From the course: Photo Tools Weekly

Photoshop: Mocking up layout ideas

From the course: Photo Tools Weekly

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Photoshop: Mocking up layout ideas

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- [Instructor] Hello friends, and welcome to another episode of Photo Tools Weekly. In this week's episode, we are in Photoshop. And here, we are going to focus in on using Photoshop in order to create some design concepts. We'll talk about things like guides and rulers, and centering objects. We'll also look at typography as well. And this is a bit of a real-world project. I am writing a book right now on portraiture called Authentic Portraits, and I'm working with a compositor who's taking my designs and coming up with ideas for the way that the design of the book will look. And this is something that he sent me, and rather than this for a chapter opener, I want something a little bit more like this. Well how in the world can we take what we have here and maybe rework it so the design's a little bit different? How can we create a custom design of our own? Well one thing's I'll do often is I will simply create a new layer on top of someone else's work or something I have done, make a selection, and just fill that with a color. So I'm just gonna go ahead and fill this with my foreground color, which is white, and now I have a box there, which is essentially just hiding whatever is underneath it. And I'm hiding it rather than deleting just in case I need to go back to it as a point of reference. Alright next, I've already added a few type layers in here just to speed up that process, but I have the number 10, so that would be a chapter number. I have a potential title, and I have some copy down here. First of all, I want all three of these to be centered, so click and then shift-click. Then we have some alignment options up top, the one which I would use is this one to center all of these so they are all centered. Next, I want these centered on this page. Well, in order to figure that out, I need to figure out where the center is of this whole document and then also just this page. One kind of hack workaround that I'll use every once in a while is to create a selection of an area and to fill that selection with a solid color. So we'll use solid color here, I'll use a nice bright color so you can see what I'm talking about. And now that I have this going over the entire space, whatever it is, for whatever kind of design project, you can just go to Free Transform, Command-T on a Mac, Control-T on Windows, and say give me half of this. So I'll go to 50%, and then apply that. Well now that I have half of that, I know that this is where the page should end. Or this is the exact middle of the document. If we open up our rulers by pressing Command-R, we can then drag one of these guides out from these rulers here, press the Option key on a Mac, Alt on Windows and you can flip it so it's coming down from the top horizontal, hold down Option or Alt, and then put that in just the right spot. Now there are other ways to find the middle of a document, but this one I find is helpful, especially if you have odd sizes, or you just really need to quickly find out, hey, where is it, I want to be sure that's it. Then next we can hit Command-T again to Free Transform it, and do you see how we have this center point on this rectangle of green? Well if I grab another guide down and put it right there, I now have the exact center of this page as well. Well now that we've done all this, we really don't need this anymore, that was just a tool, kind of a measuring device to help us find out the center of something. And then from here of course, we could then position this so that it's locked in to that center point on that guide. Alright, well how about customizing our copy and our text further? Well one of the things that I want to do with 10 above is I want this to be more of an outline. So I'm gonna make this bigger so you can see it, and I'm gonna share a shortcut for hiding guides. That is Command-Colon on a Mac, or Control-Colon on Windows. Next, I'll go ahead and double-click this layer to open up my Layer Style dialog, and here I'll go to Stroke, I'll add a brush stroke, I'll make it really thin just so we can see that, it's a red brush stroke around that. To remove the fill, we go up here to the Layers panel and just delete that. So now we have nice outline text. Now if I want to change the brush stroke, to black, double-click the word Stroke there, and just go over here, and we can change it to a different color, we can change it to a different size, I want it nice and thin, and then click OK. So now I have this chapter number up top, which I will Free Transform with Command-T and try to get that down there, and then press Enter or Return to apply. Now as far as the title of the chapter, I'm gonna go ahead and change that. And center it, so I just highlight that. And highlight both of those, center those. And then I can move those over here. Now with type, you can either change their size by double-clicking on the type here, and you can change the size in one of the type fields, or you can also do that in the Character panel, we can change the size, or you can just Free Transform type. And if you press Command-T on a Mac, Control-T on Windows, you can Free Transform it, get it exactly where you want it, and then press Enter or Return. Now if you want to change more characteristics of the type, you probably want to go to the Character panel, and here you could add a little spacing between the letters, that might be kind of a nice touch like this, or you could change the spacing between the lines. So you could have the two lines closer or further apart. So when it comes to design, often you want to customize these so it's not just standard, right? So it's really unique, one of a kind. We have an outline up top with the number, we have the title, the chapter stylized exactly how we want it. Then we next have our copy. For the copy down below, again inside of the Character panel, we can go to the Paragraph tab, which is next and do something like this where we have it so that it goes from edge to edge. Now if you want to change the font, a really easy way to do that is just to click into the Type layer, and then to click into the Font field here, and use your arrow key, so I'm tapping the Down arrow key, that's allowing me to scroll through different fonts and I can see the preview of them really quickly. And if I find one that I think might work, I can also customize some of these other qualities of that as well. Next, I'll go ahead and just close that and click off of that, and then I want to make sure this is all centered. Remember how you do that? Click and Shift-click. And then we'll use this alignment here. Let's bring back the visibility of the guides, that's Command-colon on a Mac, Control-colon on Windows. And as you bring it to that spot, you'll find that it will kind of lock into that center point. So you just want to make sure everything's nice and centered. Let's hide the guides again, Command-colon on the Mac, Control-colon on Windows. Get it in just the right spot. And there we have a custom design layout. Now I realize that you may not be designing pages for a book, but it's really surprising how frequently we as photographers often need to use some of these other techniques in Photoshop when we're creating different things with our photographs, whether it's for advertising or for business cards or different things, so that's why I wanted to highlight these tips here, because I'm hoping that they will help you work with your images and type inside of Photoshop. Alright well that wraps up this week's episode, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day, and I hope to see you next time, have a great day, by for now.

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