2.3 Project Setup

Welcome back to event flier design. My name is Kirk Nelson. we are working our way through chapter two, which is the sports flier. This is lesson number five, where we take a closer look at setting up for these projects. So here we are back in Photoshop again. I'm going to start a new file because we're beginning a new project here. And I'm going to use the preset for US paper. There's also a international paper preset. If you care to use that, you may, or whichever you care to. I have my size set to letter. And what's really important is the resolution. Resolution for print should be at least 300 pixels per inch. Now it defaults to this in the presets, but you want to make sure that it's there if you're setting up a custom size. If you don't intend to point out your flyer and it's just going to be an online banner or something, then you'll have it down to about 72. One-fifty is a good medium resolution if you're only doing it, perhaps, in a power plant presentation, or to be projected on screen. But if you're printing it out, which we intend to, I like to work at a high resolution of 300-pixels per inch. It always comes in as portrait style, that's just kinda by default. It's easy enough to change that to landscape by going to Image > Image Rotation, 90 degrees, either direction. You may think we're ready to continue on by putting some elements in here. Before we do that, there's a very important step that I always make sure I do on my designs and I would like to pass on to you. I make sure that I have my guides set up and I've got my canvas set up. And the entire project is ready for print, so to speak. What that means is I need to know where my title safe is. I need to know where my crop lines are. I need to know where my bleed lines are and I wanna put in some rules of thirds just to help with my composition. What do those terms mean? Well let's start with the bleeds. If you try to print all the way to the edge of a piece of paper or any other type of material, you'll find that printers generally are not able to print to an edge. But you see printed material all the time where the color goes all the way up to the edge. The way that works, is it's actually printed larger and then there's an overprint to it, or a bleed. And then the printer cuts off the overprint. So then it appears the ink is printed all the way to the edge of the paper. And we're going to allow for that in these flyers. So first, I need to be able to put in some regular guides in here. So I'm going to, first, my View > Rulers, so that I can just snap these right in. It'll snap right to the edge. If your guides are not snapping in, you can go to the View > Snap setting. Make sure the snap is to document bounds or at least that option is enabled. So to build in a bleed all the way around here, there's a great trick in Photoshop to make sure you have a consistent width completely around the canvas. You go to Image > Canvas Size. We're gonna use this expand the canvas out. We'll change this to inches. And this is the default setting here. It's 11 by 8 and a half. So if we want, say, a quarter-inch bleed all the way around the canvas, then it sounds like you've got to do a little bit of math in there. Most of the time artists don't really like doing math. So here's an easy way to minimize the math pain. If you set the relative option it zeroes it out. This term relative is probably the wrong term to put in here. What it means is how much more you want to add to the canvas or how much less. Maybe that's why it's being called relative. If we put in 0.5 for half an inch what that does is it increases the height and the width by half an inch, and by having the anchor point in the center, it increases from the center. Which means it'll put a quarter inch all the way around the edges. You get that? Because if there's a half-inch increase in width, that means a quarter-inch on each side. Okay, and there we go, you see that. So now what that means is that the original lines we put in here, these are our bleed lines. So next let's worry about our title safe. What title safe means is it's a looser type of guide and it's a bounds in which if you put the title inside, or sometimes it's called action safe is a similar term, you put the action or the title inside and you don't have to worry about the possibility of those elements being clipped or too close to the edge. So even if the flyer is being displayed in a way that you don't expect it to, maybe it's being cut down for a banner, or maybe it's being overlapped with some other flyers, usually, everything that's inside the title safe should be safe from being cropped out. Everybody has a different opinion as to how far a title-safe should be. It's difficult to find an actual standardized view. And it has seemed to been reduced recently in the industry, mostly because displays like monitors and such are becoming so much better that the title-safe can be much larger than it ever has been before. Me, personally, I like giving about an inch. The way I'll do that is I'll add in a new guide to start with from the view menu. I'm going to put it, and you may be thinking one-inch, right? But since we expanded the canvas out by a quarter, we need to account for that. So 1.25, this is one and a quarter inches. Which puts it one inch from the bleed line. No more math at that point. Let's go ahead and do this nice little trick with the rectangular marquee tool, that'll keep up from having to math anything else out. I'm going to go to the intersection of these bleed lines. Start pulling it out, pulling out this rectangular marquis. Hold down the Shift key so it stays as a perfect square and it'll pop right to that first title safe guide. And what this does is provides us a means of putting another guide in exactly where we need it to be. And as long as that selection is active and our mode is on the new selection we can move this. So I'm going to move it down to this other corner, and just add guides there too. Then we can throw that away with Ctrl or Cmd+D to deselect. Next up, is our rules of thirds. As often as this gets done in Photoshop, you'd think there'd almost be a tool that automatically does this. There's not yet. There's some actions you can probably download. The technique that I use to add them is actually pretty easy. First you start with the crop tool. It defaults to the entire canvas, but if you just click in there it gives you automatic rules of thirds. Now I know we are cropping to the outside bleed, but that's okay cuz rules of thirds are kind of just a loose suggestion anyway. It's very rare that you'd need to measure exactly to it. And if you're worried about that you can always pull those crop lines in to the inside bleed. And it just moves those rules slightly. It's not even that much. Once they're there you can pull down additional guides to match up to them, both horizontal and vertical. Just be sure that you cancel out the crop tool, you don't commit it, or else it will lose those bleeds that we established before. So now we have this whole big mess of guidelines. Is this really helpful? It's hard to really see what's going well, it just looks like a bunch of squares. That's true. What I like to do is to create my own guide overlay, and I'll show you how I do that. First, create a new layer here. And I'm going to use the rectangle tool. I'll have my fill set to null. And the stroke, we'll let's see, let's do it with red first and then my stroke is a dashed line because I want this to be my bleed edge. So snapping to those outside bleed lines. Just pull that out. And it's hard to really see because the line is active. But if we click on the background to deactivate that layer, and if we turn off our view of the guidelines, just real quick. You can see the show guides here, which is also Ctrl or Cmd; you see how that looks. It's a red doted line. I like using that for the bleed area. And turn my guides back on, and now I'm going to use another square to add a gray line that's a solid line for the inside title save. And then for the rules of thirds, I like using a blue line. Now you may be wondering how do we do the box if they're not boxes. Here's a great little trick. First let's change over to our blue line. You just go off canvas with it and snap it to these rule third lines here. We're going to need two of them. Let's toggle off our regular guides and you can see how that looks. To me, that looks a lot more informative than the blue lines everywhere. I'm going to reduce the opacity of the rule third lines down to about 60% or so. And then I'm going to create an overlay of these. Select them all. Right click. Rasterize these because they are shape layers now. So they're actually vector in format. And then once they're rasterized merge them together. Right click and merge layers or you can use Ctrl or Cmd+E. And then we have a nice guide overlay. That's my process that I use just to develop the guilds to have one my projects while I'm designing. It's good to know how to develop those. It's good to know why we're using those. If you don't want to create that new every time, just save this file out here. And then this becomes a starting point for all future projects. Really quickly, let's go ahead and set up our sports flyer project here. I've got my sketch soccer 02 jpeg. This is the sketch that we're working with. I'm just going to drag that over, deposit it right in here, put it beneath my guides, and change the blend mode to multiply. That way I'll be able to see through it. And then I will transform it out so that those initial document bounds and that sketch matches up with the bleed lines that's in my guide layers. Now, name this sketch. Let's also grab some of those other photos that we were looking at before. I'm going to Window > Extensions > Mini Bridge. And here's those field photos that we were working with before. I'm grabbing the one 642 with the Camera Raw adjustments that I made on them before. Just gonna open that up. It goes through Camera Raw to open. And then I also wanted one of the other field shots, number 651. Bring that in as well. Again, it opens through Camera Raw. So if you want to make any further adjustments there that's the time to do it. And then I want to deposit these over onto the work in project file. Once they're in here, we can begin scaling them down to what we need. Before I scale it down though, I do want to turn it into a smart object in case I need to scale it back up. So I'm going to begin just transforming and adjusting this to match the perspective that I lined up within the sketch layer. Same thing with the photo of the ball on the field. Convert to smart object, and position it in place. In this case we want to match up with that sketch as well as we can. Always remember, the sketch is just a guide. It's not your master. If you find while you're positioning things it doesn't work with the sketch or you find a different position that does work better, go with that. All right. I think we have a good starting position here. We've got our guides in. We've got our sketch layer. Pull it down a little bit so as not to be too distracting. And we've got our starter photos in here ready to use. Thanks guys. That wraps up lesson number five on setting up for the project. You'll wanna make sure that you catch lesson number six where we begin the photo illustration of the flag ball.