Alright, welcome to another NoBs Photo Success PhotoShop tutorial. In this tutorial here, I’m going to show you how to make a real quick and dirty wall panel. We create these for our clients all the time, I do everything radiant Photoshop, it takes me a few minutes to do. We print this out at about 30 inches by 12 inches, we mount them on masonite and laminate them or mount them on gator board for a quick hanging.

What I do here is I’ve got four images that I’ve got to have in my wall panel, it’s almost like a story board panel. So I’ve got my four images already workload and I already sized to the size I want. I like my image to go directly across all the way across the panel with no spaces in between which I’m going to show you how to do.

So, first thing I do is I got my canvass here and it’s about 12 x 30 and you know, I can—let’s start with the background color. I’ll talk about colors for a second. Now when we create our panels, I’d like the colors to harmonize with each other so I like the colors in the image to harmonize with the color of the actual background, so I know right now that my colors in my backgrounds are going to be probably in the pinkish and light purples. So let’s go ahead right away, let’s just add a background color. I’m just going to take my color drop right here and I’m going to take a dark, let’s go with the dark pink, purple here or whatever you want to color, there we go. And use a paint bucket and we’ll just drop that right in there, there we go.

Now, let’s just drag all of these images, I’m just going to drag them one by one holding the—just click and drag, that’s just like this, click and drag, go to that, we’ve already got that one and we’re just going to click and drag, perfect. Now we’ll just use, we’ll be working on this image here.

Now, I want to find the center of my background image so I’m just going to go view, new guide and then the horizontal axis, I’m just going to type in 50% and that’s just going to place the guide right in the middle of my canvass. So now I’m simply just going to drag, just take an auto selector, let’s just drag all our images up into here. I’ve got no particular order with these. Like I said, I like my images to go right across the whole thing so let’s just drag this right here, click this one over—perfect.

So I’ve got my background and I’ve got my four layers as you can see here. Now I’m not going to change anything on here, well you know what, let’s just—for everyone’s sake, let’s just change this up for the heck of it an just put that there, perfect.

Now I’ve got the top layer selected; I am just going to merge these images by holding CTRL, pressing D, merge that one there, now I’ve got my images on one layer and I just want some a little bit of a space and there’s so let’s just zoom in a bit, there you can see that little space right there—alright, CTRL-E, CTRL-E, CTRL-E, and now we’re good to go, perfect.

Now, in reality, here’s my panel here, I’ve got my background and I’ve got all my images on one layer. Now this is kind of boring right now, so let’s add a little bit more color to it, you know what I’m going to do, I am going to select, an inch from the top and an inch from the bottom just using my marquee tools. So there’s an inch there and I’m holding my SHIFT key down to add to this selection, let’s just go an inch here, perfect.

And I’m going to press CTRL-J and put that selection on its own there. So now I’ve just got that. Now if I wanted to change the color on this, I could do many things, I could just select it and fill it in with a paint brush or the paint bucket or you know what, I can simply just go into my levels and just increase the levels together, brighter or darker color. So let’s just go there and see what I got. You know what? I like that, just like that. So I am going to just flatten the two bottoms and I’ve got that and that.

Now if you got your brushes, a lot of people like to do brushes and stuff like that and add like swirlies and stuff like that, let’s just go ahead and do that. What I’m going to do is I’m going to new layer and I’m just going to put a new layer and have a blank layer, just so I have it on its own there so I could change the opacity of the brush or whatever. And let’s just choose a squiggly brush here. There’s many brushes in the form that you can go grab in the download sections. Now you can create or make your own brush, let’s just see, we’ve got something here, something that’s going to go very nice with it.

Alright here we go. Now I’ve got it on it’s own layer; I’m going to increase the size and what I’m going to do is I’m just going to change the color to white and I’m just going to drop this in here. Let’s just go, let’s just say like that, okay. Now let’s drop the opacity down to say, I don’t know—40%, 50%, 100%, 20% and I want just barely visible, just like that, perfect.

Now, what I can do is, let’s just kind of keep this symmetrical here, so using my move tool, I’m going to hold my ALT key down, I’m just going to click that layer and drag it down here just like that. And pressing CTRL-T to bring up the free transform, I’m just going to go, rotate a 180º and I will just bring it down into the same as far as we had it, there just like that, perfect. And if I wanted too, I mean, you can, you know, you can keep going as many ways as you want and if you want to change the size or whatever.