You may have seen some of the GWMS pride posters that have popped up around the school. Most of them look something like this:

Now, it’s your turn to make one. If yours is particularly good and you’d like this, we will print it and put it up around the school, and share it on social media.

You will use Photoshop Elements to create your poster. You can find a link to the program right on your desktop:

Once the program opens, along the bottom there are three options, Photo Editor, Organizer, and Video Editor. You want the first one:

Click the little triangle next to Photo Editor and choose New File:

First, create a descriptive file name. Call it GWMS Poster:

Next, we’ll set up the paper size. The first step is to change the measurements from centimetres to inches:

The posters in the hall are either 11 x 17 inches or 17 x 11 inches. You can choose whether you want your poster to be wider (landscape) or taller (portrait) orientation:

Most of them are 17 inches wide, so my example will be as well.

You also need to change the quality of your image to make it printable in high quality.

Change the Resolution measurement to Pixels/Inch, and make the number 300:

Once your document opens, make sure you SAVE it in your Documents folder!

To see the full features available in the program, make sure you choose the “Expert” tab across the top (it first opens on “Quick”)

You will want to open a panel to keep track of the layers in your document. Find this panel under the Window menu at the top of your screen, or just press the F11 key to open Layers.

Go to misterjrobson.com and click on LINKS:

Find the link to download GWMS logos

Find the SchoolPhoto and download

Make sure that you SAVE the file:

(It will probably go into your Downloads folder unless you change the location)

You will also want a GWMS logo. Choose whichever one you like!

Once you have your images, switch back to Photoshop.

Under the File menu, choose Place…

Go find your school photo first and place that on your page.

If you have your Layers panel open, you will start to see things getting piled on top of the white background.

You will notice that the image does not fill the entire page, no matter whether you have chosen a Landscape or Portrait layout

Hold SHIFT on your keyboard and pull out one of the corners to fill either the left or right side. Be careful when you are doing this that you do not STRETCH or SQUISH your photo. Keep the proportions right so that it looks realistic.

Do the other side as well

Now your photo should fill the entire page.

At the bottom right there is an option to commit (keep) the change (check mark) or revert back (try again – Do Not Enter symbol)

Now place a GWMS logo on top of the school photo. You can move and resize however you like.

Once again, click the check mark or hit Enter to accept the changes.

We’re going to add a box in the background of our text. I like that box to be the same colour as the Sharks logo. To make that possible, you need to use the Color Picker Tool to pick up that colour. The tool looks like an eyedropper, so click on it to activate the tool.

Once it’s turned on, go and click on the blue in the GWMS logo.

On the bottom right of your screen you have two boxes with colours in them. These are your foreground and background colours. When you first start up the program, they are black and white. Once you use the color picker, your top box (the foreground colour) should change to that colour.

Now we’ll switch tools to draw our coloured box. Click on the tool that looks like a little blue blob.

There are a bunch of different shapes that you can draw, I’m going to use the Rectangle. You could try another shape if you think it’ll look better for you.

You could also choose to switch to a different colour if you think it’ll look better.

Click and drag out a box to cover whatever spot on your page you think is best for the text.

You’ll see a shape layer appear in your Layers panel.

If necessary, you can use the Move Tool (the top left tool, you can also press the v key to activate it) to move or resize your box.

Following that, you’ll need the Text tool (looks like a T, the t key on your keyboard will activate it)

At the bottom of your screen you’ll see a box that will allow you to change the font (PLEASE DO!), the size, and the colour of your text. You can make it bold, add italics, change the justification (left, center, right), and more.

Click on top of your coloured box and start typing. You do NOT need to insert or draw a text box! Just click and type! Once you type your message, you’ll see that final layer appear in your Layers panel.

You can use the Move Tool to adjust the box and it will adjust the size of your text at the same time.

Something else that you can do is adjust the Opacity of a layer so that you can partially see through it. Any time you want to do anything to a specific layer, you need to select that layer in your Layers panel. Click on the Shape layer. At the top of the panel, you’ll see a box called Opacity. Try turning that down a bit and see how you like it. You don’t want it too light, so don’t turn it down too far.

You can do the same with your Sharks logo if you wish.

Feel free to be creative and have some fun with this. Don’t get too crazy and be silly, but if you have better ideas for how to improve the poster, go ahead and add/change things!

Once you like the look of your poster, you can save and drop it off in OneDrive.

Posters that look great and represent our school well may be printed and hung in the halls and/or used on social media!