Male: Hello and welcome to a new easydigitals.com tutorial. Remember, you can get all of our high quality Photoshop and Photoshop elements templates at easydigitals.com. Just click on the products button and don’t forget to sign up for our monthly newsletter. We give away free templates and tutorials each and every month, along with product update info and coupons. Okay, Kim, what easy tutorial are you going to show us today?
Kim: Today I want to show you how to work with this template overlay that I've created for the backdrops. This is one of my favorite templates and I'm really excited that it’s my template of the month and it’s free, so my customers get to start using it right away. Fist, let’s go over the work space, I like to have my move tool selected. Auto select layer and show transform controls. I like to have my layers up and let’s just go over some of these layers. At the top we start with some of the text. We have a spot here for an extracted photo. We have an additional text layer with the more rocky, grungy feel.
We have our top stripe, our bottom stripe, dark edges, another place for a photo and a basic backdrop has been added. The first thing I want to do is just show you how to add a photo that will take up the entire backdrop area. So I'm going to select backdrop. I'm going to come over here to open and I'm going to select my photo that I want to add. All right, here’s my photo and I'm just going to drag my photo in. And now, if this layer wants to move the dark edges layer, sometimes I just like to lock it in that way, I don’t have to worry about the moving around on me.
Okay, so I'm going to arrow this up to the corner and you see these little pink guides, those are called smart guides. You just go to view, show and then smart guides. I like to use those because they help show where everything is lined up. So I'm going to go ahead and arrow this up a little. I'm going to press my SHIFT key and drag this photo out so that it doesn’t lose it’s aspect ratio. And I'm going to press ENTER and arrow up and get it into place. Now, I've got some guides on here and if these help you to figure out where you want to place your photo you can use those, they're in the center horizontally and vertically. If you don’t want them, you can just go to view, show and guides and have it turned off.
Okay, so that’s how easy it is to add a photo and just have it take up the whole area. We’re going to change this text in a little bit. But I also want to show you the way they use this for backdrops. So we’re going to go and turn this off. I'm going to come up here to file open and this is my extracted photo. You can extract photos using the extract filter. There are several tutorials out there that show you how to extract photos and it’s really a fun way to make neat posters. Up here where it says extracted photo here and then I'm just going to drag in. I could move it around but I just want to get it in the right spot right away. So I'm just going to press SHIFT and drag this photo down and get it right where I want it and press ENTER.
Okay, now I have my photo in place so now I can just resize it you as I want. You can move these layers around and you could move his name behind the extracted photo or you could, you know, any way you want to do it. But this is the way I like it. So we’ve got this photo added and if I want to I can even add an adjustment layer and come up here and add a hue saturation layer and change the color of my backdrop by just moving this. Let’s say I wanted it to be like a color of red and I also wanted it to be darker, so you can just play with that until you get it right, until you get it how you want it and then you’ve got a different color backdrop there.
What's great about this template is that you can add other backdrops to it like the easy digitals backdrops and I'm going to show you how to do that. These are our backdrops or sports backdrops and all you have to do is open up the backdrop, select your backdrop layer and your document, you click layer, duplicate layer, easy digitals, July of ’08, okay, and there it is. So now, my backdrop is in there. And if I want to, I can even resize my backdrop and press ENTER.
You can also use the backdrops from our urban grunge set. So you just open up that template and let’s say we wanted to add the grunge back layer, duplicate layer, click OKAY, get rid of that and there’s my layer right there. So that looks really nice. And again, you can change the color of this if you wanted to.
I'm just going to show you one more. We have our sports volume two backdrops that come in a huge variety of colors. I just want to show you how you can add that one. So if you happen to own that set. This is—let’s see what this red looks like. Layer, duplicate layer, I choose the correct file click OK, you can see how easy it is to add all these different backdrops and if you have backdrops like from other sources. Okay, here’s the backdrop I want to use. So I'm going to open this, this is from iStock and you want to make sure these are pretty high resolution for this because this is 300 DPI and it’s 8x10 300 DPI so it can be printed up to 16x24 or maybe bigger depending on where you have it printed. I mean, it should still not look pixilated at all when you print it out.
So let’s say I wanted to have this one as my backdrop and then I could just do the same thing, layer, duplicate layer, and then choose where I want to put it and then I'm going to close this out and you're just going to put it into place where you want it and then press ENTER. So you can use any backdrop for this if you get a backdrop from another source you can use them as well. So I think that makes it pretty nice.
Okay, let’s go ahead and customize this with the correct text that we want in here. I'm just going to click on my type tool and I'm going to double click this and I'm going to change it to baseball. And it doesn’t quite fit exactly the way my other one did. So I'm going to use if you have CS3 you can just have it over this and make it bigger. If you have other versions you may need to arrow down or type in the number here. And then I'm just going to send through it and make sure it looks light. This is one of those times when the guides come in handy because they can help show you where the center is. You may not exactly want it in the center but it does help to look at that. I like to use this little box up and then down, I see that it’s not exactly centered but I think it looks best a little bit to the right in this case.
And let’s say I want to use my other text then I'm going to double click it and I'm going to change it to whatever I want. But I've got my cap locks on. Same thing you can just expand it. This is agency an agency font. If you don’t have this font some other nice fonts one that everybody has is impact and that looks really nice too. You can exchange the font for something else if you don’t have agency. This needs to be bold. And then I'm just going to expand this. Just make sure it’s not coming out over my back. It’s a little big, I'm going to make it smaller. And you can also expand it and tighten it. I’ll change that back to zero and then you just come down here and do the same thing to the name.
If the name expands too far past you can you know change the font and make it smaller or larger. So you can see that there's a lot you can do with this template. You can have baseball players that use the whole picture and you can use any backdrop that you want. So I think it’s a pretty versatile set I really think you're going to enjoy it. So let me know if you have any questions. Enjoy the template.
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