Presenting your Photoshop work for your portfolio
Overview
Daniel Scott
Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor
instructorI discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.
Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.
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All right, to make this work we're going to have to do a little bit of a hack. What I mean by that is that there's some skills you're going to learn further in the course. Things like Smart Objects and Layer Masks, with which we're going to make this a very perfect non-destructive professional version of what we're just about to do, but we don't have those skills, so we're going to do a big old hack version where it works, but maybe not the most professional use. So what we need to do is kind of smush all of this together. At the moment, it's all separate layers and stuff, we need to kind of smash it into one layer.
To do this quick and easy at the moment what we're going to do is we're going to leave-- I've saved this version where I'm up to. It grays out when it's already saved. So if you're like, "Man, it won't let me save," it's because you've already saved, and nothing's changed, watch, to move it-- then it goes, "Hey I get to save it again," so I'm going to undo that. Let's save your document, then let's save a backup. So let's go, 'Save As'. We're going to keep that one original with all the layers so I can do adjustments.
Now let me go on to my 'Desktop', I'm going to call this one 'Hacked Postcard'. It's not hacked, it's just, we're doing it badly. Click 'OK'. What we're going to do is, we're going to go to 'Layer' and we're going to go to this one that says 'Flatten Image'. You can see all, my good work and all my separate layers have gone, I can't separate them out, that's the bad bit. The cool bit though is it allows us to do the Drop Shadow when you're kind of moving it around. First up, we need to-- we have that kind of continued problem with background, and it's locked. So just name it, I'm going to call this one 'Postcard'. So that's phase one, it's got rid of the lock.
Next one is, we need to expand the background a little bit. The easiest way, it's under 'Image', and go 'Canvas Size'. Canvas size, think of it as your page size. So at the moment we are using inches, '6 x 4'. I want it to be a bit bigger either side. So how much bigger? Maybe one and a half inches, '7.5'. That was at '5.5', either side. Click 'OK', I've just got a bit of extra background now. The next thing I want to do is add a background behind it. I'm going to make a new layer, this little tuned up page here. I'm going to call this one 'Background'. With it selected, I'm going to say I want to go to 'Edit', and I'm going to go to 'Fill'. So I'm going to fill that layer with, what color? I'm going to fill mine with black, you might say Foreground, Background, you can pick a color, I'm just going to pick black, click 'OK'.
Problem with the Layout Order is obvious now. Background's at the top, so click, hold, and drag them underneath. Now what I want to do with this, you could have just picked a solid color. What I want to do is add my Gradient that we did earlier because remember, I'm over doing Gradients all the way through this course. So what I'm going to do is go down to 'fx'. I've got that layer selected, 'fx', I'm going to go to 'Gradient Overlay', and it's remembering the default that I had from the last one, but remember, if you click on the word 'Gradient' here you can double click these two little houses to pick new colors, but that's in an earlier tutorial, jump back and check out the Gradient one if you want to know more about it.
What I might do is change the direction of it, I'm going to lower the Opacity. I'm lowering the Opacity in this case because this black is my background color. It's going to kind of darken it out, so here's the black, I'm just kind of raising it up a little bit. Finally what you want to be. Click 'OK'. Now we're going to use our Drop Shadow and Rotation, so click on 'Postcard'. Let's rotate it, you could go to 'Edit', 'Transform'. Use Rotate, but now we're using super-duper shortcuts, remember, which is it? If you can't remember, it is 'Command T' on a Mac, or 'Control T' on a PC. Not there, just a bit further out, click, hold, and drag. I don't know why it's on the angle, it's just like, I don't know. Just thrown down in a casual but professional way. Not sure why it doesn't work that way, has to be on that kind of link.
When you finish, hit 'Return' on your keyboard, or 'Enter'. Now we're going to add our 'Drop Shadow'. There's not going to be much more than that. That's what we're going to do. We're learning it now because it's going to be part of your homework in the next video. So hang around if you like, I'm just going to add a nice big shadow. Opacity 'up', Distance 'up'. Do the angle. Size wise. Beautiful! I never play around with the Spread, you'll see-- it's not why, it's just like the choke. Just kind of moves the Drop Shadow further out. I just never use it, you might love it. Let's click 'OK'. That's our little gangster lane. We are now going to add a bit of text and get on to the next video. Totally skip ahead now, because I am just going to add some text, but you can stay if you like.
This is like a client presentation, right? So I'm going to say, my super-duper client is going to be-- I'm going to keep these on all separate lines. Actually I'll put a 'return' in, 'Client' and 'Project'. What I'm going to do, select them all, I'm going to say, that be 'Right Aligned'. I'm going to use a different font. Museo I've been using through this course, you don't have that probably. It's a font you can download from Typekit if you want to go and do that. It's part of your Creative Cloud license, I'm not going to cover it all now. I'll use the Slab, it comes in a Slab version as well, which I like so. I'm going to be on the Lite version. I'm going to grab this font, bring it down, the Leading. I'm going to do the Leading here. Not so much Leading, not so much Font Size either. That will do it for me.
I'm going to duplicate this. Now we're being using the right click, 'Duplicate'. I'm going to share a little secret. If you hang around, you get the super secret. Watch this, click, hold, and drag it to the new window. And it makes a duplicate, and gives it the name 'Copy'. There he is there. Awesome, huh? It pays to hang around sometimes. I keep telling people to go mess up here. And then I give you a super secret trick.
So this one here, I'm going to use '900'. The client for this one is going to be 'Scott Shoes'. The project's going to be their 'Spring Sale Postcard'. I'm reluctant to date these things because I've got stuff in my portfolio that's like 10 years old. Just holding on in terms of being okay to add to this, still add to it but it might be a big client, or I just want to hang on to it so I don't date them. What's going to date this though is the Gradients. I think I'm catching the end of this Gradient phase as well, I feel like the whole Instagram Gradient filter type thing is going to be it in a little while or else my portfolio is Gradient-tastic. So that's going to be it for this video. Next video, we're going to set a project for everybody. Let's jump into that and do it now.