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Hi, my name is Rich Harrington, and welcome to another edition of Photoshop for Video. This week, we are going to continue our look at designing a lower third graphic.

If you did not watch the last week’s episode, you can go ahead back to iTunes or Adobe TV and be sure to download it as well.

This week, we are going to finish our design, taking advantage of things like pantone colors, as well as use finessing controls to better format the text. Let us jump in.

Now, last week, we use a solid color or red to stylize the bar. One of the things that you may encounter if working with corporate clients is that they will provide you with pantone colors for very specific colors that they use for their corporation.

Now, the challenge with this is that pantone is a technology that is normally used for specific inks in the world of commercial printing. There is no way to exactly calibrate a television to a printed document. But, you can get relatively close and at least make the effort to try. Here is how.

If you are using a solid color layer to tint things, make sure that that layer appears on top. You could do that by dragging it within the layers stacks. So in this case, I am going to put it above the rope texture, and it is a little bit stronger with its colorization.

Next, you could take that solid color layer and click on it to open its controls. Now, if you do not have one on your document, remember, it is accessible from the adjustment layer or fill category, and you would just choose solid color.

When you open that up, you will see that you have your color picker, and nowhere within this color picker do you see pantone. To access that, simply click on the button label Color Libraries.

When you do this, a new window opens up and you will see several different pantone as well as other types of print libraries.

Go ahead and stick with the solid coated unless there is a specific reason to switch from client instruction. And you will see here that the numbers are all there. So, you could type in the values such as 192 for red, or come over here to the side and click on a particular swatch to load it as well.

Let us go ahead and stick up here with the reds and oranges, and we will choose that value of 1788.

When satisfied, I can click Okay, and, this is helpful because we have actually used the pantone value to affect the graphic.

Again, it is not going to be an exact match because pantone colors really only work when using actual pantone inks. But, this is the closes way to come to matching those colors that a corporate or other type of client might have in their style guide.

What I want to do next is actually finesse a few things here. We are going to take the text here for the description and break that back into two lines by clicking and dragging here so the text wraps. And what I want to do is nussle that right underneath the letters here.

So, let us go ahead with that selected and nudge that up just a little. We will turn back on the safe title overlay to look at it, and what we see is that we need to move things around the bit.

This is a good example because we can tighten up the space between the two lines a text. If you look at the text here, you can go ahead and click to open up the character and paragraph pallet. And what we see is that the letting is currently set to 27 points.

Now, the letting is the overall space between all lines. So if you want to close the gap, we need to put a smaller number in.

Let us go ahead and take this points size down to about 20 for the text, and we will decrease the letting to 23. And notice how the text appears closer to each other. Pull this just a little tighter, and that will wrap, there we go. And, we can now nudge that up just a little.

And at this point, it is looking pretty good, but I want to improve the readability. We can do this using layer styles.

Now, we can select a layer here such as the text and click on the little f for a fax, and let us go ahead and click and add the drop shadow. And you see it is applied to the text.

Now, this is fine and most people used the default values, but we can go ahead and increase the size a little bit, and the spread to make it a little thicker.

One thing that most people do not know is you can click right inside the window here and just interactively move the shadow around. So if you wanted to go down to the right, just pull it down to right.

The key there though is to make sure you leave the global light property check. So here, global light is indicated and this means that this angle of the light that causing the shadow will propagate to all other layer styles in the document, and that is important! Because you do not want your shadow going down this way, but on another layer have a bevel and have the light looks like it coming from over here.

So, you need that consistency so you have an overall lighting source within the document.

Let us go and click Okay, and we will select our next level here, and I am going to also add a drop shadow. We could do that by simply option dragging it down, it will actually apply it. And if I want to finesse this a little bit further, let us toss on a small stroke, and we will change that stroke to be a dark color, let us sample a tree here, and that works out pretty well.

Three pixels on the outside, I could take that down to two actually, and it is still looks pretty good.

The next thing you should do is thwick the curning between all the letters.

Now, if we double click on this here, you will see all the letters, and right now, it is pretty good, but it feels like the G and the H are little too close to each other. So if I hold down the option or the Alt key and press the right arrow, I could increase that spacing. Go to the next letter and do the same thing. If you want to pull a letter to the left, just press the left arrow, and it tightens the gap.

And what we are trying to do here is just get a nice overall balance for these characters. So, it is still feel tight, but not too tight between each letter. There we go. And when satisfied, click the commit button.

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