What's up YouTube? Eric Vasquez here from Teach Me To Design. And I know a lot of times
I say I'm excited, but today I'm really excited
for this design tutorial because I'm going to be giving you
an in-depth look at how to create a stunning movie poster design
using a handful of visual effects and compositing techniques that I use
in my everyday professional workflow. Any time that I'm creating posters
for film, for television or for sports. So today we'll be focusing on sort
of a supernatural k
ind of poster design. So be sure to let me know. What's your favorite supernatural movie
poster in the comments below? All right, so without any further ado,
let's get into it. All right. So let's jump over here in Photoshop
where we're going to set up a new document that's about 11 inches
wide by 17 inches tall with a resolution
set to 300 and color mode rugby. And then from there, let's go ahead
and click Create to set up our document. Now, the first thing we want to do here, once we set up
ou
r file is go to the file menu and we're going to go to place embedded
to open up our first stock image here. All right. Now, if you've watched my videos before,
you'll know that I like bringing images and using the fireplace embedded method
because it automatically brings everything in as a smart object
with the file name already in there. So once we've done that, the first thing we're going to do here
is create a couple of selections. So I'm going to press P to get my pen tool
and I'm going to
zoom in here and I'm just going to select the sword,
the face and the hands. Okay. So I'm going to start tracing
by zooming in and just grabbing those areas of the skin
and the sword. First. Great. Now that we've created our selection, we're going to go ahead and press command control
and return on the keyboard to activate it. And then click on the Layer mask icon
down here at the bottom of the palette. And we now just have that selection made. So what we're going to do at this point
is just app
ly a couple of quick adjustment layers to start, hold the option key
and click on the adjustment layer icon and then go ahead and choose
black and white. And be sure to check off this box here
that says use previous layer to create a clipping mask. Now, once you've added that one, we're
just going to reduce the opacity to 20 by pressing
the number two on the keyboard, then select your smart object layer again
and return back down to the bottom of the Layers panel to add another black
and white a
djustment layer. Now, this time what we want to do is change the blend mode of this layer
to soft light. And let's go ahead and leave the opacity
set to 100. And what that's going to do
is just give us some nice contrast here. All right. So we've desaturated it
a little bit with the first one and then added a little bit of contrast
with the second. Now select that first adjustment layer, hold the shift key and select your smart
object. Press Command G To put it into a group
folder, double click
group one and we're just going to rename this layer
something like Skin and Sword. Now let's
go ahead and go into that folder. And what I want to do is hold the alt option key and click and drag
that smart object out of the folder. All right, So I have to move it down
one more time. I select it and press command control
and the left bracket on the keyboard to make sure that I move
that outside of the folder. And then we're going to hold control. Click on the Layer Mask and choose
Delete Layer Ma
sk. What we're going to do is create another selection
around the outside of the hood here. So we're going to do the same thing
really quickly with the pen tool to create another selection. Okay, So now we have our next selection
and we'll once again press command, control and return or enter on the keyboard to activate that selection
before applying a layer mask. And we now have this isolated
from the skin and the sword. So let's go ahead and hold
the alt option key and we're going to apply two
adjustment layers
here, starting with levels. Let's check off this box to use
previous layer to create a clipping mask. And now what we're going to do
is just move this left slider
in a little bit to add some contrast. Somewhere around 22 looks pretty good. And then let's leave the other sliders
as is. Now select the smart object layer again,
return to the adjustment layer icon and apply a black and white
adjustment layer. And let's just go ahead and move this one
on top of the levels adjustmen
t for a second and we can leave
this set to normal and 100%. So we're completely de saturating
the cloak and the hair and everything else separate from the skin and the sword. So now it's like that
black and white adjustment layer hold shift and select
our smart object here. And then once again, press command
G to put it into a group folder, double click on the text,
then change it to cloak. Now, what I'd like to do at this point
before we go ahead is just make sure to go ahead
and save your wor
k. So I'm going to save this really
quickly before we go on. So once you've saved your work,
we're going to select both of these folders, press command
J to duplicate them and then hold the control key
and click on them and choose. Convert to Smart object. So we're basically merging
these two layers together or these two folders together onto a new smart
object. Now, once we've done
that, we're going to go up here to the image menu and choose Adjustments,
shadows, highlights. Now, right away,
yo
u can see that this pulls out a lot of detail
from the shadow areas, especially. So I like to use this a lot. Any time I'm doing compositing work
to get those extra details to come out of the areas which are
maybe a little bit too dark in an image. And when I do this, I always move the highlights to zero
just to zero them out at first. And I mainly just focus on these first
three sliders here under shadows. So for the amount, I'm going to reduce
this to somewhere around 15 or so. And then
for th
e tone, I'm going to set that to 50. So that's okay as it is. And then 30 pixels
for the radius and click okay. All right. So you'll now see that we have a merged
smart object here on top of our two folders. And what I'm going to do now
is go ahead and apply a layer mask to this press B to get my brush tool. And I want to make sure
that I have a medium to large size black soft brush selected with an opacity
setting of around 20% or so. And what I'm going to do here is zoom out
a bit and remove s
ome of this brighter shadow detail area from the bottom
and the size of the image, because I want most of those nice details
to be focused on the face and the shoulder area. Right. That's where I want
the viewer's eye to go. So I'm going to leave
these other areas a little bit darker. Okay. And you'll see if I turn that on enough now that it's only affecting
that top part of the image. So now I'll select this layer, hold shift
and select the cloak group folder, put them inside of another folder,
and change the name to Main. All right,
so this is going to be our main folder that contains the base
here of our main heroine or actress. So now let's
go ahead and import our next image by returning to the file menu
and choosing place that in and I'm going to navigate
back to where my images are. And this time I'm going to grab this image here from Unsplash, this nice kind of snowy background,
and then I'll go ahead and click place. All right,
Now I'm going to zoom out a little bit because I w
ant to make sure
that I scale this up by clicking and dragging from any of the four corners
while holding the alt option key to drag it out
proportionately from the center. Now, once you've scaled it up,
press return, then press command control in the left bracket to move this down. One position
to just below our main folder. Now we can change the blending mode
of this to screen and reduce the opacity to about 50% by pressing the number
five on the keyboard. Now from here
I'll hold the alt optio
n key. Click on the adjustment layer icon and apply a black and white
adjustment layer and once again check off the box to use previous layer
to create a clipping mask. Now we've just desaturated the snow and let's
bring a little bit of contrast into it. So I'll select that smart object,
go back down to the adjustment layer icon and this time add
a levels adjustment layer. And here all we're going to do is just
move the middle slider a little bit. Let's see which way we want to go here. Now, I'm
going to set this middle slider to around
0.6 or 0.5. It looks pretty good just to get some nice
contrast out of there. Okay. And now what I'll do is select
the smart object, hold shift, and select my black and white adjustment layer press
command G to put it into a group folder, and I'll rename this one snow back. Okay. And while we're at it, I'm going to select the main group folder
and just scale this up a bit more and slide this image up a little bit
so that her head and face is a little bi
t more
towards the top or center of the image. Now let's
go ahead and add some more snow to this. So once again, go to file place embedded. And this time I'm going to open up
this first snow image here from Unsplash. And this one we're going
to put on top of our main subject here. But before we do that,
we need to rotate this. So hold the control key and click. And then let's go ahead and rotate it
90 degrees clockwise. Now I'm going to once again
hold the alt option key and drag outwards from a
ny of the four corners to scale
this up. Once you've scaled it up, go ahead and press return or enter
on the keyboard to apply those changes. Now, once again, we'll have to change
the blending mode of this layer to screen so that we can see our image through and we'll go ahead and apply
some adjustment layers to this. So hold the Alt option key. Click on the adjustment layer icon and then we're going to add a levels
adjustment layer with a clipping mask. And let's start by bringing this left
sli
der in to somewhere around 8082 just to really crunch
that black and white there. And then I can move this middle slider
a bit to not too much,
maybe around 0.82 looks pretty good. .81 somewhere in that area. And you'll see that
we now have a lot more contrast, which is getting rid of some of those mid
gray values and just allowing the white snow to show through,
which is exactly what we want. Now I'm going to select that smart object
and apply a little bit of a blur to it because I want there
t
o be some motion here. So I'm going to go up to the filter
menu and choose Blur, Motion, Blur. And then for the angle,
I'm going to set it to 48 and leave the distance set to somewhere
around 68, like I have it here and then go ahead and click, okay. Now that we've done that,
I can throw this into a group folder. And as you may have guessed, I'm
going to call it snow front. I know I'm very creative with my folder names here,
but it helps me keep track of things. Now we're going to add some more
textures,
so I'm going to go back to the file menu she's placed embedded once again, and now I want to open up this fiery spark
kind of image here from pixels. So go ahead and click place. And I want to scale this up as well
while I'm at it. So I'm going to make that quite a bit
larger. Press returner Enter on the keyboard
to apply the changes and then command control in the left bracket
a couple of times to move this down. And I think I want it to actually
even be below our snow back folder her
e. Okay. So because we desaturated
that snow in the back, it's allowing the color of this image
to show through. Now, let's just play with the size
and positioning of this a little bit more because I want to see some of these flames
on the left side a little bit. So somewhere around there
it looks pretty good. And then we'll go ahead and apply
those changes. Now I'm going to hold the alt option key
and go ahead and apply another level adjustment layer
with a clipping mask, click. Okay. And as yo
u might have guessed,
we're going to crunch the contrast here a little bit more. So what I'm looking to do is move the left
slider in to somewhere around 17 or 18 and I'll move the middle
one to around 1.5 or so, somewhere about there, just so that we can start
to get some more contrast here. And then I'm going to put these two layers
into another folder and I'm just going to call it fire
for now. Okay, So now let's
go ahead and create a new layer above this fire folder,
but behind the snow back
folder and press G on the keyboard
to get our gradient tool. Now up here,
I want to select a radial gradient that goes from a solid color
to a transparent 100% transparent color. And for the color itself,
I'm going to maybe use like a bright sort of orange color that will kind of
pick up from the flames a little bit. So here I'm using the hex value
ff6600 click. Okay. And now with your gradient tool
selected, I'm just going to zoom out a bit and click and drag from the middle out. And now I can
kind of scale this up
and the idea here is to maybe place some backlighting
behind our main talent here. Now that I've done that, I'm
going to change the blending mode to soft light, and that's just going to add
a little tint here above the flames. So there's more of a gradual fade
happening. All right. And then I'm going to go ahead
and throw this in a group folder and I'll just call it soft light 100%,
just so I know what it is. Now, let's go ahead and create
another new layer above this one.
Press G once again. But instead of using a bright orange color,
I'm going to just darken it a little bit. Something like b6500b looks pretty good. Click okay. And now I'll create a second
radial gradient here and I can scale this
one up a little bit as well. But instead of using soft light this time
I'm going to go with color, dodge, and maybe reduce the opacity to around 50% or so
and just scale that up. And that's just giving me a nice back. Hello there. All right.
So you can see if I turn th
at on and off. It's creating
sort of a nice glowy halo effect. Okay.
But let's push it a little bit further. I'm going to create another one
this time just using a solid white color. And I'll change the blending mode
to overlay to make it a little bit more poppy. And let's just resize it a little bit,
see what that looks like. If it's a little bigger, a little smaller somewhere about there looks pretty good. And then let's duplicate it one time by pressing command control J on the keyboard. Okay
. And now we can scale this
one down a little bit. And what I'm going to do is select this
top white overlay gradient hold shift and select my color Dodge Gradient press command G on the keyboard
to put it into a new group folder. And then I'm just going to go ahead
and rename this folder backlight before playing with the opacity
a little bit. So I don't think I need it all the way up. I think I'm going to reduce this
to around 40 or 50 or so. Now it looks pretty good. And once again,
be sure to
save your work along the way. Now I'm going to keep building
on top of this nice background that we have here
by bringing in another fiery texture after going to the file menu
and choosing place embedded this time,
let's go ahead and grab this Pixel's image here, this fire image,
and we're going to choose Place and we want to make sure that this
is placed above our backlight folder. And once you've done that,
hold the alt option key and drag outwards from any of the four corners
to scale this i
mage up. And then let's just play around
with the size and positioning a little bit here. Now what we're going to do is change
the blending mode to screen and then hold the alt option key
and click on the adjustment layer icon to apply a levels adjustment
with a clipping mask. And this time we're just going to move
the left slider in to around 14 or so. Just to give us a little bit of contrast
there in the fire. You can push it a little bit more
if you want. Maybe 16 looks pretty good. And now I
'm going to put these two layers
into a new folder and call it extra flames. And I really want these flames
to stand out here behind our subject. So I'm going to create a new layer
just above the extra Flames folder. But behind the snow back folder, press G on my keyboard to once again
get the gradient tool. But this time I'm going to check off
this box here that says reverse, and then I'm just going to hold
the adoption key to get my Eyedropper Tool and sample some of this dark blue color
from
the upper right or the upper left. Now what I'd like to do here is click
and drag out from the center of the image to create my sort of inverted
radial gradient and then change the blend mode
from normal to multiply. Okay. And what that's going to do is give us a nice sort of vignette
around the outside of our image. Okay, So let's
go ahead and rename this layer vignette and then we can play with the opacity
a little bit. We don't need it to be at 100%,
maybe somewhere around 65 or so looks pret
ty good. And I can create another new layer. And just remember to uncheck the reverse
box here, maybe grab a linear gradient and just do one more of these
from the top, right? Just to darken the top a little bit more. Maybe I'll stretch it
out a little bit, slide it up and then play with the opacity
a little bit more. All right. So we're just getting a little bit
more of a vignette there on the top that we can play around with. All right. Now I'll throw both of these layers into a new group fold
er
and just give it the same name vignette. Now, at this point I'd like to return
to our main folder here, the one that contains our subject, and let's just click on the arrow
here to go inside of the folder. So instead of adding anything into this
folder, I'm just going to select the folder itself, hold the adoption key
and click on the new layer icon. Check off the box here to use
previous layer to create a clipping mask. And now once again,
press B to get my brush tool. And I'm just want to m
ake sure
that I have a solid black color selected with an opacity of around 20% or so. And all I'm looking to do here
is to manually kind of paint in some shadows over the hand
and the bottom area of the subject. All right. So we're just going to darken
this up a little bit. And since we're using a mask,
we can always come in here later and injustice if we need to. But I'm just doing this so that later on
I have a little bit of an area to add my title and some text. Okay. So we'll probably come
back to that
and adjust that a little bit. But for now, I'm just going to go ahead
and call that shadows and leave that there. All right. So I'll select the main folder once again,
add another new layer, press command control in the right bracket key to make sure that this is above
the shadows layer. Grab your brush tool. And now I'm going to sample
some of this orangish color from over here on the flames
by holding the alt option key to get the eyedropper
and then just clicking the sample. Some
of that color and using a large round
soft brush. I'm just going to start
to click around the edges here just to add a little bit
of a glow all the way around on my subject. All right. So all around the hood here,
the shoulders, the sides of the arms, we're just painting in here
with a large soft round brush. Okay. But what we can do now is change the blending mode of this layer
from normal to let's try hard light. Hard light actually gives a pretty nice
looking effect here. And you can kind of
see
what I'm doing right now. I'm just kind of painting in some of this
light here so that it wraps around the edges of our subject. And then if I want to change
the color of this a little bit, I'll just press command control alt option
and you on the keyboard to bring up a hue saturation adjustment. And I think I just want to make this
a little bit less saturated and maybe play with the hue
a little bit as well. All right.
So here I'm just checking off colorize. I have my hue set to 25 saturat
ion
set to about 50 and a lightness. Let's just bring that to zero. Okay. And that's just going
to change the color slightly. Now, I want to really focus on
bringing out some more highlights here in the subject
to really make this pop. And one of the great ways that you can do
that is with a little technique that I like to use,
which is a Nondestructive D'Argent burn. So select the main folder here
and then hold the Alt option key and click on the new layer
adjustment icon. Now this time let's g
o ahead and just type
in D and B for Dodge and Burn. Notice that the checkbox here
is already selected for us to apply a clipping mask and we're going to change
the color to gray and let's go ahead and also change
the blending mode to overlay and check off this bottom box here. This is fill with overlay
neutral color, 50% gray and click okay. Now all we need to do here is reduce the size of our brush
by pressing the left bracket key. And I just want to set my colors
back to the default black and
white. So press D on the keyboard to do that. And what I'm going to do is zoom in here,
make sure I have a white color selected. And using this color,
I'm just going to begin to paint in some highlights over the areas
where they already exist. So I'm not really creating new highlights. I'm just pulling out a few areas here,
like on the nose, the mouth, the face a little bit to try and get
some of those areas to pop a little bit more. Okay. And I'll do the same thing here over this
cool looking
sort of like wolf pendant. You know,
I want her chain to pop out a little bit, so I'm going to brush with white
over the jewelry, over her rings just a bit. And we can also do this
on the sword as well, so you don't have to go crazy with it
here. I just want to have a few areas
that kind of pop out here and we can do a little bit
more work on the sword later. But already you can see that
just by doing this, it's helping some of those areas pop out. And if I change my brush color from white
to bl
ack, I can go in and brush over some of the darker areas,
like on the eyebrows here, eyelashes, maybe even a little bit over
this paint on her face here, again, only on the areas
where shadows already exist. I'm just pushing the shadows
that are there. Right. And using a low opacity brush. So let's go back to white and maybe bring out some of the hair again,
just a little bit more. Just get some of those details and then I'll paint with black here on the bottom,
just in some of those shadow area
s. And I'm actually going to paint over this. It looks like a like a fitness tracker
or something on her hand. So I'm going to just cover that up just so it's less noticeable. You can't really see it
with all the textures we have going on. But I'm just going to give that
a little bit of love to. All right. Now you can see that doesn't burn. Helps give this a nice little bit
of polish here. And now let's select
the main folder once again, come down to the adjustment layer icon
and add a hue satur
ation adjustment layer. And let's move it to the top of this stack
here just by pressing command control and the right bracket key
a couple of times. But make sure that the clipping mask is still applied, which you can tell
by this little arrow pointing down. And now we're just going to increase the saturation a little bit
on this whole folder to around maybe 16 or 17, somewhere in that range, just to pump up those colors a little bit. All right. So now I'm going to click on this snow
front fold
er, add a new layer. And what I'd like to do is kind of start
to play around with the overall color here. So I'm going to go ahead and maybe change
my fill color to a nice shade of blue like three B A7 seven DC click. Okay. And with your foreground
color still selected, press alt option delete on the keyboard
to fill the entire layer with that color. Now from here I'll change
the blending mode from normal to multiply and then press four on the keyboard
to reduce the opacity to 40%. Okay. And the
n I'll press command G
to put this into a group folder and I'll just rename it Blue, and then maybe I can reduce the opacity
of the entire folder a little bit as well. So I'll bring that down to around
70% or so. And that's just going to give us this nice sort of nighttime moonlight
kind of tint on the whole image. So now what I'd like to do
is spend a little bit more time working on our subject here. So the next thing I'll do here is select
the main folder and I'm going to hold the alt option k
ey
and just click on this eyeball. And what that's going to do is turn off every other layer
except for this one, right? Except for this folder. And once I've done that, I'm going to go up here
to the select menu and choose Color Range. Now, once I have this panel here, I'm
going to choose highlights. I only want to focus on the highlights,
right? And my fuzziness is set to around 20 and the range is set to somewhere around
100 or 100 into. And the reason I'm doing
this is because I want to appl
y some color adjustments that are only going to affect
those brighter parts of the image. So I'll click okay to apply that selection and then hold the alt option key
and click on the eyeball once again to turn on the visibility
of all of our other layers. And then let's select our blue folder here
to make sure we're at the top of the Layers palette, come down to the adjustment
layer icon and apply a gradient map. Okay. So you can see in the layer mask here
that our selection is indeed what we wa
nt it to be. But now we just need to change the colors
in the gradient map. So I'm going to click on this little gradient
editor here, the strip at the top. So let's go ahead and change these colors
a little bit. I'll select this left color and maybe
change it to a slightly different blue. So I'll go with 00aff,
it's a little bit lighter and now I'll double
click on the white color here. And now I'll click on the white color
here on the bottom and change this to maybe a warm color like ff7800 so
that we have a blue to orange sort of gradient map
and then click okay to apply the changes. Now let's go ahead and change
the blend mode of that to multiply and you can see what's starting to happen
here. It's really creating some nice dramatic
lighting for us. So I'm going to select that layer, press
Command J to duplicate it, and this time instead of multiply, I'm going to change
the blending mode to divide and then reduce the opacity to 50%
by pressing five on the keyboard. Now I'll put bot
h of these layers
into a new group folder and I'll just call it gel light,
since we're getting sort of a chill light effect
and reduce the opacity to about 40%. All right.
So you can see we're adding some little bit of color there. So at this point, let's keep going
and seeing if we can continue to push this further. I'm going to select this soft light
folder down here. Go inside and just grab the gradient
and I'll press command J to duplicate it. And then I'm going to move it all the way to the
top of the layer
stack here above the jet light and this time
I'll try a different blending mode like color
and reduce the opacity down to 10%. So it's just a subtle warming up
of the middle of the image here. All right. So go ahead and press command
G to put that into a folder and then I'll just rename this folder
color 10% just so I know what it is. All right. So now if I want to collapse
all of these open folders and layers I have here, I can press command option
shift and click on this arro
w and that's going to go ahead and close
any folders I had open. All right,
So now let's go into this folder all the way at the bottom here
called Fire. And I'm going to just grab the smart
object layer, hold the adoption key and click and drag it all the way
to the top of my layers palette up here. Okay? And then what I'm going to do
is scale this way down all the way down here, and we're going to place this
in the eye of the witch here. So let's go ahead and change the blend
mode from normal t
o let's go with lighten. Okay? And I'm just going to zoom in here
so I can see what I'm doing and I want to have some fire in her eyes
here. I think that would look pretty cool.
All right. So I'm just scaling it
way down, as you can see. And then what I'm going to do
is hold the alt option key and click on the Layer Mask option
to apply an inverted layer mask. And now if I press B to get my brush tool,
make sure you have a white foreground color and a small soft brush
set to around 20% or so and
then just start to brush
in on the main part of the eye here, Right. Just so we can see that fire
reflecting in her eyes. Then let's go ahead and just throw this
into a folder, too, while we're at it. And just called Fire in Ice. Okay, cool. All right. So let's zoom out a bit here. I'm going to go ahead
and create a new layer, grab my gradient tool,
change it back to a radial gradient, and make sure that the reverse box
is no longer checked off. We just want a regular radial gradient. I'll go a
head and change the color a little bit, maybe make it a little bit darker, create a gradient on the top here,
and let's go ahead and change the blending mode to color dodge
so we can bring it up. And I just want to play around
the positioning here to see what can look good. I'm also going to reduce the opacity to around 40% or so just to make it
a little bit more subtle. But I like to start to add
in some variations of color here. So kind of alternating
some warm and cool tones. All right. So pr
ess command J to duplicate it
and then maybe move this somewhere on the other side here
just to balance it out. And we can bump up the opacity
a little bit, Just see what looks good here. Now create another new layer. And this time, let's go ahead
and change the color from blue to maybe like a yellow. Okay. Like a bright yellow, like I said,
just kind of alternating between cool and warm colors and then go ahead
and create another radial gradient and this time change the blend mode
from normal t
o overlay and drop the opacity down to around 25%
or so and just place this somewhere over
here, over the shoulder area, right. Kind of wear the hood in this. These flames are all right. And then I'm going to duplicate that
once again. Move it over here somewhere to the top,
top right over the hood. And then let's just bump up
that opacity. Right. And I don't know if I need it to be 100%,
but I can maybe bring it down to around or maybe bring it up to around 60 or so
and just play with the size
a little bit. And now let's go ahead and select
all four of these gradients, put them into a group folder, and
I'll just go ahead and call it top flight. Pretty self-explanatory, right? The lights
that are on top of everything. Right. But you can see it as a nice little bit of a pop there
and nice little bit of contrast for us. So now that we're starting to play around
with some of these brighter areas in these highlights,
let's go back to our subject for a second. I'm going to go inside of this
main folder here and at the top
you'll see we have our smart object, which had these shadows and highlights
adjustment applied to it, and let's hold the control or command key
and click on the thumbnail to activate the selection
around the woman and the sword. Okay. And now I'll select the Hue saturation
adjustment layer, add a new layer on top. Make sure that you have a white foreground
color selected and press alt option
delete to fill your selection with white. Okay, but we're not going to s
top there. And once we have our selection filled
with white, go up to the select menu and choose, modify, contract
and contract the selection by 28 pixels. Now, once you've
done that, you can just go ahead and hit delete on the keyboard
to delete everything inside and then press command control
D to deactivate your selection. So we essentially have a stroke
going around the whole outer edge here. But what we're going to do
is turn this into a smart object. So hold the control key, click
on the l
ayer, convert to smart object and let's change the blend mode
from normal to overlay. And then I'm going to apply
a gajillion blur. So go to filter blur, Gaussian blur and somewhere around 30 to 40 pixels
looks pretty good for this. Click okay to apply that. And then what I'm going to do
is duplicate this two more times. So press Command J
and Command J once again. And we've now got this
pretty intense outer glow happening. So let's select all three of these smart object layers
here, put them in
to a group folder and then I will
just rename this edge light like so. And then I'm going to put a layer
mask on it, grab my brush,
make it larger, and we want a large, soft round brush with black
set to the foreground color. And I'm just going to use an opacity
of around 20% because I really like to, you know, kind of do this
gradually a little bit at a time. And what we're looking to do here
is just dial this back. Right? It's obviously way too intense,
but I think it's sometimes easier to, yo
u know, go a little further
and then pull it back as opposed
to just adding a little bit at a time. So I'm just going to keep brushing
over this area here and really only leave this area over the
the shoulders and the arms. Right. That's kind of the main area
where I want this glow to be placed so I can brush out
most of these other areas a little bit, dial it back. Right. Because we don't want it
to be overpowering. I do want it to be
there, but I don't want it to look too overpowering. Okay. S
o something like that. Maybe even remove a little bit
more from the sword up here and dial it back on the hood as well. I'm just turning the visibility
of these layers on and off so I can see the changes. Right now. We've got a nice glow happening and it's not quite as obvious
as it was before. So now that we've added that glow,
let's select the Edge Light folder. Come down here
and select our main folder with the, the main sort of group of objects in here,
and then we'll press command G to put
all of these into a folder
and I will just rename it which. Right. This is our which. So let's go ahead and continue. I'm going to select the top layer folder
all the way at the top, add a new layer
to the top of my layer stack and I'm going to add another
white radial gradient, change the blending mode to overlay. All right. And then I'm going to transform it. So press command T on the keyboard
and then hold the shift and the alt option key and drag
either of the left or right handles in just s
o we can squash this and make it
more vertical or something like that. And what I'm looking to do here is place
this highlight only on the sword, right? And I want the sword
to pop out a little bit more. So I'm going to continue to squash
that a little bit and maybe I'll make it longer as well. So hold the shift key
and pull it down a bit. Somewhere around there looks pretty good
and then press return or enter to apply the changes. All right. And then I'm going to zoom out
for a second so I can
see how everything's looking
and we can even try to duplicate that. I'll press Command J
one time, squash it a little bit more, make it a little shorter here, see if we want to place another little highlight
towards the bottom of the sword. All right. And that's looking pretty cool. So now let's grab both of those,
put them into a group folder and we'll call it the Sword Highlights. Awesome. So we're cruising along here
and I'm just going to do a little cleanup here and get rid of that
backgroun
d layer at the very bottom. We don't really need that. And I'm going to do something here
that I think, you know, usually helps to tie everything together. And it's just a little finishing technique that I like to use
to add a bit of noise to everything. All right. So I'm going to go ahead and hold the adoption key and click
on the Create new layer icon here, and I'll just rename this layer noise
and I'm going to leave this box unchecked. I don't need clipping mask
because I want it to apply to
everything, but I will change the color to gray
and the mode to linear light. And then check off this box at the bottom
to fill with linear light. Neutral color 50% gray. Now click okay. And we've got our neutral gray layer
set to linear light at the very top of our layers
palette. Now hold the control
key and click on the layer and change it to a smart object
and then go to the filter menu. And we're going to choose noise. Add noise. And for our settings here,
we don't have to go crazy. I'm goi
ng to leave the amount set
to around 25, but make sure that you have uniform and monochromatic selected
and then click okay. Now from here I'm going to drop down
the opacity and the fill. So for the opacity, let's bring it down
to 30 by pressing three and we can actually also adjust the fill
using the keyboard shortcut six
plus the shift key. So if I just use the numbers
without the shift key, it will adjust the opacity. But if I hold the shift key and use
the numbers, it will adjust the fill. S
o that's a nice little shortcut for you. All right. And then once again,
just going to put this into a folder called Noise to continue along here
and keep everything nice and organized. All right, now, before we go on, I'm just going to go into my
which folder here. Add one more new layer inside
and just grab a linear gradient that fades from black to white. And I'm just going to fade out
this bottom edge here so that it looks like the cloak
of the witch continues to the bottom. Okay. And I'll j
ust call that fade. And that way we don't have any, you know,
hard lines there on the bottom edge. Okay. And we can also go into our shell
light for a second. Just take a look
at how everything's look in there. And something I want to do
is add a little bit of a blur to the mask because I want to soften
some of these edges here. All right? So what I can do is select my gradient,
unlink it by clicking on the link between them, and then I'll go to the filter menu
and apply a subtle Gaussian blur,
maybe of around six or eight. Let's go a little bit higher, maybe around 10%, just to blur the mask a little bit
and then be sure to re link them. Now I'm going to do the same thing on the one above by first unlink
it, selecting only the mask and once again applying it gauzy and blur of around ten pixels or so. We will go down a little bit to 8.5. Okay. But remember to click that link icon to
move them back to where they were before. And the reason for that is because if you
need to reposition a
nything in your file and those things aren't linked,
you're going to be very confused as everything except for
this mask will be moving around. All right. So at this point, I think
we're ready to start adding some text here and our poster is looking
pretty cool overall. So let's go ahead and select these sort
highlights folder, add a new layer. So it's just below the noise and then press t on the keyboard
to get your type tool. And I'm going to click somewhere
along here on the bottom. And what
I'd like to do is type out the title for the movie,
which we're going to call Spellbound. Okay? And I'm going to make that upper and lower
case change the film color to white. And as you can tell,
our tracking is all over the place here. So I'm just going to reset that
to zero for now. And for this,
I'm going to use a really nice typeface that I picked up from important elements, which is a really great site for
just finding some handy design resources. And that typeface is called Washington. Ri
ght? And what I like about this typeface is that it has some
some nice personality to it. It kind of feels like a supernatural
kind of witchy looking font. I think now, instead of using solid white,
let's go ahead and change that color to C zero, C six, C B,
which is sort of a grayish blue color. I think that just adds a little, you know, personality to it
without making it so, so high contrast. Okay. And then I'm going to come up to the file
menu and choose Place in that ID and I'm now going
to
bring in a nice texture for our logo. All right. So let's go ahead and grab this
texture here from pixels. All right? And I'm actually going to place this
below my text layer. Just move it
down, play with the size a little bit. Somewhere around there looks pretty good. And then let's add two adjustment
layers here. So with your texture selected, hold the alt option key
and click on the adjustment layer icon. And first let's add a levels adjustment. Check off this box
to apply a clipping mask an
d I'm going to bring this left
slider end to somewhere around 65 or so. 65, 66 looks pretty good. And then I'll move the right
slider in towards the left until it's set to around 210 or to 12. Right. Just to push that contrast more. Okay. And then I'll select the texture again,
return to the adjustment layer icon at the bottom and apply a black and white
adjustment layer and then press command in the right bracket just to move it
above the level adjustment. All right. And what I'm going to do no
w
is actually change the blending mode of my text layer
from normal to color. And at first glance, you won't really
be able to see it, but it is still there. Okay. So what we're going to do is hold
the command control key and click on the thumbnail
icon for the text layer here to activate a selection around it. With that layer still selected,
hold the shift key. Select your texture press command
G to put it into a folder. Change the name to T for title treatment
and then wire selection is still
active. Just go ahead and apply a layer mask. Okay. So now you will see that the texture
is only inside of our text here. We've used that text which is adding
a nice tint to our title treatment in order to create that selection
for our whole folder. And what's nice about this is I can now
kind of play around with the size and positioning of the texture
inside of the letters a little bit and maybe even rotated a bit as well without having to worry about adding
any new masks or anything. All right
, So that's looking pretty good. And then let's go ahead and add one
more new layer just above our text layer, and I'll grab my brush once again,
pressing B on the keyboard, make it a little bit larger,
and I'm choosing a solid black fill with a low opacity. So like 20% is all you need. And I'm just going to apply some shadows
here to the bottom of our text, and that's going to help to add
a little bit more depth and dimension. All right. So instead of having everything
just be very even, I'm ju
st going to add some shadows in here
just to the edges, the bottom, the outside. And if you need to, you can apply a layer
mask and dial it back a little bit. If there's any areas that are too dark, we just want to make sure that everything reads really nicely
and that's looking pretty good. And if you remember what I said earlier,
we may want to go back into this which folder here
and adjust our shadows a little bit. So I'm going to hold control and apply
that layer mask that we had there befor
e and then use a black brush to once again
just come in here and brush out a little bit of the hands
because I just want that title treatment
to be nice and easy to read. Right? And something like that looks pretty good. All right. So let's go ahead and add another new layer
just above the title treatment folder. Press T on the keyboard
and click to make some new text. Oops, I don't want to do that. There and add some text above
it just so I don't select the wrong thing. And let's go ahead and c
hange our typeface
to something more simple. A nice, clean, sans serif like Avenir.
All right. And for the way I like Avenir Black,
and we're definitely going to want to scale this down
quite a bit, maybe to around 70 pixels or so, 70 points,
I should say something like that. All right. And then let's go ahead and change this
to say what can we do here? Some spells can never be broken. I feels like kind of a nice line. All right. And then I'm going to just click two or three times inside here
to
select all of my text and expand the tracking setting here to around 205. And that's just going to spread
those letters out evenly and then press command T to scale this way down
while holding the alt option key. So it scales from the middle. And what we want to do here is place it somewhere in here
just below our logo. So that feels nice
and sort of nested right. I want it to feel connected
to the logo itself. Something like that looks pretty good,
maybe even a little bit smaller and you can s
ee how it just fits
nicely in here. Next to the defender of the letter
P and goes all the way across and is justified with the end of the title
trim in here on the end of it. All right. And then I'll just go ahead
and change the color a little bit maybe. Let's go with 8385, eight, five. Nice little gray color there. That kind of makes it feel
more connected to our logo. And then what I'm going to do is duplicate
this layer by pressing command J and I'm going to move this layer
towards the top of
the poster, okay? Because anytime you've got a movie
poster like this, you want to remember
to put in your talent names, right? So of course we have to throw those names in there,
even if they're just placeholders. All right. So this same color,
I don't think is going to work at the top. So I'm going to change that
to maybe a lighter shade of blue. Let's go with BD 2d9. It's kind of a nice bright color
and I'm just going to go ahead and type out a few names here,
so I'll type up the name Julian
na. What's press command eight to select all of that and then just increase
the type quite a bit, maybe around 25 or so. And I'm also going to modify the tracking
once again by maybe doubling it. Let's go to four or five. Okay. And I'm going to press command T
to do a free transform and move this so that it's sitting to the left
of the sword on the top of the poster press command j to duplicate it, command t
to do a free transform, click and hold the shift key and slide it
over to the side of th
e sword. And then let's change this
to a different name. So let's go. Isaac Stone
All right, something like that. And of course, with a shorter name,
you know, it just fits a little bit nicer on this side
where there isn't as much space. And I think at this point we can
maybe make these names just a little bit smaller. So it's going to
scale them down just a touch that way. We have some breathing room and the names
aren't too close to the edges. Okay. And I can kind of visually center them
on th
e left and right sides like that. And now what I'll do is select
both of these names, put them into a group folder,
and I'll just call them talent names, and I'll do the same thing
with our text here and just put that in the folder
called tag line. All right. So now what I'd like to do
is add some more details in here. So let's pick up the credit block,
which I've created here. It's just a TMT credit block
and I'm just going to drop this into our poster here, press command T to do a free transfo
rm and then I'll bring it
all the way down here towards the bottom. But I think I want to modify this
so it's not quite as many lines. So I'm going to
go ahead and click in here, press my right arrow to go to the second line,
then delete at the space there so that we can
just keep this to three lines. Okay?
And you can modify this however you want. I've just kind of put
some placeholder text in here, but I'm going to press command A to select
all of this block and change the color to something a
little bit more subdued so
that it doesn't stand out quite so much. So I'm going to go with 626979,
click okay. All right. And that's this
nice sort of bluish gray color. And I just want to make sure
that this is centered here. So I'm going to kind of click
and you see my smart guide popped up there and made sure everything is nice
and centered. Okay, I'm going to zoom out a bit. That's looking pretty cool. I'm pretty happy with this. All right. So now what I'm going to do
is put this into a gr
oup folder and just call it credit block and we can select all of our text folders
here, the talent names, credit block tagline,
and the title treatment. Put them into a group folder called Copy. And that way we've got all of our text
in one folder, right? So it makes it really easy. If we ever had to hand this file off
to somebody else. If you have to make changes, everything is really clean, organized,
and easy to find. All right. So now let's go ahead
and add some global adjustments here. And
I love using global adjustments
because it's affecting everything here in my file. So if you're not familiar
with global adjustments, be sure to check out my other video on Five Secrets to create poster designs
where I go into a little bit more depth. But for now, let's go to the adjustment
layer icon at the bottom of the Layers palette. And we're going to start with a color
lookup now here where it says a load 3D LUT let's go ahead and change this
to crisp, warm look and that's going to immedi
ately
warm everything up, which you can see. It's a pretty cool effect, but
we don't quite want it to be so intense. All right, so I'll leave the blending mode set to normal, going to lower the opacity
to 30 by pressing three on the keyboard and then also reduce the filter 30% by And once again, if you remember,
hold the shift key and press three. Okay,
So now it's a little bit more subtle, but we're going to add a few more layers
here to push these effects. So next, let's go back down to the ad
justment
layer icon and add a color balance. And let's
go ahead and start with our shadows here. So for the shadows,
I'm going to move it over towards the red until it's set to around 20 or 21%. And then for our green,
our middle magenta slider here,
I'll move that towards the green around 5% and I'm going to bump the blue up
to around 14 or so. All right. And then we'll go over to our mid tones and I'm going to drop the first slider
down to a negative nine to take a little bit of red
out of it,
leave the middle slider zero, and then let's go a little bit
more yellow around negative five. And then finally we'll
go to the highlights here and I'm going to bump up the Reds in the highlights
to around 15, move the middle slider to negative three
or four somewhere in that ballpark and then move the bottom
slider towards the yellow around negative or so. Okay. So that's giving us a nice overall color
adjustment there just to warm things up and bring out some of those nice colors. Now I'm goi
ng to continue on here
and add a hue saturation adjustment layer and I'm just going to increase
the saturation to around 15 or 16 or so to make those colors more intense. And then let's add
a curves adjustment layer on top of that. And what I like to do here
is sort of create an S-curve. So I'm going to create a point
in the middle and point in the upper right quadrant here
and one in the lower left quadrant. And what we can do is change the settings
for each of these. So for the top,
I'm going
to leave the input set to 192 and change the output to about 187. All right. And then we'll select our middle
point here. And for this one, I'm
going to change the input to around 135 and let's change the output
for that middle 1 to 123. And then let's select
our bottom point here and set it to around 66
for the input and 56 for the output. All right. And that's going to give us some nice
looking contrast here. Now, I'm going to go ahead and add one
more color look up here to the very top. And t
his time, let's go ahead and choose
tension green. And here all I'm going to do
is drop the opacity down to about 30%. Right. So just adding a bit of green in here helps to make it feel a little bit
more realistic. All right. And lastly, I'm going to apply a levels
adjustment layer to the very top and move the left slider in a little bit
just to get more contrast out of it. So I'm going move that to around nine and let's set the middle slider
to around 1.12 or so. And then what we can do is sele
ct that top
levels, adjustment layer, hold shift and select our first color look up layer press
command G to put them into a group folder. And then we can just call this global fix. Right now we've got all of our nice color correction
layers here in one folder at the top and you can see it actually really does
make a difference between what we had before and now adding
some of those finishing touches here. So before we finish this up, I just want
to give it, you know, one more look. I'm looking
at everything
and I'm thinking that this snow is interfering a little bit
with the title treatment on the bottom. So I'm just going to play around
with the size and positioning of that snow layer a little bit more,
the snow front layer, I should say, and maybe add a layer mask to it. Let's go ahead and add a layer mask
and then I'm going to use a soft black brush just to get rid of a few of these
pieces of snow that are interfering with the legibility of our title,
something like that. And we ca
n even brush away
some of the snow at the bottom here just so it kind of fades out to the black. Right. And these are just, you know, details, finishing touches as we wrap up our poster. Right. So if
you want to make any other adjustments to, you know, the size, the scale,
the positioning of some of these elements, you know, now is a good time to
to make some of those adjustments here. All right. So I'm just kind of going through
some of my different layers, taking a look at the lights
that we'v
e added. Maybe I'll move this one
around a little bit more. I might make that light
a little bit darker. All right. So I'm just selecting this light
inside of the top light folder, and I'm just going to darken it a bit using a hue saturation adjustment layer. Right. And I'll do the same thing
on the first one here as well. Just press command control option
and you on the keyboard. And we're just going to change that color
a little bit. That looks pretty good just playing around
with some of thos
e colors. Okay. And now what we're going to do,
just to put some finishing touches on this is one of my favorites,
which is the camera raw filter. So before we do that, we need to go ahead
and merge all these layers together. And in order to do that, we'll use
the keyboard shortcut, command control, plus all option
plus shift and E on the keyboard. All right. And that's going to merge all the folders and layers we have here
into one layer at the very top. And I'll now hold the control key,
conve
rt it to a smart object and then I'm going to rename this camera right? And from here we'll go up to the filter
menu and choose camera raw filter. Now, this is really where I like to go in
and just tinker with some of these settings
before I save out my final file. So while this is not a exact science,
you know, sometimes you have to experiment with this
a little bit. But these are the settings
that I found work best for this image for the temperature. I'm going to move this to around -12
just t
o bring a little bit of blue back in there. We're going to pull the tent down
to our negative five. The contrast
I want to bump up to around 20 or so. And then I also want
to bring out the shadows because it's getting a little too dark. But you can see here,
if I pull the shadows way up, we're getting some of those nice details
back, which looks pretty nice. All right.
So I don't want it to be completely black. You can see what happens
if I move it all the way to the left. I might want that set
somewhere around,
you know, 30 or 40, somewhere in the middle. And then I'm going to come down here
to clarity and just bump this up to ten. Just to get a little bit more detail. It's kind of like a sharpening
or a high pass almost. All right. But I'm going to set that somewhere
to 10 to 12. Drop the dehaze down
to about negative five, increase the vibrance to around ten and desaturated this slightly,
maybe negative five. Somewhere
between five and ten looks pretty good. Okay. And then let's go
ahead and click
okay to apply all of those changes and you'll see right away
the difference in our image. So this is before the camera filter
and this is after the camera filter. So again,
this is a little bit too intense. So I'm going to just go ahead and split
the difference here and just lower the opacity maybe to around 50 or 60%. So we still have, you know,
a lot of those things showing through, but it's just not quite as intense
as it was before. And the last thing I'll do here is select
a
ll of these folders, put them into one group folder
at the very end and just call it artwork. And now we have created our awesome spellbound supernatural movie poster. All right,
so we covered a lot in this tutorial. It was, you know, I wanted to do something
pretty in-depth for you guys where I really showed you
how I go in there and play with a lot of these settings,
layering things up compositing, you know, six, seven or eight different
images together to create this nice poster, complete wit
h some movie
poster details from our title treatment and tagline, the talent names
and even the credit block at the bottom. Okay, so hopefully you enjoyed this video
and I hope that you can apply some of these things to your own poster designs
whenever you're creating art. If you did enjoy the video, please
go ahead and smash that like button. Be sure to subscribe to the channel
and turn on that notification bell So you never miss an update. Thank you all so much for watching, This is Eric Vasqu
ez here for Teach Me To
Design, and we'll see you in the next one.
Comments
What is your favorite 'supernatural' movie poster of all time? Let me know in the comments below! 👇