 Hi everyone, I'm Rob from Project Sandbox, a University of Lethbridge Library Initiative. In this video, we're going to learn how to create a research poster with Adobe Photoshop. So when you open up Adobe Photoshop, this should be the screen that you'll see. You'll notice that past projects will be here, you have the title bar and it'll say open or create new. Since we want to create a new document, we're going to go to create new. So after you click on create new, a screen will pop up. This is where you decide some of the things about your document. So if you're unsure about sizing, you can go into a bunch of different templates that exist in Adobe Photoshop. So these are templates for photo, templates for prints, art and illustration, web, mobile, film and video, whatever. But since I at least know what size that we want to create something in, we're going to do it without a template and do it just from the ground up and I'll explain why. The first thing that you want to do before you do anything is you want to find out how big your document is supposed to be. Just from a look online, you can see that research posters are generally 40 by 36 inches. But if for whatever reason, your size is a little bit different, that is totally fine. I'm going to go by 48 by 36 inches, not 78, 48. If the screen flashes back to my face, it's because I have a quick key on number two, which may cause a problem, 48. There we go. Okay. 48 by 36 inches. Once again, if your size is different, feel free to put in different sizing right there. Whether you have different sizing for width and height, there are a couple of things that will be similar. One is resolution. Generally if you want to print something off, and I'm assuming if you want a research poster, it is to print off, your resolution should be 300 pixels per inch. If it was only for a screen, you would want it to stay at 72, but we want to print ours off. Since it's printing off too, there's two different color modes that I would suggest you choose from. One is RGB, and one is CMYK. RGB is red, green, blue, and that would be for computer monitors or TV screens and stuff like that. CMYK would be if you're sending it off to a printer. So once again, since we're sending it off to a printer, we'll choose CMYK. We can leave it at 8 bit right now. Don't really worry about what that means. And pretty much everything else looks fine. The main things I want you to pay attention to are the width and height, the resolution and color mode. So once everything's chosen, you can just hit create. And then this will create your document for you. So just to give a little look around how Adobe Photoshop is set up, we can see that there's a toolbar on the left hand side. This is where you can click all of your different tools to do whatever you might want to do. You have a layer section right here. So I'll explain what that is as we move along. You have some rulers. If you don't see the rulers and make sure you do see the rulers, you can just click right here under view. You'll see why in just a moment. And then you can have some other options up here. These options up here will actually change depending on the tool you've selected. So if you see this is the way it looks with the paintbrush, if I change it to paint bucket, you'll notice it changed eye dropper changed the shape tool changed. Just keep in mind that this bar will change on you. If you've watched the design theory video, you'll know that one of the most important aspects of making something is alignment. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to put down some guides on this page to let us know if things are aligned properly. So to add some guides, we go to view and you can do new guide if you want. That'll generally you'll probably never click on that. What you might click on though is new guide layout. Actually before we do this, this is set to pixels right now. So if you want to change this, the ruler, like change how it's measuring your document, all you do is right click on it and you can choose a new section. So I want to choose inches because that's what we're going to be working in. Okay, so once that's selected, then go to new guide layout. I don't know if you're paying attention before, but it did say pixels down here originally. Now it's in inches, which helps us. If you've done a Microsoft Word document, let's change that back to me. You're familiar with what margins are. So we're just going to add a one inch margin around the outside so that we don't put any content in there. Because if once again you watch the design theory video, you'll know a little bit more about white space. Something else we want though is we want some columns and rows. So I always like to make sure that there's something in the center to always know where center is. But what we want to do is add four columns because at the moment that's how I'm envisioning this will be set up. If you want there to be more, totally feel free to do that, but I want there to be four. So to do four, we just type in four. We want to make sure that the columns aren't totally butted up against each other though. So we want to install a space in between all of the columns. So since we've already established that the margin is one inch, we should probably still be using that same spacing. So we'll change gutter to one inch. And then you'll see that there's some extra lines in between everything. And as for rows, we probably don't need to add anything else. So let's just call it good. Actually I'm going to use the new guide that I said you totally will not use. So I'm going to change this to percents so we can see that it has 50%. And then go to new guide. And then I want to guide vertically at 50%. So we hit 50. Let's change this back to what I want it to be and then hit OK. So this adds a line down the middle. It's generally helpful just to know where center is on your documents. So if you followed along so far, you'll have a nice bar in the middle too. It's for us to know where center is. All right. So we have our four column set up. So now what I want to do is I want to start imagining how things are going to be laid out on here. I like using a nice solid bar at the top just to highlight everything. So just to show you how you can create a bar, you can go to this shape tool right here. Where shape tool might look like this, might look like that, might be a polygon, might be a line, or it could be the custom shape tool. Whatever it is, it should be more or less in the same location. I want the rectangle tool though. So with the rectangle tool chosen, you'll see that my cursor is now a plus sign. So what I can do is click somewhere in just the top left corner and then I can drag out a shape. And this is my rectangle. If say you wanted a perfect square, you would just need a hold shift and that would make a perfect square for you. Obviously, we want a rectangle though, so we're going to avoid that perfect square. So I'm just going to let go and you'll see that it's created. It doesn't have a color in the stroke, that's what this line means. The background is black though. And I'm going to actually change that. And to do that, we're going to go to color.adobe.com and we're going to pick a color palette to choose from. So I want complementary colors. You don't generally want something that saturated, it doesn't generally look good. A little desaturated would look nice though. So this is roughly what I'm going to choose. So I'm just going to let's change the color mode, that's important. So that we're using the proper color mode. Okay, so I'm going to use these colors. And I want to change this black. So I just copied and pasted my first color from right here, that's why I highlighted it. You didn't see, but I hit Ctrl plus C just to copy it. And now I'm going to change this black box. So to do that with the box selected, I just want to click on the fill and then click on this little bar right here or this little box. When you click on the box, you didn't see it because I was using it on a different page previously. Anyway, when you click on the box, this pops up. Then you can just paste that same code in the hexadecimal and hit Enter. And then your box will change. So once your box has changed colors, you can adjust it a little bit. I'm just using the up and down keys to move around a little bit. After that, I'm going to put on my title. And to do that, just to go over what I just did, I'm going to delete that. You're just going to click this little T. This is for the type tool. Once again, if you hold, click and hold on these, this is how you get these extra menus. But I'm just going to click on it once to get my cursor to change to this. Now what you can do is, we're just going to click off that bar because I don't know if you saw my cursor was a circle. That means I'm interacting with that box and I don't want to. But if you click and drag out a text box, you will add text to it. If you notice mine clipped to the guides, if yours isn't doing that, just under View, click Snap and then things will start clicking to everything, which makes your life a lot easier. Anyway, so I just dragged out a text box and this is a perfect example of showing you how layers work. So if you notice, I dragged something out but you can't see it at all. That's because this top box is blocking the text. And how I know it is is right here in the Layer panel. So the rectangle is above this text right here. So if I click on that text and drag it up above, we will now see it above the text box. So that's how layers work. So layers that are at the top here show at the top level of your document where layers underneath will also show underneath, which is also why this rectangle is showing above the white background versus everything just looking white right now. All right, so I have some text pulled out. What it created was just some text called Laura Mipsum. It's literally junk text to help you design. But I'm just going to throw in something. So as with most things, it's an awesome research poster, not just a regular research poster. So I'm writing awesome research poster. Now it's spelled correctly. With the type tool, if you highlight stuff just like with Microsoft Word, you can edit whatever. This also, if you're highlighted, gives you the ability to change your font, your font weight and your font size, alignment, anything like that. So say I wanted it center, I could change it there. Let's make this font a little bit bigger because it's pretty hard to read. Yeah, awesome research poster. That's good. We can leave it as bold. We're not really sure if we want to use it as bold yet. So what I like to do now generally is I would like to choose a different font style. So there's two ways to do that. If you click this drop down menu, you can just scroll and pick whichever you want. I'm never exactly sure of the font I want because depending on what I'm creating, I might want a different font style. So how you can also do it is if that's highlighted, you can just click in the box so that that's highlighted. Then with the arrow keys, you can just scroll through your text until you find one that you happen to like a lot. Just in the interest of time, and I'm not sure how this is going to turn out, I want to use, yes this one, I just like what the A's do with this. I want the text to be a little bit bigger so once again, you can read it really nicely. That's going to be my text title. So I want to see what this looks like now. So I'm just going to remove the guides for a minute. So if you just go to view show, you can click off guides. And this can help you position things a little bit better. So with that layer selected, you can just use the arrow keys to move it around. If you'd rather drag and drop it, you can do that by just clicking on the layer too. If that's not happening and say you're selecting this background, it might mean that auto select is selected, which means the computer will just do its best to figure out what you're selecting. I generally like to have it clicked off so that I can ensure I have more control. And then you can just select your layers by clicking on the layers instead. Alright, so let's move awesome research poster back. There we go. And then I want to see my rectangle selected and that's why it's moving. I want that to move down. Okay, so we got awesome research poster. I want to click off of that because I don't want it to interact and then I'll put my name. I need to move it up in the layer menu so that you can actually see it. And I actually want my name to be different because I want to use font style to contrast the difference font style and sizing actually to understand that there's a difference. But I still want them close together as I pointed out with proximity in the theory video. If you haven't gotten the theme by now either, probably watch the theory video before you do all this to give you a better idea of what I'm actually saying. Okay, so I want it to be Ariel or Ariel, whatever you want to call it. And I want it to be just regular. Then I'm going to make that a little bit smaller. That was weird with just my first name, Rob Project Sandbox Guy, yeah, sure. All right, so we got that there. If you had more information, feel free to use this whole top area. Just figure out what makes more sense for how things are laid out. Okay, so got our title. That's nice and good. We're going to bring our guides back up. And if you notice, Rob isn't quite aligned. I am very specific about that. So I just use the arrow key to align it again to that guide. If you want to get closer because you're not sure that it is in, you can hit control plus or control minus to zoom out. Control plus will zoom in though. So I want to make sure it's all nicely aligned. Should be, oh, Rob's a little bit over. There we go. Okay. Nicely aligned. All right, so why don't we make some of our additional headings now? I'm going to use a different shape tool just to give you an idea of how other ones work. So I want the rounded rectangle tool. So if I click roughly by one of those guides and drag out a box, that'll create a nice little thing for me. Now let's see if I want to use a different color. See this is always the hard thing about graphic design. Which color do you choose? With all these colors too, I would like to say you can use black and white too. That's totally fine. Or different shades of some of these colors. But you just want to stay within those hues generally. I'm going to try out this guy. Let's go back. And that is selected right there. Shape tool selected, so this menu's up. So I'm going to choose, let's click once, twice, there we go. Click on there, and then paste that in there. Let's see what that looks like. All right, that looks pretty cool. So we got a nice rounded box right there. Today with this box we want more rounded corners. You go to the radius, and that's what makes the corners a little more rounded. 50 to 100. You can't see it on that one, but if we made another one, you can see that the corners are a little more rounded than right there. And I'm actually going to use the second one. So if you want to delete a layer, you can just click the layer and click and drag it to this little trash bin, and then it will throw it out. All right, so we got our nice box. It's nicely aligned. I'm going to drag it up here, and there's still a nice white space right here. So now I'm going to put in a title. So the generic one would probably be like introduction. You can't see it because it's white, but it is right there. So I'm just going to click it and drag it in. Something that's helpful to do, too, is line up this layer with the alignment box. So I'm able to move these little dots around because I have the text tool selected and you click on wherever. So sorry, I realized that wasn't explained well. So I have the introduction selected and I click on the type tool. You'll notice there's still no dots, but if I click on that, the dots appear. Now we have the ability to move that. And I like to do that generally because it gives you more control over, like say you decide later on you want it center justified or right justified. This is how you can do it really simply. Cool. Introduction. Now I'm just going to throw in some text to create the body of the introduction. This automatically fills with lower Mipsum text. And that's why it's highlighted right now. Let's make it black so you can actually see it. So I just clicked on this to make it black. And now let's shrink it. I'm just using the arrow keys to make this a little smaller. It should not be center justified either. If for some reason you notice there's hyphens at the end of this too. What you want to do is you want to click on this character and then click paragraph. And then deselect hyphens because if this is selected, so it'll hyphenate things. With the deselected, the hyphens will disappear and just the full word will be together. I have never run in a situation where hyphenate was a good idea. You might, that's totally possible, but just deselect it. That's generally the best thing to do. This font still is very big because keep in mind this poster is 48 inches by 36 inches. That will end up being a lot bigger. It'll probably look something more like this. Do you know how we can tell? I'm going to right click on this bar, set it to inches. And then when inches looks like it is about an inch apart, it's about there. This is how big our text would be. So that's pretty big. So I want this to be a little smaller. It's pretty big. Still want people to read it though. Yeah, that's a pretty good size. And you can feel free to change your size. This is just what I thought looked pretty good. Alright so this is what it looks like on my whole document. So I doubt my introduction would be that long. If that accidentally happens where another layer pops up, just click and drag it into the trash. It's probably going to be longer than that. So how you can get extra lorem ipsum text is to go to this type layer and hit paste lorem ipsum and then it'll fill up your whole box. Now by doing this we've established some rules. We've established that titles look like that for sections and bodies look like this. So we want to ensure that we do that throughout our whole document now. So to do that we're going to group these elements together. So the first thing I'm going to group together is just this title area. So I can do that by clicking on introduction and then the rounded rectangle. Holding down shift while I'm doing that. Or you can hold down control and then you click this little folder. What that will do is it'll create a group of those two items and you can see by clicking the eyeball which makes things visible or hidden that they are now grouped together. And then if you double click on that we can change the name of it so it's a little more meaningful and then let's create another group. I'll show you another way to create a group. So you can also create a group by just clicking on the folder. It'll create an empty group but when you click on the items to go in the group and click and drag it in you'll see that the group is now filled. And this is also a way to keep your whole document really nicely organized so you don't just see like a thousand layers all the time. And I'm actually going to do the same thing with my title stuff too. So now I know that's the title area and I'm going to click and drag that below so it starts to make sense. So introduction. So that's my introduction area now. So now if I click the eyeball it gets rid of all of it. But what I want to do is I want to create a method section, a conclusion, a result. Whatever your heart desires really or whatever you are told you should be putting in a research poster. So to do that you can just click on your folder and drag it down to this button. What this will do is it'll copy it. So now if I have the copy selected and the move tool selected at the very top we can just move it down, center it on the next section. So why don't we call this something like methods and then we could just get rid of some of that text. Let's get rid of the text just by dragging it to that guide. And then you would just be able to use the type tool and then put in your methods section. It's as simple as that. Okay, so we got methods and introduction. Let's get rid of the guides for a minute just to see how we're doing. Okay, it looks pretty good. Right, so now one of the first things is to change introduction copy to methods so we know which one we're selecting. And then we'll keep just creating different ones. So with methods we'll create a new one. One thing I want to highlight that I'm doing too is with that snap feature that I mentioned earlier, you can see that this is getting aligned with everything by these lines that pop up. So there's a top line that shows right here that shows that they are aligned appropriately. Because alignment is so important. Like if you have something that's like a little bit off, I can't show you yet. I'll show you in one moment. It's hard to show with just one thing. It looks weird. Make sure you don't do it. It can really screw up the way your document looks. I'm just doing things I've already told you about already. There we go. Why don't we call this results. Don't pay attention to my titling or my order. You might want to change things entirely. So now that results is, let's just fill that and then we can copy and paste that. I'll show you now what having things not lined up properly looks like. Having it not aligned properly would be like this. These now look like they're related, but there's a weird space. Let's move this down a little bit. Weird alignment. It doesn't make sense. Even if it's slightly off, it just looks weird. That's why it's really nice that those guides exist. There we go. Let's bring them back up because guides are our friend. All right. So let's call this, I don't know, a conclusion. Change this. Let's do one last one, like sources or something like that. Obviously, sources wouldn't be formatted in that way. One thing to mention, if you are using Photoshop to do things, you have to do a lot of things manually. Say you want a bullet point. There's no way to bullet point a list with this. But if you hold Alt, then press 0149, it'll make a bullet point for you. And then you can fill everything out. So say for sources you wanted bullet points for some reason. We could put Project, Sandbox, Guy, Rob, and then all of your other information. If you notice, this doesn't line up really that well within here. So what I generally like to do is if we highlight everything, you can go into the text options This is an additional little text option right there. Then go to Paragraph. What we can do is we can push the top row and move the bottom row everywhere else so it gets aligned properly. So to do that, you first want to move the top row, which is this guy right here. So we'll want to move it back a little bit. And you'll know that it's lined up properly when this aligns with here and there. That's roughly the same distance. So it's negative 34 points. So to get it back to the way it was, you want to change this top one to 34 points. I'm sorry that changed again. There we go. So now everything's aligned and you got your bullet point. And then since you don't want to go to all that work for every single one you create, just hit Control C. And then you can just keep pasting for however many that you want to create. That's probably the simplest way to go about doing all of that. What might happen when you're creating a poster though is you might want to bring in a graph. And these aren't going to be under the right section, so just forgive me. What you can do with Microsoft Word, which is excellent, is you can just grab your chart and drag it right into Photoshop. So I just wanted to zoom in because we still want it to be aligned. I'm going to hit Show Transform Controls with the Move Tool. And then these boxes appear. And then if you don't click anything, your box will align appropriately. Notice it's blurry. When I click the Move Tool again though, it gets clear and everything's good. So see how there's a line around that? That does not look good. Make sure that doesn't happen. So there's a really easy way to get rid of that line. So with that layer selected, which is this one, you can use the Eraser Tool. I'm just going to show you the Eraser Tool. So with the Eraser Tool selected, with that layer selected, we can just erase it just like you would in Microsoft Paint or whatever. If for some reason you did have a colored background, I'll show you. The reason I wanted to do this isn't because I thought this color would look awesome. I just wanted to show you that this is what this still looks like. All I did was erase that line, which was just the edge of this picture. If you have a colored background, you'll be able to see that God awful box that was still there. So that's roughly what you'll have to do to create a document. There might be some things you'll want to try out, though, if you want to fiddle with stuff a little bit more. One of the big things that you might want to do is add things like shadows and stuff like that, and there's a really easy way to do that. What would look good with a shadow? Maybe the title? I'm going to group these together because I want them both to have a title. Then you can click that FX button and then hit Blending Options. When you click on that, this box will appear. So I'm going to click Drop Shadow, which adds a shadow, and keep your eye on right up there. Then we're going to increase the Spread, Distance, Size a little bit, Distance a little more. There we go. Okay, so we got a shadow on there. That little area has a whole bunch of other options. I actually don't like the shadow, but if you would like to explore them, totally feel free to do that. So that's roughly everything that you do. The one thing I would like to add is if you ever want to add an additional image to this, you just click and drag the file to this document just like I did with the pie chart. The final thing you'll want to do though is you'll want to save this. So if you go to File, Save As, and really theoretically you should have been doing this all along, this is the first thing you should really do, I'm going to save this to my desktop and just call it Awesome Poster. And you'll want to make sure you have a Photoshop save file, because if say you want to save it later as something else or you want to make adjustments, it has to be in Photoshop. If you just saved it as like a JPEG, you've totally erased all of your image. So we save it as that, then you might also want to save it as a JPEG. So this would be just like a standard image you would use on your computer. You also might want to save it as a PDF though. Like say you're wanting to send this to printing services because they're the only person who can print this off for you because it's such a large document. They actually have some specifications and I'm going to show you how to go about doing that. And to get their specifications, we actually need to use another Adobe program. And I realize we've been watching for a little while but bear with me, I'm almost done. So we're going to open up Adobe Illustrator. Alright so we have Adobe Illustrator opened up. So we want to go to File, Open, then we're going to open that Photoshop file we just chose. I'll show you why we want to do this. Yeah, this doesn't really matter. I just said to flatten it to an object so I just hit OK. Alright, so now that our documents open up inside Adobe Illustrator, all you have to do is go to File and Save As. Then we want to save as a Adobe PDF and then this window will open. From here you go to Marks and Bleeds. Make sure that all printer marks is selected. And what you need to do is just click on this and set your bleeds to 0.125 inches. If it doesn't say inches right there, like it might say pixels and stuff, just like with Photoshop, make sure your rulers is open, so right there. And if you right click on it, make sure it's sent to inches. And that'll make sure that everything is working the way you want it to. So once again, File, Save As, PDF. We'll go back into this window right here, Marks and Bleeds. Then make sure it's 0.125 inches all the way across the board. Then you hit Save. Don't worry about that. You have Photoshop if you want to go back and change things. Alright, so after this will be what your document will look like. So what that Marks and Bleeds did was it created these little printer marks on the outside of the paper. And it created this little space because whenever you print off a document, say you wanted a 48 by 36 inch document, you can't print that off on a 48 by 36 inch piece of paper. Because your printer needs a little bit of area around that page to grab onto it. So when you send it to printing services, they like this so they can print this off on a bigger piece of paper. And then having these things is what lets them know if the colors are correct. So just remember that when you're sending it, you need to have Marks and Bleeds checked. And it should be a PDF. And if you've already set it up so it's CMYK and stuff like that to begin with, you're golden. I appreciate that this was a fairly long tutorial. There was a lot to go over to do something like this. Just remember, although I showed you different aspects of Photoshop, that's not everything that there is to know about it. Try things out and have fun. Thank you very much for watching this video. Like I said, I know it was long, so I appreciate you staying through all of it. If you'd like to keep a prize to new videos coming out at the library, feel free to subscribe to our page. And if this wasn't enough for you and you would like to watch some more videos, feel free to click on one of the videos on the screen right now. Once again, thank you very much. I've took it enough of your time. I hope to see you sometime soon.