Photoshop Poster Design Course
Every week or so we do a small write up about one of the tailored Adobe Courses we run. Early this week saw Greta return to Newark to deliver a Photoshop Poster Design course. This was a two day Photoshop Course with a specific aim in mind – creating, designing and publishing posters. The client was Rufford Park Golf & Country Club who had been outsourcing their poster design work for some time. They felt with some training they would be able to bring the posters in-house and save the club some money.
Everyone was fairly new to Photoshop so the first day was spent mostly on covering the essential tools and features they need to know to use Photoshop. Obviously layers played a big part in the day as did the transform tool. The guys were very keen to replicate the swoosh shape at the top of their poster design so we worked a lot with Photoshop’s Transform Tool.
Photoshop Swoosh Tutorial - how we did it
Swooshes in Photoshop
Although these look quite difficult they are very easy to create. We drew out rectangular shapes which were filled with their company corporate colour and then activated the Transform tool.
Creating a Photoshop Swoosh Step by Step
There are a number of different ways to create Photoshop Swooshes but this shape was created using the Transform >Warp Tool and you can do this with the following steps.
Create a new document
Add an empty new layer
Draw out a rectangle using the Rectangular Marquee Tool
Make sure that the Swoosh Layer is selected then go to the Edit Menu >Transform >Warp
Once this is selected the above grid and handles appear and all you need to do is to drag the handles into the shape. (Hold down Shift as you drag to keep a perfectly straight line along the vertical grid)
Press return or the tick box on the Options bar to accept the transformation.
Note: You must either accept or reject transformations. You cannot move on in Photoshop until you do
Photoshop Layers
Whichever way you look at you can’t avoid layers in Photoshop so just before creating the Swoosh vector shape we looked at how to duplicate the background layer then moved on to adding new layers for the rest of the content. If you want to use the same content more than once on the document its best to duplicate it to get and exact copy which is what we did. We duplicated the Swoosh layer and positioned it at the bottom of the page then simply returned to the Warp tool to flip it horizontally.
The ladies used an image of the Ruffold County park found out how to shuffle layers backwards and forwards to show different parts of the image and to position it under the Swoosh layers.
Photoshop Type
We then added some text to the poster layout. Being a pixel based software Photoshop text is not the best tool to use but we went ahead and did anyway because they only subscribe to Photoshop.
Adobe Illustrator & Type – Crisp Text
If you have the full Adobe Creative Cloud then its a good idea to create your text in Illustrator and import it into Illustrator as a Smart Object.
Once finished the poster was saved out with both layers intact and as a flattened image. The former for future editing and the other one as a proof.
This is a quick screen grab taken during the course which doesn’t really give the image full justice. It does show what can be achieved on a basic tailored Photoshop course. This was produced on the second and last day of the course by a delegate who was completely new to the software.
Photoshop Poster Design Course
Greta Powell Training specialises in tailored Adobe training Courses and would be happy to discuss running this or a similar course for you. Onsite Photoshop Poster Design training courses are run across the Midlands & UK including all major cities including Nottingham, Leicester, Derby, Chester, Liverpool, Sheffield and their surrounding areas. Please do send an email to arrange a time for us to give you a call to discuss your Adobe Training needs.
