Photoshop tutorial: Creating a wicked cinema billboard scene

Today, we will be creating a wicked cinema/theatre billboard effect that you may have seen before - either in print advertising or online work.The effect incorporates many cool techniques such as creating a star-burst, working with multiple layers, positioning, and other awesome styling queues. Feel free to subscribe to our RSS feed to be alerted when we update the blog, and in particular, add more Photoshop and other tutorials.

To get this show on the road, this is what we are going to attempt to create today! Good Luck!

Step 1
Start with a blank canvas, by going to ‘File>New’, set size to 640×800 pixels with white as background.

Step 2
Create a new layer called ‘Gradient’ - ‘Layer>New> Layer’ (Shift+Ctrl+N). Set your foreground colour to: #ebb82d (hex) and background colour to: #8e410e. Create a linear gradient(G) from the top to the bottom of the canvas. If you did it right, it should be looking something like this.

Not much yet - I know.. There’s a method to my madness - kick on!

Step 3
Create a new layer, and call it ‘Footer black’. Change the foreground colour to #373737, grab the rectangle tool (U) and draw a rectangle, the width of the canvas in about the bottom 20% of the size of the canvas. After you have achieved this, create another layer, change foreground colour again to #b13333; this time calling it ‘Footer red’, and again, draw a rectangle across the canvas where the black rectangle ends. Make it about 50 pixels high. If you did it right, it should look like below, so far.

Step 4
Okay, so far so good. Type U on your keyboard to make the Custom Shape Tool active. If you click down on this icon, or right click, you will get an option called ‘Custom Shape Tool’. Select this! When you do, the top navigation will change to show the following:

If you click on the highlighted section you will be shown a list of shapes you can use to spice up your projects. Select the ‘Registration Target 2′ shape. The shape you need is highlighted below as well as how to activate all shapes, if you can’t see it the first time.

Step 5
With this shape now selected, create a new layer and call it ‘Starburst’. You should be on that layer at this stage - drag it so it is positioned under the black and red footer layers. You can also use ‘Ctrl+[' to drop layers down, and 'Ctrl+]‘ to push layers up above other layers. Okay, let’s kick on and draw a shape on the ‘Starburst’ layer, which should still currently selected. Change your foreground colour to white, or #ffffff. Start drawing the shape - making sure to make the shape bigger than the canvas - zooming out of the canvas to see; if you have to. You can hold down ’shift’ whilst drawing the shape, to get a perfect circle! Make sure it covers the full area of the orange gradient - like mine, below. When you are done with the shape, set the opacity of the layer, thus, the shape, to 20%. This will create a neat see-through effect. If you can’t find opacity, try clicking on ‘Window>Layers’.

You don’t have to make it exactly center-perfect - it makes it a nice effect if it’s not actually 100% in the center of the canvas. Notice how the red and black footer layers don’t effected because we moved them ‘on top’ of the star burst layer?

Step 6
Okay, create a new layer and call it ‘Billboard frame’, making sure it is the top-most layer, using shortcuts shown above. Set foreground colour to white, if you have to, set opacity to 100% before you kick on, and create a rotated rectangle as in the screen grab below. Firstly create a shape, and click ‘Control+T’ on your keyboard to transform the shape. If you move your mouse to the corner of the shape, your mouse cursor will change to a ‘rotate’ shape. Clicking down and moving your mouse will let you rotate the shape. When the shape has been set and rotated, click on ‘Layer>Layer Style>Blending Options’ and copy the settings from below.

The settings for the ‘Gradient’ colours in Fill Type above, with basic setting directions are shown for your convenience below.

Step 7
Okay, moving on. Create a new layer called ‘Lights’, making sure its the top-most layer, once more. Set the foreground colour to #ff6600, click the brush tool (B) and then right click on the canvas to get brush settings. Use the following settings: Master Diameter: 45px, Hardness: 0%. Place your mouse cursor in the middle of the black portion of the newly-created billboard and paint. It should look something like this.

Okay, still on the same layer, change the foreground colour to: #ffffcc, change the brush settings by right-clicking the canvas again, and change to the following settings: Master Diameter: 20px and Hardness: 85%. FYI; the greater the hardness is, the less blur-out there is (i.e. shape is ‘fuller’ with colour). Okay, this might sound hard, but simply align your cursor in the middle of the orange brush splatter you just made above and paint (click once). You should now have something cool like this:

Yay! it’s starting to look like a light-on :). Let’s press Control+J to duplicate/clone the light layer (which should now be the two brushes on top of each other (as above). Do this a few times, and lay the lights out around the black border. When you are done, you should have something like below.

Step 8
Wicked ayh! Okay, grab the line tool, pressing ‘U’ on your keyboard will select the Shape Tool, and right clicking on the icon, or clicking and selecting it will let you change to the ‘Line Tool’. Change the foreground colour to #ffffcc and draw lines from left to right of the white section; just like lined paper, all the width of the white. In an upcoming tutorial, I will show you how to make this an easy process using custom patterns.

Does it look like this? If it does, you are still on track!

Step 9
Okay, we got the lines, let’s get some text up on our billboard. This really is up to you to make it creative. What I recommend is using Arial bold and playing around with tracking (in the character panel) to portray spacing. Here is my creation.

Step 10
Alright, this has been a fairly detailed tutorial - hope we didn’t lose anyone! Let’s start wrapping up - if you need any help, have any questions or whatever, please don’t hesitate to comment and we’ll get onto it! Okay, what’s left to do is type some text on the red and black footers, maybe put your logo on the black section to re-enforce the ‘branding’. After you have done that, you can stop, sit back and admire your work! This is an example of what you could have at this stage.

Awesome ayh? Simple, cool effect you can use on your next website or ‘ad’

If you really want to get techy; applying some custom-vector shapes to the mix and some lighting effects, (Filter>Render>Lighting Effects), you can easily come up with something like this:

Obviously, you wouldn’t want your logo and the ‘call’, etc to be hidden in the light, but for this tutorial, it’s just some ideas on what you can do to spice it up! Looks pro, ye?

Well, there you have it boys and girls - I hope you have enjoyed the tutorial and/or it has helped to show you some of Photoshop’s hidden jems that just make a project look awesome. As you can see, the steps themselves weren’t hard - most of the time, it is the conviction of how everything comes together that creates the ‘wow’ effect.

Feel free to share your creations on the Cheb 2.0 Flickr group, subscribe to our RSS feed for updates on when we post now content/tutorials, and digg/bookmark this tutorial if you enjoyed it.

Till next time,

Cheb.