Creating Backgrounds In Photoshop

Series Summary

Adobe Photoshop is the industry standard for photo editing today. It is a program that allows the user to be very hands on with images and manipulate the characteristics of the picture in whatever way they feel is suitable. It gives the user the ability to add specific features only available through the program to their images. Photoshop is also now being used to create images from scratch at a design level. The impact of this is that anyone with a computer is now able to design and create as they see fit. It is no longer reserved to the established and wealthy designers.

This video clip series will provide tips and techniques for the basic uses of Adobe Photoshop and it's tools. Each video is a step by step visual tutorial guiding you through the basics of the program so that you can start creating right away. Whether a novice or an expert it's a great way to brush up on the foundations of the program. Take a few minutes and check out some of these videos and their methods. They are invaluable.

Video Transcript

"My name is Dan Kallenberger. I am an instructor at a technical college teaching Visual Communications and Photoshop as well as other Adobe products. I am going to be showing you Photoshop CS2 today. I’m going to make a custom background for you just to create a new file 800x600. We’re going to do is it’s from scratch from absolutely nothing we’re going to create a custom background and how powerful Photoshop can be when you can do that. There are some filters in here that you could actually render, and the one I like to use is difference clouds. It’s one that’s just been really powerful that I can create some things just out of that. So filter, render, difference clouds. Once you do that, you can go into image adjust, have a brightness contrast. You can change the properties of that; you can add some filters. We’ve talked a little bit of filters in another session but in blur or artistic you can actually call up these images and start creating different textures and different background. So I’m going to use cutout for now. We see how that has already adjusted our main image from that. If I layered that over the top and actually add another filter with artistic. Let’s just experiment and try some other filters on this. Sponging looks interesting. I’ll keep going. There’s a lot of arrows you can pull down for filters. There’s distortions, sketching and I might try one of these because once you layer over the top of one of these, you can also use modes and that’s using custom backgrounds. You can actually jump into this and arrow down to see all the different types of modes that you could use to overlay over that other background. Now, this one I’m not really exactly happy with but I can do another filter of a blur and use gogen blur and increase that and try some other backgrounds. Blur the background out from the other side and then I can also change the hue back there. Image adjust, hue saturation, choose that. Then when you’re able to add text to that and adding a couple of things with the filters you can actually start to do a lot with the custom background and there’s a custom background."