Making Lower Thirds Part 1 - Photoshop for Video

[Music playing] Hi! This is Rich Harrington, and welcome to another edition of Photoshop for video. Today, we are going to look at a staple in broadcast design and that is the lower third. In this first part, we are going to talk about designing the bar and really had to work with some texture so it could move beyond those clunky days of just using gradients. Let us see how. One thing that I like to do when working in my Photoshop document is to put a photo back there for reference. So, I will often put a piece of video or a clip or a still frame or even just a head shot back there. So, I have something to design within relationship to what we are actually working on. Now, the first thing we are going to need for our lower third here is going to be some sort of bar and texture. Let us go ahead and make one of this from scratch. I want to make a new layer and press Shift+Del to call the fill dialogue box. And we will fill that with the default of 50% gray. Now, 50% gray is a natural values. This is really easy to run filters on it and we will see a lot of details pop up. So, let go ahead and generate a texture. There is lot of textures you can make right inside the Photoshop and you can also combined third party filters. So for example, I can use something here like Flaming Pear. Let us go ahead and try this vibrant patterns one that they have. And this will come up and generate new patterns. Now, flaming pear makes a lot of great filters and what I really like about their filters is that it fully functional for 30 days. So, if you visit our website, you are actually download the filter and tried out and put to it to work and see how it does for you. Now, cool thing here is that we can actually roll the die. So if we click the die here, it will generate different patterns with each click. And you see that you have a lot of variety. So, there is a lot of fun things you could do here with playing and then of course, you can actually make your own adjustments here with the mixers sliders as you see fit to create different looks. You can also go ahead and play with the hues if you want to colorize that or mix the colors over all and get some interesting looks. When you are satisfied, you just click Okay and it will actually apply that texture for you. So, that works out pretty well. Now to finish this off a little bit, I am going to soften that because I do not want too much texture in my texture. Remember, it is a background so that cannot be destructing. You can throw this away because I am not going to use that layer, and I have got this and let us just name that bar Texture, and we run a filter here. Filter blur, motion blur, and we will go ahead and push that left and right a little bit to just get a much softer pattern. And that works out really well. Now, the next thing we are going to do is shortened this so the bar is not quite so tall. We could do this with free transform or we could just delete away the part that we do not want. I am going to grab mark key tool and just lasso around top part bar here that we are not going to use, and we could then press delete. Now, if you are not seeing it, you want to make sure you have some safe title guards in there. If you make a new default document with the video pre set, it is going to put him in automatically and those are usual show up as guides, but if you do not have them, you can actually take advantage of one of the actions in the video set. Go to your actions panel, and load up the video action. If they are not available, just click the sub menu and they will be at the bottom there. And within that set, you will actually have one that says Title Safe Overlay, you can cut play and let it run. And then they will actually give you a guide. So, that works out pretty well. If you want too here, if the text is too big, you could change that pretty simply. We just trash that real quick, grab the text tool, and we will just pick a different font, there you go. And let us run that action again. And it goes ahead and adds a title safe guide for us there labeling things. So remember, your text is going to fall inside of title safe so make sure you enough bar there to hold the text. Next, we are going to ahead and combined this with a little bit of color. Now, because there are so many reds in this here, we are going to ahead and actually change that color. Let us just put a solid color layer above that. And I can pick any color I want, I can even sample from the background if I needed too, but that is pretty good there. And we will set that to color mode. And it will stylalize the bar. Now, you noticed it is affecting more than the bar. That is easy to fix. Simply choose layer, create clipping mask. Notice that the layer indents itself and it only applies to the opaque layers down below. We are going to use the same technique no when we introduce some texture additionally to the bar. I am going to put a photo of climbing rope of the bar, and which is the same thing, layer, create clipping mask, and it indents. I have got this laid on top and we got to need to do now is blend it. So, the easiest way to do that is to pick the move tool and then use the keyboard shortcut of Shift+ to cycle through bonding modes. There is the layer, grab to move toil, and do Shift+ and you will see that I could step through blending modes and those textures are now mixing together into a new look for the bar. And I like that results, setting it to overlay mode, and we will drop the intensity just a little by taking opacity down to about 60%. So, you see there we have generated our own custom texture and works very well. To make things easier, we are going to go ahead and group the bar into a single layer. To do that, select all the layers. So, well just simply shift click and then command or Ctrl+G and you will see that it gets put into a single group. We can name that bar and the advantage of this is that we can now apply a gradient mask to get some ramped opacity into that bar. I simply click on the mask button here, and I can grab the gradient tool. And what I will do is at white to black gradient. Click and drag and you will see that we get a nice ramping effect. Now, the case of this bar, it is translucent on the left and opaque on the right. I want to change that. So easy enough, we could just select the mask and press command I, and it inverts. If you need too, you can then press command L for levels and continue to play with the mask itself putting more or less transparency into the bar by adjusting it. And this works out very nicely to create a bar with ramp partial transparency. At this point, let us finished it off with some quick text and then week, we will pick this back up and further stylized it by adding a logo using some layers styles as well. I have got some text down here. Let us go ahead and just turn this layers on, and you will see that we are playing with it. So, I have got a few things to move around. Let us go ahead and position the text here for describing the descent into the Canyon, and we will mudge that down to the bottom. If I want, we can move that to a single line and just get rid of the spacing to make that a little bit easier to see. Expanding the size of the text block will change where the text wraps. There we go. Let us mudge that down. And then we will grab the top line here. And I am purposefully having this break the top of the lower third bar. Many inexperience designers feel like to text can only go in the bar. But you can go ahead and break that line. It is something different to try with your designs. And I am not going to use this voice off because we are actually put this over the person while we see them on camera. So, we got a good start there but we definitely want to refine this a bit. Be sure to join us next week where we are going to take this lower third and go a little deeper with it to finalize our design. For Photoshop for Video, I am Rich Harrington. I invite you to check out our resource blog at photoshopforvideo.com and be sure to post a comment there because we will be giving away a copy of the Photoshop for video book later this month. Thanks again. [Music playing]