Get paid for commercial fashion, magazine & product advertising design?!?  Yes you!  Learn the skills of Madison Avenue Advertising Designers here. (opens in new window)

Get paid for commercial fashion, magazine & product advertising design?!?  Yes you!  Learn the skills of Madison Avenue Advertising Designers here. (opens in new window)

You may have to make some adjustment to fill some space. One way to do this is to make a selection with the rectangular marquee on the layer and then Edit: Free Transform (Ctrl T) and stretch it to the edge of the document. It’s going to be covered anyways but it still looks like sky here.

Add a layer mask and use the gradient masking method covered in the First Edition. This will get rid of that harsh edge. Now change it to one of the lighten blending modes. This will get rid of the dark pixel data in the layer when mixing with the layer beneath. All that is left is the lightning strokes.

Now pull in some auto layers of some fancy cars. Use the eraser tool carefully to get rid of extraneous pixel data. No need for the layer mask here, you just want to get rid of that extra pixel edges to leave each car alone here. You can also select each vehicle before you bring them in.
 

Here I’ve already created some pre-selections so I’m just dragging in the escalade layer.

I’ve used a combination of the magic wand tool which works well on 30 tolerance to get most of the red or yellow pixel data. Then I used the polygonal lasso tool on ‘add to selection’ to get the rest of the selection, switch to moVe tool and drag them into the document.

If you’re new to Photoshop, note that we have different independent ‘auto’ layers here. Layers are essential to understanding Photoshop and graphic design. You can move these layers around with the move tool to where you want. Here I’m putting them into place where they look ok. You can use Edit: Transform for additional functions such as rotate scale, etc.

Create a Text layer with the Type tool. I’ve used Brush Script Std and then right cilcked to go to Warp Text. Here you can see the settings I’ve used. We want to create a logo that represents the business we’re designing for. Effective typography is knowing what works for a desired goal...a lot of it comes with experience where you start to have a ‘feel’ for what would look right. You want all of the elements of a design to synergize and come together to represent the independent ‘whole’. Anyways, find yerself some blingin’ text.

Now you’ll want to spend some time in the layer effects dialog box. Fool around with the Satin settings, drop shadow, stroke, etc.