Making a Brochure Ad

Here’s how our final result should look:

Open a new canvas of size 1024 X 268 pixels, by going to File> New.

I have opened a picture of a flower I took some time ago, i like the flower here, since it has clean sharp edges and will work great with the magnetic lasso tool.

Once your required photo is opened, drag and drop it on to your canvas you opened earlier. Simply use the Move Tool (V) and start dragging from the picture to the canvas.

Incase the picture does not fit on the canvas completely, Scale it up by hitting the keys CTRL + T, hold down shift and drag from one of the four corner handles that appear.

Click the Magnetic lasso tool, by default the Lasso tool is visible, hence you will have to right click on this button and then chose the magnetic lasso. you can also press L to activate it , and then you can press SHIFT+ L to cycle all the tools that are in that category.

A good idea is too zoom in a bit say at 300% and the draw, this lets you see the pixels clearly, and use the spacebar to pan around, this needs a little practice, since while panning you can easily mess up your selection which you are making with your lasso tool

After ending the selection, this what my selection looks like.

You might get some artifacts where the selection might not be properly aligned with the edge, in this case need not worry, you will have to do some manual tweaking. You can select the Elliptical Marquee tool, and the by using ALT( to subtract) or SHIFT (to Add) to the selection, you can adjust these errors.

Isloate this flower from its background. Before I cut it, I would like to soften the edges up a bit.

In the menu Select > Feather or
ALT+CTRL+D, and then set the feather amount to 2. Click OK

After the feather is applied, inverse the selection so that the background is selected.

Select > Inverse or Shift+Ctrl+I

Press delete key , you can press it a couple of times incase you are not satisfied with the results, pressing it a couple of times, will keep deleting the edges with the feather amount you have applied.

Select the move tool (V) and align the flower with the top right corner of the canvas.

Duplicate the Flower_1 layer , right click on the layer and select duplicate.

Change blend mode of this layer to Color.

On this new duplicated layer, we will apply a Rough Pastels filter, ( you can apply other also from this category) . I am trying to achieve a little Painted soft effect, to break the originality of the flower looking real.

I have used these setting for the Rough pastels, you can play with the settings to suit your taste.

Next Apply a Film Grain filter, this will introduce some nice grains.

The settings used.

Next I need a drop shadow, one way is to use the Layer Styles to apply the drop shadow, but i need some manual control.

Dupllicate the original layer once again. Right click on the layer to Duplicate.

Move it at the bottom of all the layers, but above the background layer. Double click on the empty space towards the right of the layer( see the hand point icon in the illustration)

Make the Color Overlay black and click OK

Move the black flower a little down, so that the edges are visible.

Apply blur to this black flower.
Filter> Blur > Guassian Blur. Set the value according your requrements. It can vary with the size of your object/image

After applying the Guassian Blur.

The shadow we have created is just too soft, to roughen it up I will apply a Film Grain filter, do this by going to the
Filter > Artistic > Film Grain…

Next set the opacity to 74% or so,
this will give some transparency in the shadow.

Select the Text Tool, and type the text. Set a font that matches the overall theme and feel of the composition.

Open up the Layer Style, right click on the Flower Text layer, and select Blending options, to bring up the Layer Style options. Click in drop shadow, to see its properties, and then set the values as I have done, or according to your result as you want them to be.

I have added some more text to complete the name of the shop, “The Flower Shop”. I wanted the same layer style as I gave to FLOWER layer, simply right click on the FLOWER text layer, and select Copy Layer Style.