or you can click on this icon here and that will reset your foreground and background colors to black and white grab your bucket fill tool and go ahead and fill this in with that black then go to select none and now we've got a diamond shape here click on that layer and go to filters blur Gaussian blur and we don't need the blur turned up so high for this part so we'll go ahead and turn this down a little bit and that looks good to me so go ahead and click okay and now we've got a little shape behind here just to help this text stand out a little more and once you've done that we'll go ahead and crop this layer so we'll go to layer crop to content and that'll just shrink layer size down so now I want to add my subtitle text so I'll go ahead and grab my text tool again I'm gonna change the font to just the regular Exodus and by the way this says demo because it's a free font it's a free version of a premium font and so if you try to do special characters or anything like that it won't work with this font but everything else does work and I'll decrease the text size I'm gonna try forty-four now and then I don't want the kerning for now so I'll change that to zero and make sure that my color is set to white here and then click on here and then so for my subtitle I just said and I'll have my caps lock on brevity of life meets infinite space I just made that up and I'll just increase the font size a little bit and then grab my move tool and go ahead and move this into place and again it snapped to the middle there and so I'll just go ahead and keep that there all right and so below that text we had the release date so I'll go ahead and grab my text tool again and for that I did another free font which I show you guys how to download in another tutorial but this font is next to bold so I'll grab that and go ahead and click on my canvas here with the caps lock on and type the release date here which is fictitious again and it's summer 2018 now once I've got that typed out I'll go ahead and highlight this and by the way in game two point nine point eight the textbox editor here is a little buggy so I always come over here to edit my text but I'll go ahead and increase this so set that says 75 and then I'll increase the kerning here to tend a kind of spaced out the letters and then grab your move tool and go ahead and Center this text and right there looks pretty good okay so the last piece of text is the names of our fictitious actors at the top so I'll grab my text tool and I'll change this back to the Exodus font we were using and I'll just do the exodus demo again come up here to the top and I just made up some actor names so I've got Keanu Steve's go ahead and highlight that and decrease this until we get the size I want so we'll go with 44 now and also actually I need to take the kerning away from this I don't want any letter spacing for the actor names and then here's our fictitious actress name I'm going to go ahead and grab my zoom tool and zoom in here and then I can bring your guide down here just to make sure that these are all aligned on the page and then here's another fictitious actress so go ahead and zoom out here so now we've got our fictitious actor names up top and now what I want to do is go ahead and bring in the astronaut so to do that I'll come over here to our astronaut photo and you'll notice that this has a black background on it and again I got this photo from pixabay for free and I'll include that in the description so we want to get rid of the background here but because this is a solid background there is an easy way to do it it's not gonna be perfect and if you do want this to be perfect I recommend just using the free select tool here and manually sitting here and drawing over the lines like this I'm just doing it quickly and then you connect the last line obviously that's really sloppy but go to select none but if you just want to do this quickly like I'm gonna do it you can grab what's called the foreground select tool here and you can feather the edges so that the edges aren't precise but what we're gonna do is use this tool to select the background and cut out the foreground object and so to start you'll notice the mouse pointer looks like the free select tool and what you want to do is you can either click and draw nodes like this or you can just click and freehand this like you usually would with the free select tool and basically what you're doing right now is you're just selecting the background and you don't want this to be too close to the foreground object you do want a little bit of space so don't try to perfectly outline this and then go ahead and hit enter and what that does is it outlines the background in blue or it highlights the background in blue and you can change your preview color here so if you want green instead you can go with green and then you'll notice after you hit Enter that your mouse changes to the same pointer as the brush tool and you can decrease the stroke width of this if you have more details in here but basically what you want to do you want to make sure your foreground color is different from your background color so remember our background was black and our foreground color now is white and what I'm gonna do is go ahead and use this brush to tell the program what is my foreground object so I'm just loosely painting over parts that are within the foreground object and this tells the algorithm that this thing is my foreground object and it should be distinguished from the background and then go ahead and release your mouse and hit enter and now you'll see that this is kind of clipped to be a little bit more accurate to what our background is but you'll also notice that there's little green specks here inside of our foreground object and what that means is that the algorithm picked up some of these foreground objects that it shouldn't have and so you just click and drag over some of those objects with your mouse just paint over those objects that should be in the foreground and that's going to tell the algorithm to go ahead and exclude those objects as foreground objects and just for the sake of the length of this tutorial I'm not going to do this perfectly but as per usual the more time you spend on the details the better this is going to look but let's say there are some and let me just get this real quick if there's some key objects that really shouldn't be in your background here you can switch over to draw a background and you can come over here and I just decrease the stroke width a little bit and let's say you really don't want this stuff to be part of the foreground or the background just draw over while in the draw background mode and that'll tell the algorithm that that should be part of the background and it'll go ahead and set that as part of the background so we've got a couple splotches here that I want to draw as part of the background and this isn't perfect but this is good enough for now so go ahead and hit enter again when you're ready and you'll see that this now draws a selection area around your foreground object then go to ctrl C to copy that and then come over to your composition and hit control V and that'll paste this as a floating selection layer and since our text layer was the last layer we worked on that's why it's over there but we'll go ahead and click on that and click create a new layer to put this on its own layer and grab the move tool and go ahead and move this more towards the center of our image this is still too large so I'm going to grab my scale tool here and go ahead and just click and drag just to resize this a little bit and again you can use these boxes in the center to Center this a little better then go ahead and click scale use your move tool if you want to adjust where this guy sits alright so the next thing we want to do is make him fit in a little better here and so I'm gonna go to colors color temperature and this is a gaggle operation to check to see if this is in an older version of just go to tools gaggle operation and there's a list of gaggle operations that will come up and if it's in there it'll be within that drop-down list as color temperature I'm gonna set my original temperature to 40 100 K so I did that by clicking this drop-down arrow here and I chose moonlight just because that was a pretty cool image to start here's the original here it's pretty blue and then my intended temperature I do want this to be a little bit warmer so I just chose a warmer color which in this case was 5,500 K and you can see that this brightens up a little bit and it makes it fit in a little better with the other colors in the image so go ahead and click OK and then I'm just going to come over here to my colors and the levels and I'm just going to increase the levels of this a little bit so that my astronaut is a little brighter I don't want to overdo it but I do want this astronaut to look a little brighter here and then you can do a split view if you want to see it before and after and so the split view is the left side is the after and the right side is the before and you can see he's a little brighter now now go ahead and click OK and by the way we're pretty much done with these guides so you can go to view show guides and that'll hide those guides so I want to apply a blur to him so it looks like he's kind of getting sucked into this black hole I'm gonna come over here to his layer and I'm actually just gonna real quick name this to astronaut to make it easier and then duplicate that layer and I'll click on the bottom layer here and hide that top layer and I'll come over here to filters blur zoom motion blur and that's going to give him this look here and actually I'm gonna cancel that real quick because I do want to come over here to layer and just do layer to image size just to increase that boundary of the layer and then I'll come back to that filters blur zoom motion blur and again this is going to make it look like this guy is moving towards the black hole basically so I'll go ahead and click OK on that and then I'll unhide that original layer here and this wasn't what I did for my original composition but this actually looks kind of cool so you can keep it like this if you want or you can click and drag this astronaut above our original layer right click go to add layer mask and set this to white full opacity and click add and now with our layer mask selected you can come over here to your blend tool and select black as your foreground color and then come over here and make sure this is set to foreground to transparent and then change the shape to linear and what I'm gonna do is draw my gradient and make sure it's in the direction that my astronaut is in and if you're using the same version of I'm using you can live edit this gradient on the screen and so I can click and drag my starting point in my end point and just make adjustments to this I can also adjust when the foreground starts to turn into the transparent but what this does is it basically makes this zoom motion blur effect that we applied here gradually fade out so it's more intense towards the bottom here and then it fades out towards the top and then I'll go ahead and grab another tool or just hit enter and that will apply the gradient there if you're using the same version game two point nine point eight and so now the astronaut has a bit of a motion blur around some of the lower parts of his body and it just makes it look like he's kind of getting sucked into the black hole here alright and the last thing we're gonna do is go ahead and add a vignette so I'll create a new layer and name this vignette and click OK make sure it's filled with transparency and I'll move this to the top and then I'll go to filters light and shadow vignette or if you're using an older version just go again to tools gaggle operation and select a vignette and you can copy my settings here but basically you've got the center so if this is set to 0.5 and point five it's going to be in the middle of your image you've got the radius so that's kind of how wide that vignettes gonna go the radius of the circle within the vignette before it starts to fade out to the black here you choose the color of your vignette if you want to change the color how soft that vignette is so that's gonna be that's gonna be how soft the fade is right here from transparency to black and then if you want to rotate this if you don't want it to be you know perfectly centered you can rotate the gradient like that which actually looks kind of cool I'll go ahead and click OK and I rotated this version I didn't rotate the last poster but that looks kind of cool and you'll see that all the text here is kind of buried so I'm just going to click and drag so that this is below the text so that that text stands out a little better you can go ahead and export this if you want you can go to file export and you can change the name of this and go ahead and select file type by extension you can just do a jpg if you want you can even save this as a PNG or a PDF Portable Document format and so I'll just hit export alright so that's it for this tutorial if you liked it please subscribe to our youtube channel at youtube.com slash Davies media design you can also enroll in our photo editing course on udemy and I'll include a link to that in the description and please support us on patreon if you like our tutorials and if you want more again behind the scenes content tips news and exclusive tutorials and of course I'll include the links to our social media in the description and the links that were used in this video so thanks for watching and we'll see you next time you

Channel: Davies Media Design

Views: 41,915

Keywords: gimp, gimp 2.9.8, gimp tutorial, gimp for beginners, how to gimp, gimp graphic design, gimp photo editing, gimp 2018, sci fi movie poster, movie poster, film poster, sci fi film poster, graphic desing, black hole, create a black hole, event horizon, design a black hole, photoshop, black hole tutorial, poster tutorial, film poster tutorial, poster for movie, poster for film, zoom motion blur, circular motion blur, foreground select tool, stephen hawking

Id: VQoTcWq9Bnc

Length: 29min 15sec (1755 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 13 2018