Simple Poster Tricks for Newbies

Improving the look of your color posters is not a realm exclusively for professionals. Novices like you can easily learn simple tricks to enhance your poster printing designs with professional effect. In this small guide, I will teach you a few of these simple tricks in Adobe Photoshop. Do not be intimidated by the software, you can easily learn this and make your designs absolutely perfect for poster printing.

1.      Using filters – Design filters are the easiest and most creative way for novices like you to enhance your color posters. This is done by just going to the filter gallery option in Adobe Photoshop and then choosing the appropriate design filter that you want. There you can find various cool pre-set design filters that have different styles. They are divided into six categories named: artistic, sketch, brush stroke, stylize, distort and texture. Once you click on one thumbnail of each filter effect, you should see a nice preview of your poster design (or design element) with the applied filter. You can even adjust the filter’s settings using easy sliders on the right side of the preview. With a few tries, you should be able to see a great effect that is perfect for your design.

2.      Fading Layers – Next, you can also try fading some layers. The faded image effect is perfect if you want to make a watermark, or if you want to blend an image to an object or the background. Fading layers is as simple as changing the opacity settings of that particular layer. To do this, you just need to select the layer you want in the list of layers on the right side of the Photoshop workspace. Once selected you can adjust its opacity properties via the slider on top of the layer window. It is measured by percent so you can readily adjust how faded that layer is. Just play with it a little and you should see a lot of possibilities in using this for your posters.

3.      Blending options – Another set of cool effects are blending options. Personally, I use this usually for words or whole text. By adjusting the various blending options you can add in shadows, glow effects, embossing, textures and other interesting effects on a layer. For text this is particularly useful since you can make those words and letters “come out” of the poster looking more three dimensional. The dialog window for blending options is easily accessible by just right clicking on the particular layer that you want and then choosing the blending options item in the context menu that appears.

4.      Magic wand – Now as far as selection tools are concerned, the magic wand tool is the best for any newbie. Use this to select a particular area of the canvass with the same or related colors. For example, if your picture has a blue background and a person as the foreground you can try clicking on the blue background using the magic wand tool. With that you can select the whole blue area with no trouble. This is perfect if you want to lift or cut large colored areas and replace them with something else.

5.      Color Ranges – Finally, you may want to go one up with the magic wand and select all the related colors in the whole canvass. This can easily be done by selecting a color range. By choosing the eye dropper tool to select the color you want and then by clicking on the “color range” option in the select menu you can immediately select every color that is related to the one you used in the eye dropper. This is perfect if you want to replace a certain color for another one.

So those are a few simple tricks newbies can use to make their posters look great. This is very easy and it doesn’t require any high degree of understanding with pixels and other complicated stuff. They are just very easy to follow techniques to make your poster printing designs look better. Have fun!

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