Learning Adobe Photoshop for Designers

hello my name is Michael belch itis and welcome to my course learning Adobe Photoshop for designers we're going to be doing in this course is we're gonna first go through the interface and understanding how to move around an image next we're going to go into selecting tools and we'll learn how to select an image next we'll go into working with layers and understanding the hierarchy of the layer palette next we'll move on to type and its effects and we'll be learning typography next we'll be going into pain and the pen tool which is very useful next we'll go into layer masks and shape layers after that we'll move on to smart objects and filters and then finally we'll wrap it up while being able to save for print and for the web okay so in this section what we're going to do is we're going to learn a little bit about the interface now I have this little creature that I created I actually made this in cinema 4d I do have some cinema 4d courses available as well so you might want to check those out but what we want to do is we want to take a look at a little bit about the interface and moving around this image so you can see that we have our menu up at the top of our screen and we have our tools on the left hand side and we have some more tools over here on the right hand side and our layer palette now the first thing I want to show you and it's something that is very useful especially when you're first starting and working out in Adobe Photoshop what you're going to be doing is a lot of times a lot of this information becomes a little overwhelming and sometimes you just don't want to see it you just want to focus on the work that you're using so what we can do is we can go to our view and we can go into screen mode we have our standard screen mode full screen mode with menu bar and then full screen mode so if I go to right now we're in standard screen mode which is just we have all the available information all the available tools and palettes available to us so if I go to screen mode and then go to full screen mode with menu bar you can see that this kind of shuts things down a little bit easier so it's a little bit more compact and you can have a little bit more real estate in which to work with within your screen now we can go this even further if we go to view screen mode and then we can go to full screen mode and now we have this in a fool with no palettes no menus or anything the only thing we do have here is our ruler and we can even turn that off using command R and that takes away our ruler so now you can see that now we just have our just our image we in our screen and this is important because what you're going to be doing is you're gonna be working with guides you're gonna be working with all kinds of tools you're gonna have different palettes open and a lot of times it just becomes very cluttered so it's a good idea so when you're working and you're working on an object to go into full-screen mode and this just gives you just the look of your design or whatever you're working on and it's I I kind of look at it similar to when you're drawing and you want to take a step back away from the easel and just look at your your work far away and being able to see the whole picture because you know a lot of times you're working you're working on a very detailed you're zoomed in and you're you're kind of just working on like a apart here and you're not seeing the whole thing as a whole so it's just something that's keep in mind when working with in Photoshop so speaking of zoom we can have a few different options with our zoom you can see right now that our percentage down here is about 82% now we can go to our we can go to ours magnifying glass and we can kind of zoom in to our objects just by clicking and you can see as this moves I click this percentage down here at the bottom changes to hundred and if we hold down our option key on our keyboard you can see now that our magnifying glass goes from a plus sign to a minus sign and we can then zoom out and we also have a few other options we can also go to our command - on our keyboard and that will zoom out and then command + on our keyboard and that zooms in incrementally and you can notice that within our little percentage thing here down at the bottom now there's also a keyboard shortcut a lot of times you'll just be working you'll be zooming in but you want to quickly move to your 100% magnifier so you can go to command one and that will go to 100% and you also have command zero which allows it to fit within your screen so in this case this is a pretty large image so when I go to command zero it goes to you know about roughly 80% so just keep that in mind as well okay great so next what we want to do is we want to start looking around how to move an image within this within our interface so a lot of times you'll be needing to move something around say for an example you have this zoomed in pretty good and you're working on in our area say his shoulder you're doing some color correction or you're adding in some effects or something like that you want to then move over to his other shoulder and do the same thing you can use this hand tool and that's H on your keyboard oh by the way if you hover over any of the tools you can see a the name of the tool but next to it you can see that has H next to hand tool and that gives you an idea of what keyboard key will be used to go to that tool so if say I'm gonna on the move tool which is V and then I can just press H now I'm on the hand tool so which you can then do is move this image within your interface within Photoshop but you can also say an even easier way say if you're selecting or if you're working on another tool instead of going toggling between these tools using the keyboard command and even faster way is just holding down the spacebar and then you can just move around and then do whatever you need to do with the tool that you're using that you currently have so you don't have to change a tool and you can see that by your cursor changing just when you press the spacebar goes to the hand tool and then you can you move your image around and also you do have these sliders down here on the side and on the bottom to move around as well I really use these I usually use the hand tool or if I want to just click on the hand tool and be able to just move it around freely okay so command one will get back to 100% I'll go to fit the screen so command zero so now we have our image setup so in the next lesson what we want to do is we want to start looking at some of the tools and what a lot of these interfaces me we're just going to go over just kind of an overview of everything and this this lesson will be more of a QuickStart in the next lesson we'll take a look at each individual tools and we'll just know which wooden they are and we'll get to those in more depth as the course moves on okay let's take a look at the interface a little bit I'm not going to go into a you know very specific into each of the tools I just want to know you I just want you to know where they are and where things are located within the Adobe Photoshop okay so normally you will see this in pretty much all software it you'll have a menu at the top now we'll have our Photoshop and this is where we have our preferences we'll have our file where be able to open up new documents create new documents open up documents and save out documents we have our edit image and this is where we can adjust a little bit of our image size and we have some hour adjustment layers here and as well as our mode here we'll have our layers and then this will pretty much a whole menu is dedicated just to this layer palette over here we have same thing for type since it's these are going to be things that you're going to be using pretty much all the time within Photoshop you're going to be making using the image layer type and select and maybe some filters depending on you know what you're trying to do this is a little bit more focused on design but you are going to be using some filters that I use often and most designers we use often and then 3d which isn't really applicable to this course and then you have our view which we went over a little bit briefly in in our QuickStart but we'll have everything that will be set up in here as well you'll be using snap as well and a lot of the show so you'll see like maybe hide your grid or layer slices pixel grid stuff like that and then we'll have our window and now window is going to be all the little palettes that you might use that is a little bit more specific to a particular tool or a particular function within Adobe Photoshop and you know we'll go into these a little bit more some of them are useful some of them just you know you kind of use them once in a while sparingly but you don't use them all the time so there's no need to have all of these open now and then we have our help system within Adobe now over here on the side you're going to have tools that you're going to be using quite often such as your brush you're going to be using your brush pretty much all the time if you're going to be painting something out or if you could be masking something brushes are gonna be something that you'll be using a lot and you also have the brush over here as well now next we be using clone clone is also something used a lot no this is you know if you're going to be doing designing for like the web or graphic design there are going to be times where you're going to need to do something within like an image such as this one here you want to clone something out and you don't like or photograph and then next we'll have our topography or type excuse me and then we'll have our character and paragraph palettes that's the same thing here if you just click on this one this icon will give you a paragraph and then you know for alignment and letting and tracking and that type of thing and then we'll also have our tool presets and then our libraries which is also helpful especially if you're using something if you're doing like a whole set of say emails or banners or something like that and you want to change this you have like a logo that you want to keep in you want you have certain colors that you want to use also very very useful okay so next over here we have our palettes for say our layer I also have open paths which I use quite often history palette which is also very useful and I'll kind of go over that a little bit channels so we have our different RGB if we want to just focus in on a specific color we can do that as well and then our properties which it gives you an idea of you know how big something is if you have a selection and you can see how big that that selection is so I actually have this selected to fixed size just go back to normal and so let me go over to our layers palette and I'm gonna go over again I'm gonna go over this very specifically but this is something that you're probably gonna have open almost all the time and we'll go through this every little section of this in greater detail now up here you'll have some more important tools that you're going to be using one of them is auto select so right now I just have one layer but if I add in another layer and let me just quickly add in let me choose a different color and I'm just going to add in this color to this layer now if I have a an M say this background image and I'm just gonna remove that lock so this image I can move around freely and this graphic I can move around freely as well but say I'm on this layer and I want to select this this little block here this orange square so you can use the Move tool to click and select this object but you'll notice in my layer palette it jumps to the selection of this image the reason why that happens is because you have auto selects checked if I don't have Auto Select checked and I click on this orange box with this image selected and I click and drag you can see I'm not moving this orange even though I'm clicking on that this squares aren't square I'm just only moving this background image the photograph so that's something that you're going to be using you're gonna be toggling back and forth between this oh you know often because sometimes you might want to just move a whole folder and I can do that here if I click on this icon I get a folder and I can just move this image this cube this excuse not cube this square into this into this folder and I just want to move this group maybe I have a bunch of other different layers in here as well that I just want to move those layers what you do you want to just have this selected this folder selected and then you can move this and everything else within this folder around so just keep that in mind as you're you're using these tools and I'm gonna go into layers a little bit more so that's your move tool you also have your selection tool you also have various other tools here for selecting you'll have your your wand you'll have slices which we'll talk about a little bit later too and you have all the tools that you're going to be needing to manipulate adjust or change objects within Photoshop whether it be a something like a vector type you know smart object like if I make this this rectangle is a little bit different than this cube here because what we can then do is select these points and then move these around to change our shape you can't do that with this particular object let me go back to my layers if I go to this object I can't do that so that's that's a little bit different then we have our pen tool we have our type tool we have individual selection four we have our path or we have direct selection and then we went over our hand and our magnifying glass so under here we're going to have these two colors we have our foreground color and we have our background color and then we have these two icons here so you notice that I filled in this color into this this the selection here this little this square but we also have our background now we can change this color if I just click on this color just simple click and then you can change this color by using this color picker dialog box and you can just move this around here and find the color that that you want now you also have this slider that gives you a grade of different colors within this within this color library and you can choose you know either purple you can choose all the spectrum of colors that you have here and then we also have a lot of these coordinates that you can change depending if you're using HSB RGB CMYK so we have different sections for that as well also we have a hexadecimal coordinate number system here as well and that's more for web and so what you can then do is switch between these background and foreground colors and say if I choose a different color here and I had green so let's try a blue and we can just switch these by using this icon here and then if you want to go back to your default black-and-white you can click on this icon here and it goes back to its black-and-white default and then we have our quick mask down here as well so that just kind of gives you an overview of this interface and it's it's definitely useful and you're gonna be using you know this whole the whole interface as you're working there isn't going to be a time where you're not going to be using any of these little sections so it's good an idea to get a good understanding of where these things are so in the next lesson what we're gonna do is we're going to start getting into selecting within our within our image okay in this lesson I'm going to talk about selecting within Photoshop okay so we have a few selecting tools at on the left-hand side here now we have the rectangle marquee tool and you could press M on your keyboard to also get bring up that tool and then we also have if you click and hold on this icon you can see that we have a few different other options which to choose in order to make selecting in fact anytime you see a little arrow at the bottom right-hand corner of an icon you know that there's other options to choose from so for a move you have our board tool for the the tool right below it the lasso tool you have different type of tools for that so just keep in mind that there are more tools nested within this icon so anyway if I used the rectangle marquee tool and I have that selected now we have a few different options here at this this sort of like an attributes over here for each of our our tools so with the marquee tool what you do is you click and drag while still holding down your mouse or or stylus you can see that you have this marquee that is that you drag around now you can also hold down your spacebar and move the marquee around it stays to that side and keep in mind your mouse button is still held down and then when you release you can your release your mouse button you can see that you have your marquee around an object that you want to move so the same applies to your elliptical tool as well so I'm gonna deselect this and you can go to select and then deselect or you can also go to command D on your keyboard to deselect that's what I usually do I go command D to deselect and you can then go to your elliptical marquee tool same situation but if you click and drag while holding you can see that you can make a lipped achill shape with your elliptical tool so same applies if you hold down your spacebar you now then can move that marquee anywhere you want it stays to that size but you can move it anywhere within your document okay so now which you can also do and let me go back to my rectangular marquee if I click and drag and and hold down shift you can see it constrains to an exact square so no matter where I move my mouse as I hold the button down you can see it keeps to that perfectly square marquee and as well for your elliptical marquee tool hold down shift and it keeps it a perfect circle now we also have these other options here we have single row marquee and single column marquee tool so I'm going to go to single row and if I just click you can see it I get a marquee that goes across the entire document in a horizontal of selection so I'm gonna click again just so I can have it over one of these objects and I'm gonna zoom in holding down Z I can then zoom in by clicking and dragging to the right we can zoom in to our document and that zoom will zoom right into the spot where the cursor is so you can see that we have this one pixel by the entire length of our object of seasoning of our document so this is good in say if you kit in case say I have this image or this layer selected and I want to delete I can just delete one pixel row of that of that layer whatever's on that layer so I'm going to command Z to undo and then command Z to undo again and then deselect so there are options there are situations where you want to use your selection tool to say maybe cut out a piece of your object so what I'm gonna do is drag a marquee and then what I'm going to do is I'm gonna press either command C which is copy or command X which is cut so if I go to command C it's now this object whatever is in this marquee is now copied to my clipboard so if I move this over to this area over here and I press command V now it's going to paste in that copy into a new layer you can see as I close or close the visibility of this layer you can see now that is when it's new layer and but I still have the piece that I selected it's still part of this other object and like I said I have Auto Select on so if I select this you can see I can still move this around so I can move this over to the side maybe I want to add in a little graphic here there's other options to do that but say you wanted to cut a piece off of another graphic or image to use within your layout here you can do that now if I used cut I say I select this and want to make sure that I cut this so I go to command X it's gonna cut away from that image but it's still going to be in my clipboard so if I make another selection paste it's going to paste that in but it's also going to cut out that one image so it's just you know whatever you however you want to work but I just want to show you that that's something that you can also do as well so that is the selecting of this using these tools now you also have a few other options right to the tool right below you have a lasso tool which is the same situation it's the same selecting as you did before but it's drawn in freehand so you get a selection but if you click and drag as you're holding down your mouse button or in my case I'm using a Wacom tablet if you're holding down you can see that now you have just that selection so this is good if you have something very specific that you want to cut out that that a more angular selection from like say the rectangle or elliptical just can't you just can't get this around so say you wanted to just select this little feathered edge from this graphic and make sure I'm on this this image here so I'm going to select this layer and now I have this little tiny piece selected so well that I then can do is command C and then command one to bring this back out to full view and now I can command or I'm sorry and then I can just select using my lasso tool and then paste within that selection so I can do that as well and if I need to you know I can transform command T to transform and get this particular graphic out and then just simply move it around so that's something you that's another way you can do that as well now if you have say for an example if you go to the polygonal lasso tool this is a particularly good use and let me go to a new layer I'm gonna go to here and this icon here and they'll give me a new layer and say I wanted to go to in a selection and I'm gonna pull this out holding down shift and then I'm gonna go to my color picker click on this on our foreground and then I'm gonna go to save this pink here click OK and then I'm gonna go to option delete and that's gonna fill that selection with the foreground so let me des elect let's say I wanted to see I wanted to have a little angle here where I want to put in say for an example something that will give me a little bit more information sort of a dog-ear graphic on the corner here so this is where this polygonal lasso tool is also very useful so if I click and hold down shift I can you can see where I get this you know freehand but if I hold down shift it will constrain to a 45 degree angle so then what I can do then is go to select or I'm just excuse me click again and then click again and then click again and now if I release the shift I can just connect this end to my beginning point now you can you know that because if you hover close to that beginning point you can see the little oh it sort of closes off it's an icon to let you know it's you're closing off this marquee so if I get close to it I see that icon then I just click and you can see now I have this selection so now I have this layer selected I have my selection that I want and now what I can do is just delete and now I have this little corner that I can use for or something else so I'm going to deselect and I'm gonna bring this over here and then what I can then do I can I have a bunch of different options I can bring this over on this side I can bring this up top here maybe transform rotate that around you know whatever you want to do but now I have options that I can use for this graphic maybe that's not a particularly nice-looking layout depending on what you want to do but you can then utilize this graphic however you want you can also mask it off and do a few of our other things but the point is is that you have this tool that allows you to click click click and then you can close that off depending on you know what you want to use so these are just options you're gonna find that as you're designing something you're going to be using a lot of these different tools in a lot of different situations sometimes you're going to be using all of them for a lot of different ways so let's take a look at this graphic over here and I'm gonna go to my move tool say I like this little squiggly kind of graphic over here kind of just using a brush tool and just making a little squiggle and say I maybe want to put it as sort of a background to this this graphic here a lot of times what you want to do is put this in your your layout and then put something on top of it and say this 25% off however when you move this around you realize wait a second there's a white box around my graphic so if I go to this layer and I hide it you can see that it's on one layer and this pops up a lot within design you'll be given or you'll get something on the internet and it'll just be flat until you won't have a transparent background so you're gonna have to use our tools here in Photoshop in order to take this background out and clip it out so you have this graphic where it doesn't have a white box around it so in this case what we can then do is go to our wand or a magic wand so what you can then do is again you have some options up here which you can use and if I click using the magic wand what you can see is it's gonna select whatever color that you you have and this will get a little tricky this is very simplistic it'll get a little tricky when you're using a photograph and you have lots of different variations of color but these are flat very flat colors and this is a good way of explaining this this tool if you're going to be selecting a background make sure it has a solid background and so what I mean by that if i zoom in a little bit you can see how this is a very clean edge what I mean clean it doesn't have lots of gradients it doesn't have lots of variation in terms of its color it's just white and black so if I select this then what I can then do is I have a few different options here so in this situation you can just simply delete you press your Delete key and it will cut out away from this object however if I deselect by pressing command D you see this white edge that goes around your object and you can even have some little spots in here that are a little have a little bit of white and this isn't a very professional look that doesn't look very good so even even if you're gonna be using it as a background and let me pull this underneath our little graphic here so I'm just moving this down underneath the the layout this layout folder and actually what I want to do is I'm gonna open this folder and then pull this in and put it underneath our elliptical here and I can slide this around but even still even if it's gonna be in the background you still really don't want to have that that look and so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna undo I'm gonna press command Z a few times to get us back to our original selection here so what are another option that you can use to make sure you don't have any of those white little spots well in some cases you're going to be may have to do some manual work but let's try to use the pro as much as we can in order to remove that white background there's a little right white marks well the first thing what we can do is we can go to our select we can go to modify and we can go to expand now the reason why we want to go to expand is we have this white background selected and you can see that by this marquee tool that goes around and it's selected on this around this little shape here around our little squiggly shape now we can reverse this selection if we go to shift command I we can also woops excuse me command I and that will reverse this selection so if you go up to say inverse shift command I you can see that now that is going to be reversed but what we're going to do is we're going to keep this selection and we're just going to expand so I'm going to go to select modify and then expand and we're going to go to expand by one pixel so I'm going to press ok and now I'm going to delete and you can see that we cleaned up our our selection pretty good we still have some white marks here and we can then use a manual process to get rid of some of those those extra those actual marks so let me show you another way where we can kind of clean this up a little bit more even more so if I double click on this layer and then I go to say color overlay you can see that we now have this selected but it cleans up all our white marks so if I go to the blue and our color overlay on our blend we can go back to our black now you can see that it completely clears up anything that we might have down there now if I move this interest into position and put this underneath and then what we can then do is just work on composition and making sure that we have it in a spot that we like if we need to transform this right now it's a it is a rasterized image but we can still move this around and get into a position that we'd like and you know we could always change the background of this if we need to so what I'm going to do is go to color overlay and maybe make this a darker gray something like that so that pops out a little bit more so there is one other thing that I want to show you with the selection tool so the magic wand excuse me now we have a tolerance that we can adjust as well now this is going to be good if you say you zoom in here and I want to go to this graphic and I'll go back to my magic wand and you can see we have a tolerance at 32 if I select you can see that we have a good edge around it but just as it was for it wasn't it's not very close so what we can then do so we can go up to this tolerance and you'll notice this is something that you can notice with a lot of different options within Adobe Photoshop is if you'll see these two arrows you'll have your your hand symbol icon and you'll have these two hours out lout that means that you can then move this kind of like a slider and increase the value of this of this number so you can move it left or right depending on how much you want to adjust this tolerance or you can just simply select this and type in a value so we're going to bring this up a little bit and then make this selection again and you can see that it's getting tighter and tighter as we adjust this tolerance now you can also go in the reverse way say you want a little bit more tolerance and that will get that even closer and then and then that will give us even a tighter mark around our object so I think I said that wrong in the beginning so as you bring up your tolerance you get depending on where you select you can get this pretty loose and then if you bring this even tighter you can get a tighter am a closer amount with the marquee tour in this lesson I'm going to talk about layers so on the right hand side you can see that we have our layers palette and this is something that we're going to be using pretty much all the time when doing any type of design work now I have this basic graphic design here in the center of our composition and you can see that we have our background layer and then we have a folder and we have a little icon here that let you know that you can open up this folder and we have a few items within this in this design that we can then adjust manipulate and do whatever we need to do now you'll see that we have a few options up here and I'll go through each of these and explain these but basically this is what you want to know when using the layer when using layers is that in order to make a new layer we'll come down here to this icon right down here at the bottom of our layer palette click on this icon it's the one right between the trash can icon and you can see a little folder icon so it's right in between and it's gonna open up a new layer now since I am in this folder it's going to it's gonna open it's going to create this new layer within that folder so I'm just gonna pull this out and it's just a basic empty layer there's nothing in it and it allows us to create on that lier so for example what I mean by that is if I go to say the brush tool and I have this color selected and let me add in a little bit make this brush a little bit larger and then if I just click in paint now I have something within this layer I can move it around I can use our selection tools to modify it in some way but this is the the basics of what we would need in order to create something on a liar now this could be something like say you copy and paste it into this layer but this is basically how you you would either create something or you would have a layer that you would bring in such as a photo a logo a graphic that you would bring in into Photoshop so if we want to delete this layer what we can then do is just come down to this trashcan press click on that and it will delete that layer now you can see that I have a folder now if I added a new layer bring this out of the folder what I can then do is create a folder and this allows us to organize our layer palette a little bit better so once that's created then you can add something into the folder so if I pull this in here I go back to my brush a brush tool and I paint in here now I can move this folder around I have Auto Select deselected now I can just move this around and whatever else I have within that folder so if I change my color to say maybe this orange here and I come up to my brush tool and maybe I use a bit of a smaller pen here so now anytime I move this folder oops I'm sorry I made a mistake I want to put this on a new layer so sorry about that and then what I can do is draw within that layer and now I can move this all this items no matter how many you have within that folder and then you can still maneuver around and move these objects around because they're on separate layers now we have a few different options down here and I'm going to talk about masking and adjustment layers so there's gonna be situations where say maybe you want to adjust something within this layer you want to manipulate this layer in some way so that's what these adjustment layers adjustment filters are going to be used for what you can then do is go to say solid color and you can just paint within that call within that layer I'm gonna undo and then what you can then do is maybe you want to put in a gradient you could do that or you can undo bring that out so there's there's all these different types of things that you can add to it or just that particular layer so in this case maybe bring the contrast down or brightness down you know increase the contrast so just keep in mind anytime you add in an adjustment layer what that's going to do is that's gonna affect everything that's underneath that layer so if I double click on this bring this brightness down you can see it changes everything in this layer and everything below it so keep that in mind so if you want to say maybe just have this this graphic changed you could just pull that underneath that layer so keep that in mind I'm just gonna press command Z just to get back and so that's what these adjustment layers are there are all kinds of different kinds you have pattern brightness levels what that will do is that will allow you to it's sort of like a contrast you can punch up the darks and using this this layout here you can adjust these handles that allow you to adjust either the darks or the in you know or the shadows or adjust the brightness and you have all kinds of different kinds hue/saturation color balance a photo filter color lookup you can invert you can do all these different types of adjustment layers to adjust what's going on within your layers okay so I want to talk about masking in this lesson so there's going to be situations where you want to mask off a graphic or a photo you can see here in this layer in this folder you can see I have a mask so what I want to do is I'm gonna right click on this icon right click and then go to disable layer mask now you can see that I have this just have a rectangle selection and a rectangle mask I should say that cuts off the ends of this of these layers and these are just some layers some rectangle layers that I threw in and then just use the transform tool to rotate that around and then apply this mask so I can go back to enable mask in order to give me a pretty uniform and an interesting look with these layers so next what I want to show you is how to actually create this mask so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to delete this layer mask so we can just start over fresh so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to my marquee my rectangle marquee tool and I'm gonna make a selection and as I told you before you can hold down your spacebar and get it into a position where you're not going over the corners so right down right into the center here and then you can always move this selection around to just using just loans your within that or key kind of move so I'm on the folder not the lair but on the folder of the layers and now I can press this icon here click on this icon and it will add a layer mask to the folder so everything that's within this folder is now being masked off so depending on how many graphics that you have in here you want to cut that off it will mash that off so that's how you add in masks now you keep in mind you can do that for any type of selection so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to a new layer and I want to add in a just go to a selection here and I'm gonna fill in this layer the selection with this color so what I can then do is using all the tools that I have here you know if I want to use say the lasso tool and I just want to do a little selection here and then go to my layer and then come down here where it says add mask add layer mask you can see that whatever is in that selection will now be masked off so what I can also do is if I can edit excuse me undo and what I can do is after I made that selection I can go to select and then I can go to inverse and then and in a mask now it's gonna take away it's gonna mask that off now keep in mind that you have these this icon pops up when you add in the layer mask you can see that we have this little keychain that is or I shouldn't say keychain but a chain link and that means that these these two parts are connected the image itself whatever graphic that you're masking and then the mask so if I click on that little link now these are unlinked so what I then can do is go to my move tool with this I this icon this part selected this little preview make sure you're not on the mask itself but the graphic that you're masking now you can move this graphic this image and have it masked off now you can do the same excuse me you can do the same thing with the folder so if I go to my my image as my folder excuse me and then I move that around you can see I can move this this these graphics these layers within this mask and then what I can then do is still link that back up again what I kind of like doing and this is just my own workflow and you'll kind of find your own but I like to use a folder with a mask as opposed to masking just this particular image now there's nothing wrong with that there's nothing wrong with putting a mask on the the layer that you want to mask but there's lots of situations where I just want to have this mask and now I can just simply move my graphics around and make adjustments knowing that this mask is still there I don't really have to click any link in order to move something within that mask I'm just masking just the folder and then I can move things around within that in order to mask that off so that's just my own process but you you can certainly use a layer mask the folder or the lair in this lesson we're going to talk about the type tool and its effects so in order to bring up the type tool we'll go to tea on our keyboard or we can click on this icon right down here and there's a couple of ways you can add and you can simply just click and then type the text that you want to type in so I'm gonna type in bacon and then you can just press ENTER on your keyboard and that will enable that text and then you can move this text anywhere you want so I'm gonna undo and now I'm gonna show you the other way which is to click hold and drag and it brings up sort of like a marquee and then what you then can do is type in the text that you want to type in and say let's say bacon tuna soda oops and chips so once you have that in and you can see that now we have this box that we can then adjust if we need to now you can see that once we have our text that we want in place we can select all our text by just clicking and dragging and then we can make adjustments to our font and a few other very simple very basic options that we have here in our attributes here and we can adjust this by using this slider we can type in the text that we specifically want or we can highlight this text and then use the up and down arrows to add in increments to our to the size of our font that's the size of our text now you can see that now it's kind of blending together as we increase the size but we still need to adjust the letting in order to do that would go over to this pallet here so anytime you don't see your options that you want to adjust in this attributes panel at the top you can come down to the text panel and they'll be found in here so once we have say a size that we want say 30 whatever and then we can adjust our letting here and it's the same situation we can use the slider we can adjust the value by typing it in or select selecting it and just using the up and down arrows to adjust and so say we want to adjust its justification right now it's left justification we would go to the paragraph tab and that's you can either click that here or click that right at the top here now also we have our justification appear as well so you can go to Center right and we can adjust that say Center would be fine now we can also just adjust the color as well up here and in the text area here as well so let's say we like everything we'd like where is you can just simply press ENTER and then that will enable that text and and of course you can always adjust that now if you want to make edits to this text which you can do is double click on the text or you can double click in the text here on your layer palette just double click within this icon this T icon and that will also enable you to edit that text ok great so and at this point you can adjust this manually using the move tool and now just keep in mind if you're gonna adjust anything you want to keep it Center you can hold down shift and then you can move that up up and down but not left to left to right then you can also use the transform command T and then size resize that if you want okay so at this point you can make adjustments to text that you already have so if you have some text that you want to give it some effects to we can then do is double click on the layer and this will give you up bring up some layer styles that you can then adjust say for an example you can add in a drop shadow and wanna make sure I'm centered here you can bring up a drop shadow and keep in mind you can adjust the distance you can adjust the size if we want a tighter you can adjust the spread you can also adjust the opacity as well bring that really dark so you have some options here if you want to do something with your text that I'll give it give it a better effect a better look you can adjust the gradient and you can't really see that one too well so what we're gonna do is we're gonna go to make sure we're on our gradient we're gonna select that and we're gonna just this but what I want to make sure though is if you're doing a gradient overlay you want to take a look at the style right now it's set to radial and you can see that with this little preview here so you can adjust that or change that to maybe linear and you can go to maybe a brighter font excuse me a brighter color and you know maybe a darker one we can leave that that's fine but you know maybe you don't want it left to right you can adjust this angle you can hold down shift and they'll give you a 90-degree angle you can reverse it and you can also adjust its opacity and you can even play with its blend mode if you'd like okay so what else we can also adjust the scale of it that won't affect it too much and we can bring this up a little bit now you can also go with the radial you can adjust this as any type of type that you want any type of style which is totally fine so a few others you might want to adjust a stroke at some point after a while you want to use your own creative judgment of how many styles that you want to add on to something generally you don't this is kind of getting into aesthetics and not so much the specifics to the software but you generally don't want to over design your text the point is you want to be able to read it and quickly you know read what you're trying to you know convey and what you're trying to communicate but you can also adjust a stroke and now when you start doing a lot of these effects a little bit goes a long way so I would suggest kind of using sort of a [Music] you know kind of a lighter or touch if you're gonna be adding anything in now keep in mind when you're adding in a stroke you want to know where the position is right now the position is known the inside you might do better with like say a thin text you might want to go for the outside and we can adjust the opacity a little bit so you can see you know I noticed that if you're gonna be doing any type of styles that's probably best for something like a header something you want to really have stand out away from the background that's when you're really going to be adding in some of these text effects especially if maybe if you're doing some type of logo you want to do something like that you can use that as well and keep in mind you can use these layer effects to any layer it doesn't have to be the type tool and so once you have something in place that you like you can still make adjustments to it in in terms of like you can still edit edit the text and that will be completely fine adding in these effects won't adjust won't keep you from adding in any edits in this lesson we're going to go over the brush tool and the pen tool okay so we have this one image that we were taking a look at and we're gonna just use this as a reference this isn't really going to be a drawing lecture or a lesson but it's really just kind of getting you to understand the tools so don't worry about making exactly what I'm going to be making so what we want to do is we want to use this as a reference and what we can then do is maybe drag the opacity down so maybe it's not so harsh and what we want to do is we want to lock this image down so we can choose this lock icon and that's going to lock that down so anything that I do anything I try to move to it it's gonna give me a dialog box and say don't do that so I'm gonna go to a new layer and this will be our working layer where we will be able to add in any type of marks or strokes so I'm just gonna put in type in working for our layer and so we're going to go to our brush we're gonna go to this brush tool we can go to be on our keyboard and what we can then do is go to our brush palette here and we can kind of take a look at some of the brush sizes and but what I like to do is I like to go to bar settings and this gives us a lot more a lot more things that we can kind of play around with so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna look at our screen and I just want to see the stroke that I'm gonna be making on our for our reference you know using our reference as a guide so I'm just gonna be it's just kind of sketching this guy out a little bit and you can see the this the size of the brush now we can adjust the size of the brush by using this slider here we can bring this up and I'm just gonna add in a few marks here just kind of sketch it out now what we can then do and I'm just gonna maybe go around this a little bit more what we can then do we can we can adjust a lot of the different settings that we have here so we have our hardness and this is going to give us a more sharper edge instead of a feathered edge and we can increase the spacing so as we draw we get this sort of dot pattern so there's a little bit more of a space in between those and you know adjusting that is really based on your preference on what you're trying to accomplish you know if you want to do something like that you can do some type of graphic graphical design say you want to not make it very realistic you want to give it a more of a graphic design feel instead of a very drawing painterly feel so I'm going to undo back a little bit so let me bring this down back to where somewhere where I was and so we have a few different brushes that we can use so if we click on here and we go to say its settings we can maybe check out some of the default presets we can make new brushes so we have options here in what we want to do and I just did a restore to our brush settings let's bring it back to its default I use other programs for drawing I use SketchBook Pro that's made by Autodesk but Photoshop has some really excellent drawing tools in here and you can see that we can kind of bring down maybe a more softer feel we can try this soft round pressure size and you can see as we kind of you know play around with this a little bit now I'm using a a Wacom tablet but you can totally use your mouse as well that's that's not a problem so let's take a look at what else we have we also have various say this one's a pencil so we there's different types that you can use depending on you know what you're trying to accomplish so it's kind of give us more of a pencil maybe a graphite feel if you have any experience with doing any type of traditional art this will kind of mimic that and maybe we want to add in this crease in the the fold of the skin around the eye so you can kind of adjust that and you can always take off the or hide excuse me the liar so if you want to take a look at the drawing without its reference and see how it's turning out so that is the brush tool and there's you know obviously you can really go deep into all the different brushes you can use them all you can use just a selection of like one or two you know some of these are actually really pretty interesting and then maybe let's use this this wet blender and maybe use some pick up a color here and maybe we want to use a different layer for this one so I'm gonna click on this layer make a new layer and see if we can kind of get a color here this might be not the right tool for this ya see this is more of a blending tool let's see if we can pick something else out something like this bring our reference back and we kind of adjust this as we go and maybe we want to bring this underneath our you can almost look at is this is our ink and our black ink you know drawing and now we want to kind of bring in some color underneath it so you know definitely experiment with some of these brushes so in the the next lesson we'll talk about the pen tool in this lesson we're going to talk about the pen tool so to go to the pen tool we'll go to this icon right here we can also press P on the keyboard now we have a new layer and what I'm going to do is I'm going to click anywhere in our document and you can see the icon just letting us know that it's ready to add in a pen point so if I just click you can see we have this little point and then as I continue to click you can see how the points will then fill in with the color now it's the same thing as that I showed you before with the lasso tool is you can close off this point this object by just clicking on its origin point now keep in mind you can also drop the fill for this for the the color that you have and this will allow you to see what's underneath your underneath this layer the layer underneath now what you can also do is you can add in points by clicking anywhere within the in between of the points that you already have created now you're going see that these have extra points and those are busy eight points and I'll show you those in a second now you can go down to this icon and if you click on hold you can see that we have a few different other options that we can choose we have delete anchor point so we can delete any of the ones that we created let me click on this again and you can see another one we have add anchor point and you can see the difference you have the plus sign and the minus sign on this icon so we can go to add in an anchor point now if I want to adjust this this um this polygon this this amount of paths that we created we can go down here - we have path selection and direct path selection so if I use the direct path selection I can choose a point at any any point that I created and I can select it and then move it now if I go to the path selection what that allow me to do that will allow me to move the entire path and all its points okay great so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to delete this and I'm gonna start over with a new layer and we'll go back to our pen tool we'll go to our original pen tool and what we can then do is click drag click hold and drag and that will bring us these Bezier points these little anchor points and I can continue clicking holding and dragging to create a curved path and I'm just following the outline of this I and what I have while I'm clicking I can still go to the fill and drop the fill down and now give me sort of an opacity if I would like but I'm gonna bring this all the way down to zero for now and now I can continue clicking and going through now I want to point out something as you're using this pen tool but real quick let me undo for a second and as I close this point you can see how the icon changes same with the lasso tool so I can click on it and then drag and then still adjust while holding down my mouse button I can still adjust the length and the shape where I'm turning this at so just keep that in mind so what I was about to say is what you can do is when you're adding in points the more points that you add in the more the the rougher the path becomes and the less the more smoother the path becomes so you can see I have a bunch of points up here and if I bring up my fill and then I choose another layer to get rid of those points not get rid of but remove the visibility of those points you can see the smoothness of this outline whereas here it's a little bit bumpy it's a little bit you know it's a little bumpy up on this top side a little bit so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna show you that again I'm gonna make a new layer and have my pen tool selected and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna click and drag and I want to start up here somewhere not quite at the top of the this little ellipse you can kind of look at this is an ellipse not quite at the top and I want to bring this over click hold and drag and I'm gonna bring this fill down just so it's not distracting and I'm gonna click and drag again and then click add right click again and drag and you're gonna need to add in more points when you get to more of like a or closer points when you want to have a nice tight turn like this click again click again and then I'll click one more time here and then here ok so now that I have those set what I can then do is go to my direct selection tool and then start making adjustments to get the shape that I would like so maybe I want to pull this anchor point a little bit closer over here so I can get this nice turn and maybe I want to adjust these points just a bit maybe spread them out and you can always if you accidentally miss it what you can then do is click on the path to bring up that path again but you can also go to your pass palette and you can see where you have this shape so suppose I click off if I click back on this again you can see it brings it back you brings back that path so if you accidentally click off and you don't it see it it disappears because it's not an actual shape just yet what you can then do is come back to your past palette and then select that layer that path I shouldn't say layer but path so what I can then do is come back and click on its individual points again so here's the little rough area so maybe I want to change the shape of this a bit and you don't have to be perfect right now I'm just kind of showing you exactly how to use this tool so don't be afraid if you're not getting it exactly the way that you want I just want you to to see how these these paths and these anchor points in it what they do when you move them and if you turn them you can kind of get a really kind of like a twisted shape depending on what object and kind of shape that you're making okay so there are some other options here if you go to this convert point tool this is also very useful because say you're making a curve you're making a an object do you have this nice curve busy-busy a anchor or anchor points but say you want to have a nice sharp edge what you can then do is use this tool on a point and just click and it's going to remove those handles and you can do the same here so now you have a nice flat shape going across with these nice curved shapes so you can do that as well so I'm going to undo and now we have these these nice paths that you can always go back to and change now I had this down to fill so I bring this back down bring this back up to a hundred percent and now I can fill this shape with anything that I want I can fill it with a white I can bring in a gradient if I double click I can go to a gradient overlay so I have a bunch of different options that I can choose after I make the shape that I want so just keep that in mind that this is available to you and any way that you want to do it so if I bring back some of the painterly effects that I used you can see now I have this nice shape in this lesson I'm going to talk about these Smart Objects okay you're gonna see two images in this document and there they look completely identical however if we go to our layers palette you can see that one we have a different icon for its preview now this one the lander the one I have labeled lander is a rasterized image and the one below it the object the image right next to it is the same image but in a smart object now when you resize something in Photoshop if I select it with my auto select on and I transform this command T to bring up your transform you're gonna notice that we have a height of 100 percent and with that 100 percent so when I scale this image down something to this this amount here and we'll go to our other layer the smart object and we'll do the same thing transform you're gonna see that we have a hundred percent and we transform this down to about the same size now however if we go to our other object the lander without the smart object and we go to transform you can see it stays at 100 percent it doesn't retain the information that it originally had in the opening of this video so if I transform this back again to its original size and then we transform our smart object command t4 transform will transform this but you'll notice that at the width and the height it stays 45% of its of its original document of its original size excuse me so I'm gonna resize this and bring it to a hundred percent and you can do that by just typing 100 percent and then we'll just hit return on our keyboard and now we have our two images the difference is is that if you look at this image it doesn't retain the same quality so I'm gonna zoom in a little bit and you can see how it has lost a lot of its quality and lost its pixel information because I resized it back and forth but with a smart object it will retain that pixel information and you'll keep that sharp quality of the image so this is very useful when you're bringing in a photo and you have to manipulate it you have to move it around and resize it but a lot of times it's not exact you may have to resize it up and back again in order to get it into the layout that you want so it's very useful to have a photo brought in as a smart object so what I want to show you next is the way that you would make a smart object that is already just a raster image and so what I'll do is I'll create a new layer and I'll go to my rectangle marquee tool and I'm gonna hold down shift and just make a square and I'll choose a different color something like Garn or something and then I'll fill this with my excuse me my option delete key keyboards come in and that will fill this rectangle is a square with the foreground color so what you can then do is right-click on your layer and come down here where it says convert to smart object so now you can see that this icon has changed to the smart object similar to the other one that I had so now I can transform this image this Square and not worry about losing any of its quality now I do want to just warn you about this you can if you resize it any further than 100% then it won't keep the same pixel information Adobe Photoshop is going to have to put in that pixel information and you'll lose a little bit of quality so keep that in mind when when using any type of smart object so your original size has to stay the same or it can't go any further than that any larger than that or you will lose quality to that image okay great so we're now able to keep this at a good size and I'm just going to put in 100% and then return and now if i zoom in to this edge you can see it keeps this nice crisp edge otherwise if I just had a rectangle and I just filled this and went to a new layer option excuse me an option delete make sure I'm on a new layer and without a smart object and I resize this and bring this back up again you can see if i zoom in a little bit you can see the quality of the edge looses its its sharpness compared to our other object which is perfect and here we lose that pixel information so I just want to explain that a little bit better as as you resize an image that has not does not have a smart object you will lose quality in this lesson I'm gonna talk about saving files within Photoshop so say you wanted to save this design or whatever design you're working on first obviously you would want to save it as a Photoshop document so you would go to five and file and save and if you were going to save it as another document you would go to save as so if you were going to save a document for you would have to know the specific purpose that you're trying to save it out as so if you have a few different options now the main ones that you're going to be working with are going to be TIFF which is for print P and G which generally has a the capabilities of having a transparent background which is also very important and then of course a JPEG right here so JPEG is the universal graphic image that you would save for web for social media whatever project you're trying to save it at most platforms and sites will accept JPEG so that's sort of the universal graphical file format now TIFF has holds layers but generally it's for the print industry so if you're going to and when I mean by when I say print what I mean is you know if you were just going to print a document you would just go to file and print and whatever the printer that you have associated either with the computer or your nut but if when I say save for print something that you're going to be putting in say about sure a catalog something like that where you're going to be sending it to a printer and having it commercially duplicated for print you would definitely want to use a tiff document or TIFF what file format now we do have gifts gifts are an image format that you can use now it's generally if you're going to use a raster or a vector graphic those are the two choices when you're saving out an image if you're going to be using a rasterized image which is this graphic here that would definitely be for a JPEG you would say that as a JPEG if you had something like a vector image a vector graphic say a logo you would want to save that as a gif the reason being is that for JPEGs you would have all this gradient information excuse me if i zoom in you can see all this different pixel detail that is perfectly for JPEG that that's the perfect file format or gif that's going to be more solid colors and that's generally going to be your your vector graphics such as logos and icons and that kind of thing now a gif does have the ability to have a transparency so you can see I have this white background but if I take this off and I save this what I can do is I can save that for a as a gif and that could be for for transparent background if you're going to be putting it on a website so if I'm going to save for web I would go to save for web so that's going to be file oops let me cancel I have this per second file and then save for web now you can get to that in a few different ways you can go to file and then you could go to export and you have save for web now when I go to this graphic this dialog box you can see if I kind of pull this out a little bit so you can see the full image you have your preset and then you have the format that you want to save it out at you can save it as a gif and you can see this transparency show up and you also have the ability to save it as a JPEG and a P&G now you also have file save as or excuse me export and you can go to export as and it gives you a similar dialog box and you can choose the JPEG GIF or SVG and that's generally going to be if you're going to have a logo and you want to be able to put it on the web that's definitely something you would use for as SVG I put a link in the description to download project files from this course as well as all the courses that I've made so far at astronomic skills comm I also set up a patreon page if you like these courses please check out my patreon page I added a bunch of benefits such as reference images base meshes PDF guides access to podcast and behind the scenes videos also for students there are projects homework critique and feedback videos thank you so much and I'll see you again tomorrow for another course

Channel: Michael Balchaitis

Views: 1,006

Keywords: Photoshop, Designers, Introduction

Id: D0oam8FGP3s

Length: 95min 48sec (5748 seconds)

Published: Tue May 07 2019