Movie Poster Design Tutorial

Fill your background layer with black.

For this design I'm pulling in a nice cityscape scene from my Photos.com collection. Find something similar and drag it in with the moVe tool. Ctrl T Shift to scale it down to size...we want it to fill about a third of the space and towards the bottom.

Use the layer masking technique to get rid of the harsh edges so you've got a nice blend. We want the black fading into black.  This works well on many a movie poster.

Now, grab some selections of your actors and actresses. These are from the 2,000 Images Bonus CD in my PSDesigner Package. Make your selection and pull them into the design with the move tool.

 

Once again, the art of the selection is an important study and in most designs you must have perfect selections. Here I'm using the quick mask mode with a brush to deselect the areas outside of the 'actor'.

 

This technique is covered intensively in the Basic Photoshop DVD Training (included in the Discover Photoshop: Total Package with my PSDesigner training). You could also use the Extract tool, lasso, etc.

One thing you could also do is to make a work path to save a selection. Just right click after you've made your selection (still with the lasso or marquee tool) and choose Make Work Path.

Press ok for the tolerance.

You can now see your new path in the paths palette. Click on it and Make Selection. This simply allows you to store your selection (you could also use Select:Save Selection) and come back to it when you want.
 

Press OK to not use a feather with the default at 0. Feathering adds a softer edge.