PHOTOSHOP CS4 DOWN & DIRTY TRICKS- P6 potx

[...]... background (you can download the background you see here from the book’s downloads page, listed in the intro of the book) The background is only 72 ppi and your letter and number are 200 ppi, so when they appear in your document, they’ll be pretty huge, so press Command-T (PC: Ctrl-T) to bring up Free Transform Press-and-hold the Shift key, grab a corner point, and drag inward to scale the text down to size... when you shrank them down, the effects would stay at their same size and strength, so they’d look kind of weird The way around it is to go under the Layer menu, under Layer Style, and choose Scale Effects This brings up a dialog with a slider, so you can scale the effects themselves down in size, until they look right, but of course, we didn’t have to do that here because we merged down. ) Reflection Effects... tool, you’ll have to go up to the Options Bar, click on the down- facing arrow to the right of the gradient thumbnail to get the Gradient Picker, and choose the first gradient (which is the Foreground to Background gradient) Then take the Gradient tool and click-and-drag it through the number starting above the middle of the number and dragging downward diagonally (like you see here) Don’t deselect yet... Opacity setting of this white layer down to around 11% or 12% to give it that glassy look In the next few steps, we’ll add some text, a shape, and a variation Continued Reflection Effects Chapter 5 149 STEP FIVE: Just for looks, we’ll finish off our logo with a shape and some text First, create a new layer, then get the Custom Shape tool from the Toolbox (it’s two tools down from the Type tool— click-and-hold... (PC: Right-click) inside the Free Transform bounding box and a contextual menu will appear Choose Flip Vertical (as shown here) to flip this duplicate layer upside down STEP 10: Click inside the bounding box and drag your flipped image straight down until the two sets of headphones are just barely touching, creating the mirror reflection you see here When it’s positioned where you want, lock in your transformation... bottom of the Layers panel (it’s shown circled here in red), then get the Gradient tool (G), click on the down- facing arrow to the right of the gradient thumbnail in the Options Bar, and choose the Foreground to Background gradient (the top-left one) Click at the top of your reflected image, and then drag downward to the point where you want your image to fade away (as shown here), and son of a gun, it just... letting you know it is now a Smart Object (as shown in the next step) 160 Chapter Chapter 5 Reflection Effects SCOTT KELBY STEP THREE: Give your PDF a name, and save it on your computer Now go to Photoshop CS4, under the File menu, and choose Open Navigate to your PDF and click Open When you do this, it will bring up the PDF Import dialog you see here Luckily, you don’t have to do anything in this dialog... selected layers down to the Create a New Layer icon to duplicate both layers Continued Reflection Effects Chapter 5 163 STEP 11: Now, press Command-T (PC: Ctrl-T) to bring up Free Transform Then, Control-click (PC: Right-click) inside the Free Transform bounding box, and when the contextual menu appears, choose Flip Vertical (as shown here), to flip these two selected layers upside down STEP 12: Press-and-hold... your selected area up on its own separate layer (if you look in the Layers panel here, you’ll see that layer) STEP FOUR: Get the Move tool (V), press-and-hold the Shift key and clickand-drag straight downward (as shown here), so the top of this dragged layer is about an inch below the center of the image This creates the “table” for your product to sit on Continued Reflection Effects Chapter 5 153... the center (midtones) Input Levels slider to the right (as shown here) to darken the midtones, which in turn darkens the fake table Click OK Then, press Command-E (PC: Ctrl E) to merge your table layer down into your Background layer STEP SIX: Now, let’s add some color Choose Solid Color from the Create New Adjustment Layer icon’s pop-up menu at the bottom of the Layers panel When the Color Picker appears, . onto this background. Here, we’re using a screen capture of my blog (which you can download from the book’s downloads page), or you can take a screen capture yourself of any web- page you’d. a new document that is 8x6" at a resolution of 200 ppi. (This technique works best if you start with a higher resolution, and then scale the image or shape down if you want to use it. and type in the letter “G” using the font Charlemagne Std Bold (it comes in- stalled with Photoshop CS4) . We need to put a selection around your letter, so go to the Layers panel and Command-click