By mixing up bright and vibrant cosmic designs with old, distressed and grungey textures we'll create a print-ready retro futuristic poster design for "Yugoslav Airlines", the former national carrier of Yugoslavia.
Follow this step-by-step tutorial and learn how a range of Photoshop techniques pull together the various elements to create the final design.
Preview
First let's take a sneak peak at what we'll be creating. Looks awesome isn't it?!
Step 1
Fire up Adobe Photoshop and create a document with your desired poster dimensions (I used standard A3 paper size) and fill background with white color. Remember to use a high DPI (between 150-300 dpi) and CMYK Color Mode if you are planning on sending your work to the press.
Step 2
To start, create new group (Layer -> New -> New Group), give it appropriate name like "poster", then with Rectangular Marquee Tool (M) draw a rectangle that is a bit smaller then canvas (give it 5mm on each side). Make sure that group layer is selected and go to Layer -> Layer Mask -> Reveal Selection to apply layer mask.
Download and open Handmade Paper, Desaturate the image (Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + U) to remove its colors and import into our design. Using Free Transfrom Tool (Cmd/Ctrl + T) resize image a bit and place it inside our "poster" group and set the Opacity to 40%.
Create another group - "main" (inside "poster" group), just above Handmade Paper layer, and with Rectangular Marquee Tool (M) create selection. Use image below as reference.
Select "main" group and apply Layer Mask (Layer -> Layer Mask -> Reveal Selection).
Step 3
Download and import the Capodimonte Deep Field and place it inside "main" group. You can play with the size of this layer if you want.
Adjust Hue/Saturation (Cmd/Ctrl + U) to drop down colors.
Create a new layer. For Foreground Color choose a low-saturated pink color (#eebbfb) and with Brush Tool (B), with a large, soft brush tip to create a spot; apply the Gaussian Blur filter on this layer (Filter -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur) with Radius of 130px. Then just set the Opacity of this layer to 40% to soften and blend the effect into its background.
Create another new layer (Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + N), choose green color (#2cbe7e), and with Brush Tool and large soft brush dub one more spot but this time in the upper part of canvas. Apply Gaussian Blur (Filter -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur) with Radius set to 150px,
change the Blend Mode to Screen and
set Opacity of this layer to 15%.
Download the Earth image and then open it in Photoshop. With the Elliptical Marquee Tool (M), make a selection around earth, copy it (Cmd/Ctrl + C) and then paste it (Cmd/Ctrl + V) into our design. Use following images as a reference.
Duplicate Earth layer (Cmd/Ctrl + J) and apply following layer styles and set the Blend Mode to Multiply.
Cmd/Ctrl + click on the thumbnail of earth layer to put a selection around it. Create a new layer and, on this new layer, fill the selection with black. Move the black circle towards the right an down, leaving just a portion of earth visible.
Apply the Gaussian Blur filter with Radius at 100px on the black circle layer and lower the Opacity to 85%. You can see that this technique gives our earth a nice shading effect.
Step 4
Open Picture of the Boeing 727-2H9/Adv aircraft in Photoshop, cut out the plane from background using Pen Tool (P) and import onto our canvas. Using Free Transform Tool (Cmd/Ctrl + T) resize, rotate and adjust perspective of the plane, similar to the image below.
Adjust Hue/Saturation (Cmd/Ctrl + U),
duplicate the plane layer, change the Blend Mode to Multiply and Opacity to 70%,
add Gradient Map adjustment layer (Layer -> New Adjustment Layer -> Gradient Map), and apply only to plane copy layer (Layer -> Create Clipping Mask). Lower the Opacity of Gradient Map adjustment layer to 60%.
Create new document in Photoshop with exact size like our design. Fill the Background with black color then go to Filter -> Render -> Lens Flare.
Import this layer into our design, change the Blend Mode to Screen and Opacity to 90%, rotate a bit so the diagonal lines are following the orientation of the plane and resize it to cover the whole size of "main" group.
It's time to add a cool typographic title. Lay out the title of the piece in a cool font such as Futura Condensed Medium with a large 200% tracking.
Duplicate the layer and add a 2px Gaussian blur after rasterizing the text.
Download and install the Grunge Photo Edge brush library. Set the Foreground color to #c6bebb. Create a new layer on top and use a brush from the Grunge Photo Edge brush library to roughen up the poster borders. Play around with the brush size and other brush settings to achieve a great effect.
Finish off the design with some typical brending (boeing and yugoslav airlines logos).
