I HIGHLY recommend beginning by completing a tutorial on Selection Tools, like THIS ONE. You can get to it from the Learn tab inside of Photoshop or by clicking THIS LINK. You can download the sample files from the HANDOUT FOLDER but you can use any photo to practice on!

THIS ONE is also good.

Find even more HERE!

Here are some fabulous photos that will work for this assignment: PORTRAITS

This one is clear and easy to work with IMG_1705.JPG:

Click Download, then Direct download

The photo will almost certainly end up in your Downloads folder

To open it in Photoshop, there are a couple of ways.

First, you could RIGHT CLICK on the photo and choose Open with, and then select Photoshop:

Or you could open Photoshop first:

Right on the Photoshop Home screen there’s an Open button

You could also open the File menu, then Open.

You’ll notice that things look a lot like they did in Illustrator and InDesign. Again there are Workspaces that you can choose from. I’m on Essentials:

Normally, the first step would always be to Save your work, but this is just a practice/demo, so I’m not even going to bother with this one. Feel free to Save your file if you wish.

Make sure your Layers panel is open (look at the bottom right of the window). At this point, you’ve got only one layer (Background)

We’ve spoken about Layers before, so you should be familiar with the concept, but think of them as papers piled on top of one another. You can have multiple Layers/papers and you can rearrange them in the pile however you wish, but remember that the top Layer may hide other layers below.

Also remember to select whatever layer you wish to work with! The selected layer will have a lighter grey box around it.

First off, Duplicate that Background layer. You should always keep a copy of the original, untouched photo in case you need to go back to it.

3 ways to do the next step:

Easy way: Ctrl + J

or

go into the Layer menu and New, then Duplicate Layer…

OR…

Go into the Layer menu and hover over New, then click Layer via Copy

Now you’ll have two layers,  the Background and Layer 1

You’ll notice that the Background layer is locked, so you can’t do anything with it at all. Click the lock and it will unlock

Rename your layers. Background should become original

and Layer 1 should become copy

We’ll just leave that original alone in case we mess something up, so turn the visibility off by clicking the eyeball

Make sure that top layer (copy) is selected so that we’re working with it.

We’re going to use the Quick Selection tool

If you don’t see it, your tool may look like the Object Selection Tool or the Magic Wand Tool. You can hold down your mouse button on any of those to switch between them.

Using that tool, we’ll draw on ME, NOT the wall around me to select it.

If you mess it up at all, press Ctrl + D to deselect and then try again.

Once you’ve got something selected, you are able to use the Move Tool to move that object somewhere else. Turn on the Move Tool (v)

Click on me anywhere inside the selection

And just slide it over to move!

You’ll notice that there’s now a hole in the original picture when you move the selection, though.

UNDO that move and put me back where I belong. (Ctrl + z)

Hopefully you still have me selected. Look for those Dancing Ants going around me.

We’ll look at a few fun ways of getting my ugly mug out of there.

The first thing that you could do is to fill that selection with a colour.

Go into the Edit menu and choose Fill…

Fill it with the Foreground Color

The Foreground Color is the one that’s in the top box you see near the bottom left of your window:

Right now I have black on top, so if I fill it with that, I get something like this:

Undo that (Ctrl + Z) and we’ll try something else

This time, let’s fill the selection with the same colour as the wall.

Switch to the Eyedropper Tool (I)

And click on the wall

You’ll notice that the foreground colour changes to be the colour of whatever pixel you clicked on

So we can try to remove me by filling the selection with that colour

Go into the Edit menu and choose Fill…

Fill it with the Foreground Color

Now you’ve got this:

As much as it looks like one colour, the wall is actually a bunch of shades of grey, so this doesn’t look very natural at all.

Again, let’s Undo that Fill (Ctrl + Z)

This time, we’ll go to the Edit menu and choose Fill…

And now choose Content-Aware. This is a cool tool that looks around your selection and tries to figure out what to fill it with.

Or just choose the Content-Aware Fill option from the Edit menu

This time, you get a much more natural looking fill

However, when you turn the selection off (Ctrl + D), you can still see the outline of me:

Let’s Undo again (Ctrl + Z)

This time, let’s select just a tiny bit more to get rid of that outline.

Go into the Select menu and choose Modify, then Expand

You don’t really have to expand it by much. 10 pixels should do:

Now try to fill the selection again

Make sure it’s Content-Aware

And that looks a lot better.

Undo (Ctrl + Z), Deselect (Ctrl + D) and let’s try something else.

Let’s spend some time with the Magic Wand Tool.

There are 4 options with this tool (and most selection tools), New, Add, Subtract, and that other one that I never ever use and can never remember the name of…

If you take the wand and click on the wall, it looks for areas of a similar colour. Again, the wall is not one shade of grey, so it doesn’t select everything. In this case, it doesn’t even select enough of the wall.

Deselect (Ctrl + Z)

The Tolerance setting kind of helps us to adjust how many shades of the colour the tool will select at once. Try increasing the number to 100.

Click on the wall again and you’ll see that it actually selects too much now. It’s grabbing my face as well.

Deselect (Ctrl + D)

and bump the Tolerance down a bit:

This time when we click on the wall, it selects just the wall and nothing else, which is perfect.

Deselect (Ctrl + D)

This time we’ll switch tools and select the Rectangular Marquee Tool

Click on the wall and drag out a box roughly the size of my big fat head

Make a new Layer Via Copy (Ctrl + J)

You’ll see that you now have a new layer with just a box of wall on it

Switch to the Move Tool (v)

Grab this selection and move it. It’s like patching a hole in the wall with another section of wall.

Kind of cool, but not entirely useful because it’s the wrong shape.

Switch back to the Quick Selection Tool (w) and just select my massive head:

Switch back to the Rectangular Marquee Tool:

Click inside of the selection and move the Dancing Ants to a spot on the wall:

Again we’re going to make a New Layer Via Copy (Ctrl + J)

Again we’ve got a new layer

Again click on the selection and move it

This time try to put the patch over my head.

A great improvement!

Deselect (Ctrl + D) and you’ll see that it looks pretty good

Undo (Ctrl + Z)

Deselect (Ctrl + D)

This time we’ll switch to the Clone Stamp Tool

You might have to play with your brush size a bit here. I chose 100

What the Clone Stamp does is it copies an area from one location and paints it into a new one.

To use the tool, you have to set where you want to copy from. Put your cursor over my cheek

Press Alt and click to set the copy point.

Then go click and paint over another area (like my eye.) You’ll see that it’s copying whatever the little crosshairs (+) touches into the circle. In this case, I let the crosshairs go over my nose a bit, so it started drawing me a new nose.

Have some fun with that tool for sure. It takes some practice to get the hang of it because you have to paint with little strokes (just do a bit at a time) and you have to go and set your copy point over and over again (go to a new area and press Alt then click)

Undo (Ctrl + Z) as many times as you need to restore my face (or just leave it)

Ctrl + D to deselect

One more tool that’s pretty fun is the Content-Aware Move Tool

Make sure you’re on New or Add to selection

Draw a circle completely around me and then click and move it over

You’ll see that I’m magically moved over and the previous spot is patched at the same time! Cool, huh?

Play around and make sure that you have the hang of those tools. You’ll need a good grasp of them for the next assignment, which I’m not going to show you how to do…

 

Using your newfound Photoshop skills, you will design your very own trading card in the style of a hockey/baseball/football/basketball card, or perhaps a Pokemon style card. Your job is to be creative and original while using something like that as inspiration. You will design both the front and the back of the card.

Here is my example:

You can almost certainly come up with something better than that! I have a few sample cards on my desk that you could look at, or just google a hockey card and see what one could look like.

You DO NOT have to use yourself as the subject of the card, although that would be a lot of fun! You are encouraged to make one about yourself, of course, but can make one about your favourite athlete/musician/Pokemon, etc.

A standard trading card is about 2.5 inches by 3.5 inches. You can decide whether to design it in Portrait orientation (tall) or Landscape (wide.) Make sure your resolution is 300 pixels/inch and you are using the CMYK color mode.

If you come up with something good, I’ll even print it out and give it to you! When we cut them out, it is difficult to cut precisely on the line, so we often end up with a strip of white paper on the outside. To prevent this, we add in something called a BLEED, which is an extra bit of the background that extends past the edge of the intended page. This area gets cut off, so you don’t want to put anything important in there.

We actually want our card to be 2.5 inches by 3.5 inches, but we’ll add in an extra .25 inch bleed on all sides:

By default, Photoshop files always start out with one page/canvas, but you can add another.

If you go into the Layer menu, then choose New, then Artboard…

You can have multiple pages/canvases/artboards, which show up in the Layers panel

You’ll notice two pages that you can work on side-by-side:

 

In order to properly keep that Bleed area separate, you need to set up some Guides. In order to do that, you need to be able to see your Rulers.

Go into the View menu and choose Rulers (or press Ctrl + R)

Click on the ruler at the top of the page and pull down. Do this OFF of your page (beside it)

Drag down until you’re just onto your page.

You should see a light blue line appear on your page. With the Move tool active (press v on your keyboard), click on the line/Guide to select it. Then Right-click and choose Edit Selected Guides:

The top guide should be .25 inch into the page.

Repeat this process, placing guides at the top and bottom of the page. The next one should be at 3.75 inches

If you’ve done it correctly, those guides will extend out onto both artboards and all you’ll need to do is add the vertical guides on both sides

Drag from the left ruler onto the page and set a guide at .25 in

And another at 2.75 in

The other artboard requires a bit of math because the spacing is a bit odd, but lucky for you, I’ve done it for you! Put one at 3.583 in

and a final one at 6.083 in

In the end, you should see something like this, with guides marking off that bleed area on the front and back of the card

 

Those guides are just for your information. They will not appear on the printed card!

When you create your background, make sure it extends out to the edge of the page. Remember that the section between the guide and the edge of the page is designed to be cut off, so never put anything important in there!

Remember that the guides will be the edge of the page when cut, so never put anything important too close to those guides! Keep a bit of a margin area blank all the way around.

Here’s what that might look like:

Anything important should be in that area that I have grey (Safe area.)

 

SAMPLES:

When starting with any quality project, you need to start from QUALITY ASSETS (ingredients.) The better the quality of the images you start with, the better your project will turn out. I HIGHLY recommend downloading HIGH QUALITY IMAGES as often as possible. You maybe used to using Google Images for everything. There are many reasons why this is a bad idea…

I almost always start with UNSPLASH: https://unsplash.com/

Unsplash contains HIGH QUALITY photography that you HAVE PERMISSION to use in your projects. Photos, like music, movies, video games, etc. are copyrighted by the creator. Each creator can decide whether to share a creation or not. Just because you see it on the Internet or Google Images, that DOES NOT MEAN YOU CAN USE IT. The people who submit photos to Unsplash know that they are going to be used and have given permission to do so!

You can search for just about anything on Unsplash. The more general your search term, the more results you’ll get. If you’re looking for HOCKEY, you’ll find a lot of photos. If you want a photo of your favourite Winnipeg Jet (hint: it’s Nikolaj Ehlers, of course), you won’t find nearly as much.) Keep your search fairly general if possible:

Note that some photos are labelled Unsplash+. You have to pay for those ones!

Luckily, those ones are usually kind of lame, so there are lots of free options available.

If you see a photo you like and it is NOT Unsplash+, hover over the bottom right. You’ll see an arrow on top of the photo. The easiest way to download the best quality image is to just click that arrow!

There are many other FREE photo sites like Unsplash that you might find useful. I have links to a bunch of them on my LINKS page.

GOOGLE IMAGES

Sometimes, just can’t find what you’re looking for and must resort to using Google Images. It happens. If you have another option, please use a site like Unsplash, but if you really need that photo of Nikolaj Ehlers, Google Images might be the way to go:

Go here: https://images.google.com/

IMPORTANT TIP: Under the Search bar, there’s a button that says Tools. Click it!

You can limit the search to only give you (fairly) high quality images by going under Size and choosing Large

Sometimes you might want a photo without a background. You can click the word Color:

and set that to Transparent, which should give you photos without a background:

Honestly, it doesn’t always do a good job, but you can usually find something.

You’ll know a photo has a transparent background if it has a checker board pattern around it:

If you find a photo you like, RIGHT CLICK your mouse on it and choose Save Image As…

I HIGHLY recommend saving important images in your OneDrive folder. If you save something in Downloads and need it later, you may not have access to that image any more.

 

PHOTOSHOP

Open Photoshop

There is so much to learn in Photoshop! I’ve been using the program since before you were born, and there’s still so much that I don’t know! Spend some time looking at the great tutorials available sometime:

We are going to ope the photo that we downloaded though. Click Open (or Ctrl + O on your keyboard):

and find the photo. I have mine in my OneDrive’s Graphic Tech folder:

From there, we’re just going to add some text and modify it. Here are a couple of those handy tutorials:

Add text: https://creativecloud.adobe.com/cc/learn/photoshop/web/add-text-to-image?locale=en-CA

Edit text: https://creativecloud.adobe.com/cc/learn/photoshop/web/edit-text?locale=en-CA

You’ll save that in your OneDrive folder, work on it, then move it into the folder that you shared with me for a quick and easy mark!

(stop the video after 1 minute to avoid the annoying ad)

History lesson (it’s not boring!)

Get started:

First practice!

CLICK HERE

Then click:

Turn this:

Into this:

Show me your completed file in Photoshop for a quick & easy mark!