Photoshop Mama's Highlight Box

Hi! This is Mama Shan with a very basic tutorial, just about a basic concept that probably goes neglected in a lot of tutorials. This is mainly geared towards educators or for other teachers out there that need to prepare materials for their classes and it is a simple thing of highlighting something in your screen capture. I use Text Mist’s Snag It to get my screen captures produce written materials.

So, just to get a simple highlight over an area of interest, I am going to go back in history here and just put this back to normal and show you how simple it is. There are several ways to do it in Photoshop but the quickest way for you to do it. One the quickest way again because there are 12 ways to do it is to just grab a marquee tool here and drag over an area that you want to highlight with the marquee like this and then simply go to the edit menu to the fill command and in the contents box here, where it says use, by default it may say foreground or background color, you want to choose the color option which will open up the color picker and then choose a highlight color. It can be yellow or one of these hot greens, we will do green and click okay.

Now, here is the key down here in blending, yours will normally say normal blend mode just click on that and choose the multiply blending mode make sure the opacity is at 100% and click okay and then deselect and there you have got your highlighted text. If you had filled the normal mode that would completely cover it up. Now this can be applied InDesign as well. If you have some written materials and if you want to just make a highlight box around it, just get your text frame tool and drag a marquee around the area that you want to highlight here and then click on your swatches panel. If you do not see it over here if yours is not configure again, just like Photoshop, all of these different panels and palettes can be accessed by going to the top window menu and finding it under that list.

So, it will open up the palette board and I just select yellow. Make sure that the foreground swatch here is the indicator for the fill and not the stroke. Stroke has a little outline around it here and we do not need a stroke on it. Now, the second step to this is to come over here to where it says effects. Click on effects and that opens up that dialogue box and just change the blending mode to multiply.

So, when you are choosing a lighter color and it is going over something darker, it is going to show that darker thing when you change it into multiply blending mode. So, this is a basically a simple concept on the multiply blending mode and how to get this type of a highlighting text in your educational materials or you can apply it to some other aspect in your Photoshop project. That is it!


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