Teen Magazine Cover Tutorial

Now go ahead and add some headline text. It?s ok to use the same font here. Make it that same bright yellow.

Now to add a heavy drop shadow to it as shown.

Doing this allows the yellow to stand out against ANY background and the brightness of the yellow grabs your attention at the newsstand.

Create another text layer to add another article name or question of intrigue. Make sure to use a smaller and different font. This adds balance and is natural common design sense. You don?t want everything at the same size and font.

You can easily duplicate layer effects/styles by dragging them as shown to the bottom of another layer.

Now go ahead and create another marquee selection in the bottom left corner as shown.

Press Ctrl when you click on the new layer icon to create a blank layer below the current (top) type layer that you are on.

If you are on a different color, then switch to the eyedropper tool and click on the pink.

Now with that selection active (marching ants), press alt backspace to fill pink onto that selected area on the new blank layer. This will provide another text backdrop.

Here I?m adjusting the placement of the photos.com celeb dude. You can Ctrl click on any layer to select the topmost layer beneath the cursor without referencing the layers palette.

Now that you have the layer filled, Ctrl click on the layer icon in the layers palette. Go to view: rulers or press Ctrl R to bring up the rulers. Now drag a guideline to the exact center. Go to the ruler area on the left, click and drag a guideline. It will automatically ?snap? to the center (with snap turned on). You will feel it snap. Now you know where the center of that layer is.

There?s several things you can do now. But I?m going to go ahead and with the guideline still there grab my subtract from selection (in the options bar)

rectangular marquee tool and drag from the guideline out to one side to subtract half of the selection (on the right side).

Now that the left side is still selected which is what I wanted, I?m just going to choose a different color such as blue.  Now Alt Backspace to fill this selection with blue.

Note that I am choosing to fill on the same layer; just be aware of this. You might want to go ahead and just create a new blank layer to fill the blue onto so you can have more flexibility later.