Adobe Photoshop CC - Essentials Training

Class Project 01 - Creating your own postcard

Daniel Walter Scott

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All right it is homework project time. Don't think of it as homework, think of it as ways to really solidify what you've learnt so far, and I promise you, I've taught this loads of times and if the people who bother going and doing these little extras, they really find the benefits, or at least find the tools stick a lot more than just kind of following along with me with the videos. 

So your homework, that's not really homework, it's fun stuff to do. You'll find the outline in your exercise files. So 'Exercise Files', there's a folder in there called 'Projects'. You can open either one of these, ones a Word doc and one's a PDF, whatever takes your fancy, they're the same. And in here it explains what you need to do. I'll quickly run through it here. Basically it's creating your own version of a postcard, and sharing it with us. You don't have to share it with me, but I'd love you to. 

So these are the requirements. You choose your own theme, pick-- you might have a business you work for your own kind of like side hustle that you do stuff for. It could just be a church group or a social group or anything you can think of to do a postcard for. Choose your own image, you might use one from your cell phone or if you're a photographer, use one of your own or go grab one from Unsplash; I want you to fix that image. So something from Unsplash is probably not going to need much fixing but if you're using your own one, go through, do the levels. Just like the Hues, and Saturations, and Vibrance. All that whole section on adjustments, have a look through that. 

I want you to add a Gradient, it's totally optional. I'm into Gradients, as you know. See if you can do this thing, even if you don't do it, you know, don't want it in your final, you don't kind of like hideous Gradient, you can-- I just want you to run through the process just so you know about Blending Modes and those types of things. Once you have at least one shape-- I kind of did them all to try and fit them all in for this course, so we've got circles and stars, and rectangles with corners. You just need at least one. In terms of colors, you might let the image drive the colors like we did for some of these circles, or you can go to Adobe Color Themes to get inspiration for colors. Remember, there's five Color Swatches that it picked for us. 

Next thing is you need to have just some text, like this standard text here. You can kind of copy the structure I had, you're allowed to use Lorem Ipsum but you also need to do that text on a path. Remember this badge down the bottom here, where it kind of wrapped around, or maybe the stripy stuff on the line. You can do either of those. One uses of that, or two, or ten, but I want to see that. I want to see at least two Layer Styles so that includes Drop Shadow, Strokes, Gradients, Bevels & Embosses. Have a look through the whole list, we didn't cover them all in this course. You might find, experiment with another one, and surprise me with inner feather or outer feather. I can't think of any other ones, but two of them at least. 

Then I want you to present it, not exactly like this but in that same sort of vein where we saved a version of the document, we flattened it down, then we kind of-- it doesn't have to be on an angle, get your piece straight in there, but a little Drop Shadow to make it look like it's-- you might put in the background a photograph of a desk so it looks like it's sitting on a desk. That's the way I'd like you to present it for this particular exercise. Then I want you to save and share, and over here just says save a JPEG copy. We haven't really done exporting yet, we did saving, but just so you know, 'File', 'Save', well, 'File', 'Save As', an option in here is JPEG. That's the easy one to share around. 

You can just take a screenshot, on my Mac, it's 'Command-Shift-4'. Hold those keys down and I can drop box around stuff, and then on my desktop you hear the little snappy noise, that on my desktop will be a screenshot. It's an easy way to do it as well. On a PC, can't really remember, there's a Print Screen button somewhere. You'll have to Google that one, or do this 'Save as JPEG'. That is it, my friends. 

Well, I want you to share it with me. You can DM me if you don't want to share it publicly, but share it publicly. Great places are Instagram, just tag me. You click on that link to get to my Instagram account. You can tag me in Twitter as well, there's a Facebook group. Just getting started, I'd love you to get in there, and start using that but we just got going with that, and yes, you might be the first one there but share it in there, but also you can use these accounts as well if you prefer, and you can use a Direct Message. If you're not much of a social person, just as an assignment, depending on the website you're looking at, ends up on a couple of places where you can-- there's an assignment section or you can just use the comments underneath the video. This video right here, you'll see a comment section, share it there. 

All right, that's it. You don't have to do it, of course, but please do, but if you do I'll see you in the next video in a couple of hours. Maybe a lot longer than that depending on your current Photoshop skills. And the people that are going to skip it here I will see you in a couple of seconds in the next video. All right, let's go.