Photoshop Tutorials

Create this simple poster created with layers of photos and shapes. In this Photoshop tutorial, you will learn how to use a combination of Photoshop brushes, images, and custom shapes to create this contemporary poster.

Preview of Final Result

What you will need

Design a Contemporary Poster Photoshop Tutorial

Step 1

Create a new document with dimensions; 1500 x 2000px. Now change the foreground color to a light grey, I used #e5e5e5. Go Edit>Fill and select foreground color. This will fill the background layer with a light grey.

Step 2

Now go here and copy the image into your document then scale it down until it looks like the image below. Select the magic wand tool and change the tolerance to 40. Now click outside the skull then hit Delete to get rid of the white background from the skull image, do the same for the other white bits like inside the eyes and the mouth. The last thing to do is to make sure the layer is selected then hit Shift+Ctrl+U, this will desaturate the layer.

Step 3

Next go and copy another image from here, this time of a sword. Place it into the document, first desaturate it in the same way that we did with the skull then scale and rotate the sword. Now get rid of the white background using the magic wand tool, this time with a tolerance of 10. Now duplicate this layer (Ctrl+J) then go Edit>Transform>Flip-Horizontal. Then move this layer so the swords form an X shape.