Delve into the details of preparing a three-banner display image using Photoshop. This article outlines the process of creating selections and channels to individually mask each image within the banners.
Key Insights
- The process commences with opening the Photoshop file that contains the three-banner display. The visibility of the white and black backgrounds can be toggled to determine how the images would appear in different scenarios.
- Instead of creating a mask after inserting the images within each banner, channels are created to save selections. The polygonal lasso tool is used to generate these selections, which are saved as channels within the three-banner display document.
- The channels created for each banner can be reloaded in the future using the 'load selection' option. This method proves useful when images are imported for use within the banners.
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In this video we're going to begin preparing our three banner display image with the three banners we've already created. So let's begin.
We'll go to File, Open, and within our folder, we're going to open the three banner display Photoshop file. We'll select it and click open. As we can see, we now have our three banner display. Looking to the bottom right, we can see that we have the frame, our white background, as well as a black background.
If we toggle the visibility for our black background and then toggle the visibility for our white background, we can see what the display would look like with either a white background or a black background. This can be helpful for determining how our images will look in different scenarios. Now let's start getting ready to add our images.
Before we do this, we're going to want to create selections so that when we drop our images within each of these banner displays, we can mask them individually. Rather than creating a mask after the fact, we can create channels and save our selections to later create a mask with. So let's do this in practice.
Let's zoom in first and go to the top-left corner of our first banner. Next, we're simply going to want to select all of the white space within our banner. To do this, the first thought might be to use the magic wand tool. If we click on it, we'll see that it selects most of the inside; however, it doesn't quite select all of our banner.
If we increase the tolerance to 80 and hit ENTER, then CTRL D to deselect and click again, it still doesn't quite gather all the information we want. So let's choose a different method. We'll hit CTRL D to deselect, and instead, we're going to use our polygonal lasso tool.
With this selected, we're going to choose 'New Selection' in our options bar, and we're simply going to use the polygonal lasso tool to create a selection starting at the top-left point of our banner display. We'll click each of the points, and I'm going to go right up to the edge of the gray outline without going into the gray outline. We'll then close it off, and now, with this area selected, we want to save it as a channel.
To do this, we'll right-click and go down to 'Save Selection.' We're then going to name this; in this case, we'll name it 'left banner, ' and it'll be within our document for 'three banner display' as a new channel. We'll then click OK.
Now, if we hit CTRL D to deselect our image, in the future, if we want to be able to use that selection again, we can go to the right of our layers panel and select 'Channels.' Right here, we have our left banner as a selection. Let's toggle the RGB back and deselect 'left banner.'
Now, if we want to pull this selection back, we'll right-click, go to 'Load Selection, ' and we can select the channel 'left banner.'
We'll click OK, and we can see we've now loaded the selection that we've previously created. There are obviously multiple ways this can be useful; however, we'll be using these once we've imported each of our images.
Next, let's create two additional channels for the middle and right banners.
We'll hit CTRL D to deselect, and now let's work on the middle display selection. We'll start at the top-left corner, go to the top-right, down to the bottom-right, and bottom-left, and let's finish it out here. We've now created our selection, so we're ready to make a channel. We'll right-click, go to 'Save Selection, ' and we're going to rename this 'center banner' and we'll hit OK.
Finally, let's create an additional banner selection. We'll scroll to the right and hit CTRL D, and we're now ready to create our third banner. As we can see in our channels panel, we have the left banner and our center banner.
Next, we'll click up in the top-left corner, we'll go to the top-right, and going down to the bottom, now select the bottom-right corner, bottom-left corner, and go back to the top. As we can see here, we may be missing some of the pixels up top, so let's zoom in, and now I want to add these gray panels at the top.
I'll scroll to the right a little bit, and we're going to go to 'Add to Selection' in our options bar. I'll simply click and create a selection that's slightly larger than what we had, and when I close it out, we'll see that these pixels are now added.
In addition, I'll do this on the left-hand side, so I'd like to move it over just a little bit. We'll create a selection here, go to the top, and close out our selection. We've now added this to our selection.
We're now ready to right-click, go to 'Save Selection, ' and we'll create a new channel, calling this one 'right banner, ' and we'll click OK.
We'll then hit CTRL D to deselect, and we now have the three channels set up for our future images.
We'll go back to RGB, and we're now ready to begin adding our images. Let's hit CTRL S on the keyboard to save our work, and in the next video, we'll begin adding our images. See you there!