Hello everybody and welcome to this tutorial brought to you by adobenicnacs. And today, what we’re going to be looking at is creating some really simple, easy to do backgrounds in Photoshop, but just something that will get you started on your document, and you’ll see what I mean in a minute.

Now, as you may have noticed briefly, I am back—well, I'm on a new microphone so I hope the quality will be 100 times better, I just hope. Let's get started. Let’s go to file and create a new document. It doesn’t matter what size because we’re creating a background obviously. So you can see, the typical thing you’ll open up with is white background, and sometimes it can be quite hard to work with because it's just white. It's a bit boring. I think I’ve said enough.

So some of the effects you can do to get you better backgrounds is – well, the first thing most people would have think of, amateur, is gradient. And if you think of a gradient, you usually think – I mean they are okay, but they're not great. I mean—God! I have been away for awhile. I'm lacking the right terminology. But as you can see, they're okay but it's very subject specific. I’m going to you a linear gradient. It’s very subject specific, so if you’re going to do a water type thing or a cool thing, something along those lines, this is the sort of thing you want.

But a really interesting type of gradient that I came across is something called gradient noise. This is really quite interesting. It creates some really cool gradient, which could be then used to backgrounds. So if you pick the gradient editor, this is what you typically see. But if you go to gradient type and choose noise, you see you’ve got this—well, it looks quite weird, but it's quite fantastic actually. So the roughness at the default is 50%, but I changed it to HSB, hue, saturation and brightness, and you can create some really cool effects.

So what you got here is you got your range of saturation, so it can completely de-saturated to saturated, so if I wanted it to be pretty much all saturated, you’d bring it up here. I'm going to keep that—maybe this. We wouldn’t want anything completely de-saturated. So with brightness, bring them in slightly so we don’t have quite that much range. And then you can choose your color range, and this is where it gets quite cool. So I'm going to start with light green and I'm going to bring into more of the purples, randomize a few times, find something that you like, it's kind of cool. I’ll try again, see if we get something better. I kind of like that, press OK. And just like a normal gradient, drag it out and you got yourself a really cool background. And the great thing about this is it can be any color you like and it's like a normal gradient. And like I said, this is a really cool way of creating some simple backgrounds. This is one of my favorites.

And the second way I want to tell you about is using the clouds filter. So many of you—now this, you go to filter, render, clouds. Now alone, it looks hideous for a background. But add one or two filters to it. You can usually create some really interesting effects. So you go to filter—just an example here—we go to filter blur, then motion blur. Make sure it angles 90 and just play with the distance until you get something you like. We’ll try around 200 here. That’s kind of cool. So you press OK. This is, like I said an example, there are tons and tons of things you could do with the clouds filter, it’s literally endless.

So we got it here. And then to color it, you can use gradients again. Create a new layer and you can just do a normal gradient this time. Now we use that blue one. You just drag it out and set the blend mode color. You got yourself quite a cool one, a simple design here for like a few seconds. I was just thinking, what would it be like if you add in the noise filter? Experimenting on the spot. I’m going to get it a lot more saturated up here, bring out my color range, then maybe close it in a little bit. We’ll try that one. That’s kind of cool. Maybe if we blur that there, you get quite a cool effect.

As you see, it can be really easy, really easy ways of creating some really simple backgrounds. And then we come to my favorite one, which isn't really an interesting background, but it's usually where I start with any file I'm working on no matter what. I usually start with a black background. It's just—I don’t know what it is. If you have a layer and you sort of feel the same way about this, you’ll understand. You can't really explain, but it's just a good starting point.

So that’s really the three background source is all about. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. Please comment, rate, and subscribe to this one and all of my others if you like them, of course, and thanks for watching.