The Design & Publishing Center . / . Photoshop Tips & Tricks . / . Seminars: How was it done (2)

June's Beach Graphic... continued

Now in Photoshop... the image rasters onto a new, transparent background. At this point we adjust the brightness (+5) and contrast (+25) to richen the colors. (The clip art comes resident in CYMK color mode, and ramping over to RGB leaves the colors somewhat chalky.) Now, scale down. We do this in a series of chunks rather than all at one time. Two 15% reductions with a Sharpen between each gets us to within 100 pixels of our target size.

The Type.

We selected Helvetica Ad Heavy, for a nice, fat, character that will work well at the final size, and will hold enough body to carry the blend.

Key in the word JUNE (on a new layer in 3.5) and save the selection.

(Note our Type Channel) This keeps her active -- knowing we'll be needing her again, in position, three times.

Selection/Load Selection - then Selection/Modify/Expand to 4 pixels.

(If she was still active after the selection save, then simply move to a new layer and go for it.)

Fill with Black. This is our outline and dropshadow.

We bump it down a pixel just to heavy up the bottoms of the characters. Now a slight

BLUR gives the black outline a 'softness'.

(Why we did that, we have no idea.)

Selection/Load Selection - then Selection/Modify/Expand to 3 pixels.
Now we fill with YELLOW.

This separates the true character form away from the background blue. It enhances readability a lot, while also giving a 'hot' visual spot down in the cool water... another eye grabber. (Remember our color theory: Warm advances, Cool recedes.)

Selection/Load Selection - then BLEND.

We decided to fill it with the Gold -> Red blend to mirror the effect in the sky. The Color tool window shows gold is the background, red in the foreground. We used the gold rather than Yellow to maintain our character shapes and prevent them from bleeding into that 2-pixel, Yellow outline. The blend tool was set at a simple linear blend, 50% crossover back to front. (Actually the default!)

Now we're done, and all that's left to do is flatten and render in the various forms we'll need for the newsletter and the web page. (We also captured the screen for this article.)

There you have it... 17 minutes start to finish. Write in and let us know how YOU like to do it!