Hi everyone! Happy Tuesday! I hope you all have been resting well and enjoying your holiday weekend!
Today I'm sharing something new--my first ever Photoshop tutorial--Pinterest style! Now Photoshop can be really complicated and intimidating, but there's also some really great things you can make with really basic skills. Today we're gonna learn a little bit about 'layers' and how to resize and arrange images.
In the end, I'm going to teach you how to make a Pinterest style collage! I've made a few of these for myself recently and they are just so pretty. You can use quotes and put it on your wall or bathroom mirror. Or you can use fitness photos to keep somewhere that will motivate you! I'm sure y'all could come up with more ideas since you're such intelligent people (:
All photos are from my 'Destinations' board on Pinterest.
So we're gonna park on 'layers' for a moment. If you're a little familiar with Photoshop, you can skip these first basics and go to the heading about making the Pinterest-style collage.
Layers in Photoshop is like drawing on a bunch of pieces of transparent papers and then putting them on top of each other. This way you can move around or edit different parts of the pictures fairly easily.
So for instance, the first layer is usually the background, which is plain white. Then, you can put more layers of designs on top. By clicking the little eyeball, you can change which parts of the image are visible. So if you disabled the white background of a picture, it shows a checkered pattern but that means it has a transparent background.
To resize a photo, select the layer you're interested in resizing and go to Edit >> Free Transform. Then you can drag the edges of the picture to make it a different size. This tool is also a great/easy way to drag + drop your pictures.
EXPERT TIP: Watch the percentages of the width and height. You want to make them the same to make sure your picture stays proportional. To resize to a certain dimensions, you can type in the pixels in that little box in the top. Then change your other percentage to make sure it's proportional! Make sure you type in the W/H boxes not X/Y!
1. Open up a new file in Photoshop. The width should be whatever the width of your text area in your blog is. Mine is 640 pixels for example. The height can be anything, I'd recommend at least 900 pixels and you can crop it later.
2. Select all the pictures you want and copy-paste them into Photoshop. They will all go in separate layers--this is good!
3. In your head (or on a calculator), subtract 30 from your text area width. Then divide it by three. You can round to the nearest whole number; it doesn't have to be that exact. For example: my blog is 640-30 = 610. Divided by 3 is 203. That number is the width that you want all of your pictures to be.
4. Resize all of your photos to that width, using the method above. Don't forget your proportions! I don't want to see stretched pictures. This, below, is bad. Please don't make anyone's eyes look at this.
5. Now, rearrange your pictures (with Edit>>Free Transform) into three columns. Leave a little space between the columns and each picture. If you used my number method, you can have 15 pixels between each column, but you can just eyeball it.
6. Click the little eye next to the BACKGROUND layer. Then click the little arrow on the layer menu and click Merge Visible. And save!
Ta-da!! There you go, your own beautiful Pinterest-style collage.
I think they're prettiest when you mix up vertical and horizontal photographs but it's all up to you!
Get fancy! Make your background a different color! Do not click the little eye (step 6). Instead, select the background layer. Click the little magic wand in your tool box and select magic eraser. Make sure your tolerance box says 1. Click anywhere on the canvas. Press Shift + F5 and select a color!
Now go forth and Photoshop! If you post any to your blog, share the link here so I can see your pretty new skillz! And if you want to be super lovely, you can tweet or pin this lovely tutorial with my icons floating on your left. (:
Today I'm sharing something new--my first ever Photoshop tutorial--Pinterest style! Now Photoshop can be really complicated and intimidating, but there's also some really great things you can make with really basic skills. Today we're gonna learn a little bit about 'layers' and how to resize and arrange images.
In the end, I'm going to teach you how to make a Pinterest style collage! I've made a few of these for myself recently and they are just so pretty. You can use quotes and put it on your wall or bathroom mirror. Or you can use fitness photos to keep somewhere that will motivate you! I'm sure y'all could come up with more ideas since you're such intelligent people (:
All photos are from my 'Destinations' board on Pinterest.
So we're gonna park on 'layers' for a moment. If you're a little familiar with Photoshop, you can skip these first basics and go to the heading about making the Pinterest-style collage.
Layers in Photoshop is like drawing on a bunch of pieces of transparent papers and then putting them on top of each other. This way you can move around or edit different parts of the pictures fairly easily.
So for instance, the first layer is usually the background, which is plain white. Then, you can put more layers of designs on top. By clicking the little eyeball, you can change which parts of the image are visible. So if you disabled the white background of a picture, it shows a checkered pattern but that means it has a transparent background.
To resize a photo, select the layer you're interested in resizing and go to Edit >> Free Transform. Then you can drag the edges of the picture to make it a different size. This tool is also a great/easy way to drag + drop your pictures.
EXPERT TIP: Watch the percentages of the width and height. You want to make them the same to make sure your picture stays proportional. To resize to a certain dimensions, you can type in the pixels in that little box in the top. Then change your other percentage to make sure it's proportional! Make sure you type in the W/H boxes not X/Y!
And now for the exciting part: making a Pinterest-style collage!
1. Open up a new file in Photoshop. The width should be whatever the width of your text area in your blog is. Mine is 640 pixels for example. The height can be anything, I'd recommend at least 900 pixels and you can crop it later.
2. Select all the pictures you want and copy-paste them into Photoshop. They will all go in separate layers--this is good!
3. In your head (or on a calculator), subtract 30 from your text area width. Then divide it by three. You can round to the nearest whole number; it doesn't have to be that exact. For example: my blog is 640-30 = 610. Divided by 3 is 203. That number is the width that you want all of your pictures to be.
4. Resize all of your photos to that width, using the method above. Don't forget your proportions! I don't want to see stretched pictures. This, below, is bad. Please don't make anyone's eyes look at this.
5. Now, rearrange your pictures (with Edit>>Free Transform) into three columns. Leave a little space between the columns and each picture. If you used my number method, you can have 15 pixels between each column, but you can just eyeball it.
6. Click the little eye next to the BACKGROUND layer. Then click the little arrow on the layer menu and click Merge Visible. And save!
Ta-da!! There you go, your own beautiful Pinterest-style collage.
I think they're prettiest when you mix up vertical and horizontal photographs but it's all up to you!
Get fancy! Make your background a different color! Do not click the little eye (step 6). Instead, select the background layer. Click the little magic wand in your tool box and select magic eraser. Make sure your tolerance box says 1. Click anywhere on the canvas. Press Shift + F5 and select a color!
Now go forth and Photoshop! If you post any to your blog, share the link here so I can see your pretty new skillz! And if you want to be super lovely, you can tweet or pin this lovely tutorial with my icons floating on your left. (:
this is awesome! bad blogger confession: I always resize images before putting them into photoshop because I couldn't figure out how to resize each individual layer ... thanks for solving my problem!
ReplyDeleteThanks Nicole! Haha oh man, that's a little sad! If you have any other basics you need help with, tweet at me! I'll help you out :)
ReplyDeleteUgh. This post makes me want to go to Best Buy and buy a new Macbook Pro. Why!? I don't have Photoshop either :[ Where did you get yours??
ReplyDeleteLots of public libraries and such have it installed or CS2 has a free demo version, both are free options if you don't want to pay for it. (Understandably).
ReplyDeleteThis is so super helpful (just pinned)! I'm a Photoshop newbie and tutorials like this are helping me gain a lot of confidence :) Keep them coming!
ReplyDeleteYay!! If you have any suggestions on things you'd like to learn feel free to comment or tweet them to me!
ReplyDeleteYay!! I'm so glad you got around to doing this :) Definitely pinning this so I don't forget it!!
ReplyDelete