Make A Creative Brochure With Adobe Photoshop

By Author: Colleen Davis
Total Articles: 100
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If you would like to produce brochures with lots of graphics and effects on the photos and texts, half of the answer lies in the program that you will use. The other half is in the quality of the brochure printing.

Perhaps the greatest software ever design for the creative design and layout of brochures as well as other materials like posters, billboards, and the like, is Adobe Photoshop. It is a brilliant program that allows an artist to manipulate text, images, and graphics as he desires. In the hands of a skilled designer, Adobe Photoshop is just magical.

But for newbies, it can be quite difficult to use, considering that there are many features, applications, and effects that you can employ in order to come up with your design. Some of the skills that you need to learn when using Photoshop are adding text and graphics, enhancing them with effects, and preparing the final document for printing.

If you are going to have your brochure printed by a professional printer using offset machines, then you will need to make your document in the exact size of the intended brochure and your document should have ...
... at least 300 dpi resolution. That is the standard resolution in order to get high quality prints.

Consider your Photoshop document as a piece of paper and all the other elements that you put in (i.e. text, photos, and graphics) all come in layers. For example, the background is one layer. When you add in a photo, the program will list it as Layer 1. When you type in some text after the photo, it would become Layer 2 and so on. You can rename layers for easy navigation and reference.

When you move the elements around your document, you have to click on the object or select its layer from the menu box. Use the arrow pointer to do this. You can easily enlarge or reduce any element by selecting it and dragging the corners.

You can choose a background for your brochure by either adding a solid color or using a photo to cover the entire space. As for the photos and other elements, you add effects to enhance them, such as outer and inner glow, drop shadow, bevel and emboss, and many others. You can add texture or patterns to solid colors if you want. You can manipulate photos by changing their colors, correcting red-eye, or removing stains from old prints. As for the text, you can also do so many things. You can use the same layer effects that you employed on your photos. Or you can combine the effects in order to create new graphics.

While working on a design it is imperative to save your work every now and then. One design could take from a few minutes to several days to finish. You can be interrupted by power failure or hard drive problems so if you do not save your file after every major move, you will risk losing the precious work that you did. And mind you, it is not nice to re-do a tedious layout.

Once you are satisfied with your design, you can already go to brochure printing. Save your file in PSD format or as a large JPG file and bring to your printer for processing. Using Adobe Photoshop will surely create stunning brochures because of the many design capacities that it can do.

For more information, you can visit this page on brochure printing