How Do Be Better In Photoshop?

[Raddons]

4 reelz guys.





I do my own Photoshops for my song art, and as you can see they are very "flat". Do you guys have any tips for making them stand out more?

[LunchBagMusic]

Subtlety.
It's difficult to define and even harder to teach. Look at great examples of design (especially typography)* and try too see what makes them look so... good.

I have no hope of telling what to do, but knowing that your designs are lacking means you will improve with practice. If you are out of ideas, try sketching/designing for other songs that you haven't written to practice with.

[Raddons]

Yeah, I've noticed that practice makes perfect. My first examples are cringe-worthy... But yeah, I'm trying to open Photoshop at least once a night to try and work something out just for the sake of doing it to get better

[inkBot]

Since you're working with Photoshop I have a simple, but useful, tip for you. Proofing.
Photoshop has functionality built into it to show how the picture image will look in different situations. CMYK, RBG, Color blindness, gamut warning, etc.

Since you're concerned your pictures look flat you'll want to be using the "sGray" setup. It's not one of the default setups but you can add it through the "Custom..." dialog. All it does is strip away the colors and leave you with only the values (grayscale), but without altering the image to do so. From that you can judge if your picture will pop or not, since values that lies close to each other will blend together. It is generally easier to judge if an image pops or not when the image is values only.

I took one of your pictures you posted and did this, and this is the result.



On the left is your original picture and the one with sGray is on the right.

The proofing tools are located under the "View" menu.

[Versilaryan]

One thing you can do, and this is a purely unprofessional opinion, is make the backgrounds so that the foregrounds pop out more. You have some minimalistic designs, which isn't a bad thing, but it makes it harder to bring things to the foreground. Choose where your colors change to bring out the greatest contrast between the background and the foreground. For example, in the Trixie one, you could've moved the lighter blues behind Trixie and/or the text, so that they're more visible and stand out more from the background. As it goes right now, the background blue is too similar to Trixie's blue and the purple you used for the text, making it hard to read and generally not bringing much attention to the important parts at all.

Another thing to pay attention to is where the eyes are naturally drawn. Discord's a perfect example because he's pointing at the text, which is the main focal point. If the viewer's eyes start on any part of Discord, they'll be drawn to where he's gesturing to and end up on the text. Meanwhile, with Pinkie, she's kind of standing off on the side, doing her own thing and not really pointing to the text at all, creating a bit of a rift between the text and the picture.

[Raddons]

The proofing tools are located under the "View" menu.

Sadly, I don't have access to these tools because I only have Photoshop Elements

edit: I'm actually figuring it out in GIMP at the moment. Thanks!

One thing you can do, and this is a purely unprofessional opinion, is make the backgrounds so that the foregrounds pop out more. You have some minimalistic designs, which isn't a bad thing, but it makes it harder to bring things to the foreground. Choose where your colors change to bring out the greatest contrast between the background and the foreground. For example, in the Trixie one, you could've moved the lighter blues behind Trixie and/or the text, so that they're more visible and stand out more from the background. As it goes right now, the background blue is too similar to Trixie's blue and the purple you used for the text, making it hard to read and generally not bringing much attention to the important parts at all.

Another thing to pay attention to is where the eyes are naturally drawn. Discord's a perfect example because he's pointing at the text, which is the main focal point. If the viewer's eyes start on any part of Discord, they'll be drawn to where he's gesturing to and end up on the text. Meanwhile, with Pinkie, she's kind of standing off on the side, doing her own thing and not really pointing to the text at all, creating a bit of a rift between the text and the picture.

Hmm... I'll have to figure out how to do that in application. I think I am going to tinker with the Trixie one now. Thanks for the insight. I should really take a class on this

[inkBot]

Sadly, I don't have access to these tools because I only have Photoshop Elements

Oh, ok. You can achieve the same effect by changing the image to grayscale. Though you'll have to change it back to continue working, which is why proofing is usefull.

Contrast is key to making things pop.

[senntenial]

To elaborate what ink it said, I love complementary colors. I'm still a noob at graphics, but putting colors like yellow and purple, and orange and blue work well. Just look at some movie posters, tons of them are good examples.

[inkBot]

I remembered this thing: http://colorschemedesigner.com/
Useful if you're not all that good with color theory (at when least picking colors that play of each other well ).

[Raddons]

I remembered this thing: http://colorschemedesigner.com/
Useful if you're not all that good with color theory (at when least picking colors that play of each other well ).

I used to be real into it. I'm going to brush up on it. I have that link bookmarked now. Thanks