Delve into the world of graphic design with this article, which provides a detailed walkthrough of making final adjustments to a banner design and preparing it for client export in Photoshop. Learn how to add stylistic elements to text and logo, apply filters to the background, and finalize your artwork with necessary metadata before exporting it.
Key Insights
- The article offers a step-by-step guide on enhancing text and logo elements in a banner design using Photoshop's feature set, including gradient overlays for text and drop shadows for logos to create depth and distinction.
- It illustrates how to apply filters to the background layer of a design for a more dynamic look and feel, demonstrating how to convert multiple layers into a single smart object for easy manipulation and filter application.
- The guide further explains how to prepare your artwork for export to a client, emphasizing the importance of filling out metadata such as the document title, author, and copyright status, and capturing a comprehensive screenshot of your work for submission.
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In this video, we'll be making some final adjustments to our banner and then exporting it for our client. The first thing I'd like to do is add a little bit of style to our text up top.
It feels a little plain, so we'll go down and click the FX icon, and it'll give you the opportunity to choose whatever style you'd prefer for our text. I'm going to choose a Gradient Overlay, and for the gradient, we can specify this by clicking on our gradient. I'm going to choose one of the standard gradients and click OK.
Simply adjust it. I like the different colors that this has here. We can scale it up or down, and in this instance, I'm going to scale it way up.
I'll drop the opacity a little bit so it's not quite as obvious, and click OK. As we can see, it starts to fade a little bit darker. However, as mentioned, choose your own style for your title. Next, let's add a little bit of styling to our logo.
Currently, it feels a little flat within the image, so let's give it a little bit of an ability to distinguish itself from the background. We'll go and click the FX icon, and let's add a Drop Shadow. A Drop Shadow essentially adds a shadow to our image, distinguishing it and almost giving it the look of being raised above the background.
Let's go through how we can do this. The first thing we'll want to do is change our Distance from 3, and as we drag up, we can see the shadow forming. We'll leave our Distance at about 33 pixels. Next, we can adjust the Spread, or how much our Drop Shadow spreads out.
Leave it at 17, and finally, we can adjust the Size. I'll increase the Size to about 30 to 40 pixels so that it spreads evenly. Next, let's set our Angle. As we drag our Angle around, we can see a shadow appear in different corners.
We can also see from the preview on the right where the shadow is placed. The Angle is about 130; however, I think the Distance is a little far out right now. Let's bring the Distance in a little more, to about 9 pixels.
We can adjust our Spread and Size and hit OK. We can then toggle our logo visibility effect to see what it looks like without the Drop Shadow, and I think that adds a little more depth, bringing our attention to our Phase 10 logo. Let's hit CTRL+S on the keyboard to save our work. Finally, let's add a style change to our background.
We'll select the background, and next, we're going to want to convert the Textured Corners, Green Layer, and Blue Layer all into one Smart Object. We can right-click on this and click Convert to Smart Object so that we can work with one layer for our styling. Let's rename this “Background” and hit ENTER.
Next, we'll go up to Filter and select Filter Gallery. First, let's change the view to Fit on Screen. As we can see, since the filters aren't limited to the artboard, it's going to show our entire layer and some of the edges that aren't contained within the artboard. So let's zoom in just a little bit and drag our view to the left so that we can see mostly what will appear within the artboard.
As we can see on the right, there are many different filters, and as we click on each of them, Photoshop will produce the effect within our view. We can go through a few different options and observe the differences and changes that each one makes to our image. In addition, we can make adjustments depending on the styles available on the right-hand side.
For example, with Patchwork selected, we can go to the right and adjust our Square Size. Currently, we have pretty small squares, so if we increase it to 10, we'll see that the squares become a little bit larger. In addition, we can adjust the Relief—or space between the squares—to be larger or smaller as well.
Feel free to choose whatever style and make whatever adjustments you'd prefer for your banner. For me, I'll choose Stained Glass. I'm going to increase the Cell Size a bit, reduce the Border Thickness, and finally raise the Light Intensity just a little so it's a bit lighter where the “P” will be. I'll click OK, and we'll see the effect applied to the background.
Let's save our work using CTRL+S on the keyboard. Finally, we're ready to export. In this case, our client has specified that we export this as a Photoshop file so that they can make necessary tweaks and adjustments if needed. However, they do want us to fill out some of the metadata, so to do this, we'll go to File > File Info to update our metadata.
Here, they've requested that we fill out the Document Title, Author, and Copyright Status. We'll type in “Phase 10 Construction Banner.” For Author, you can put your name. For the Author Title, we'll type in “Photoshop Student.” For the Description, we'll type “Phase 10 Construction Banner for Event.”
Next, for Copyright, let's change this to “Copyrighted.” We'll then click OK and save our work by hitting CTRL+S on our keyboard. Next, let's prepare our file for our screenshot. To do so, let's go to our Layers Panel, and we’ll want to make sure that all of our layer groups are expanded so we can see all of our elements.
In addition, in this case, we're going to drag our Layers Panel up a bit so that we can clearly see everything. We'll have our Title Bar as a group with our text and a Gradient Overlay, our Bar, and then within our Logo group, we’ll have the logo and a Drop Shadow. Finally, within our Background group, we’ll have the background layer with a filter applied from our Filter Gallery. From here, we're going to be selecting Artboard 1 as our selection so that we can confirm the width is 72 inches and the height is 48 inches.
In addition, we're going to want to make sure that our guides are shown by selecting Artboard 1. With all of these layers shown and expanded, as well as the Properties for our artboard selected and the guides visible, we're now ready to take our screenshot. On a Windows computer, press the Windows key and Print Screen to save the screenshot to your Pictures folder. On a Mac, press Command + Shift + 4 and drag a selection box to take a screenshot that will be saved to your desktop.
Please crop these images so that the entire interface is shown, and with that screenshot saved, upload it to the portal as part of your final grade. By uploading this screenshot, it's not necessary to upload the Photoshop file itself, as you will be graded on the screenshot alone. Again, make sure all of your layers are expanded, your guides are shown, and the Properties for your artboard are visible—then upload that screenshot.
In the next video, we'll be working on our Strategy Skyline postcard. See you there!