Intro to Adobe Photoshop for Nonprofits: Part 3

Let's dive right in. You've no doubt picked up everything you needed in part 1 and cleaned the image in part 2. (If you haven't, go ahead. We'll wait.)

We now move on to adding the header.

Add Guides

Before we add text to the image, we need to make sure it's in a place that looks good visually. Text shouldn't run up against the edge of an image — you need a little breathing room.

That's where guides come in: they're lines that help you make sure everything is aligned just right. You can show and hide them as needed.

Knowing where to add them usually comes with trial and error; in this case, though, we already know where to put them since we're working from a finished product. Photoshop for Scientists has a good guide on guides if you want to know more.

Here we'll be creating four guides for the top, left, bottom, and right sides.

1. Click View > New Guide….
2. Select Vertical and enter 100 px.
3. Click View > New Guide….
4. Select Horizontal and enter 100 px.
5. Click View > New Guide….
6. Select Horizontal and enter 3200 px.
7. Click View > New Guide….
8. Select Vertical and enter 2450 px.
9. This adds four guides to our image.

We just added 100 pixels of padding inside the image. Entering vertical and horizontal values of 100 pixels adds guides on the top and left of the image, entering a horizontal value of 3200 pixels adds a guide on the right, and entering a horizontal value of 2450 pixels adds a guide on the bottom. We get these last two values by simply subtracting 100 from the height and width of the canvas, which is 3300 pixels tall and 2550 pixels wide.

Add the Header

We installed the Open Sans font in part 1, so that should be available in Photoshop like any other font on your system. (If it's not, revisit that step.)

Before we add the text, let's add one more guide.

1. Click View > New Guide….
2. Select Vertical and enter 185 px.
3. Click the Horizontal Type Tool.
4. Change the typeface to Open Sans Light, the size to 72 pt, the anti-aliasing to Smooth, and the alignment to left.
5. Click the color box to the right of the alignment section (the black box in the screenshot above).
6. Enter a hex value of 275664 to change the color to charcoal gray.
7. Click on the canvas to begin typing.
8. Type "Lorem Ipsum" (without quotes) on two lines.
9. Press ESC when complete to accept the text.
10. Click the Move Tool.
11. Click and drag the text to line it up with the innermost guide. It should snap into place as it gets closer.

Bonus: We changed the anti-aliasing above to Smooth. Anti-aliasing is how software smooths the edges of letters. Photoshop gives you five options: None, Sharp, Crisp, Strong, and Smooth. Feel free to play with them to see what difference they make, but stick with Smooth for our purposes here.

We also specified a hex (short for "hexadecimal") value for the color. Photoshop recognizes five ways to input colors: HSB, Lab, RGB, CMYK, and hex.

Entering one set of values will automatically change the others, but a simple way to communicate an exact color is to say what the hex code is. More information on colors is available in many places online, but Wikipedia explains it very well.

Progress So Far

Here's what you should have so far.

Part 4

That's it for part 3! As always, please let us know if you have any questions along the way. In part 4, we'll add the body copy and the white box around it. See you there!

Part 2 Part 4

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