Western style poster

Turn off the tentative paintbrush layer frame and you see a nice sunset background like they're walking right off of an old school matte set backdrop in the old west (nevermind the new tuxedo's from Gingiss). This brighter option also works well. In Photoshop CS you can create layer comps to show different options to yourself or your clients without having to turn layers on and off.

Keeping in line with the 'poster' theme of this design, go ahead and add some more complimentary text using the same Mesquite font on a smaller font size.

Here's another Hollywood typography trick. You've seen it everywhere in the civilized world (or check your pulse). Use a font such as Minion or Adobe Garamond and make some really small text. The trick here is to stretch it with vertical tracking twice as high, make sure it's tightly squeezed together and then to veri-size lesser important words. You can do this all within the text editing field. This just takes an extra minute of concerted effort and before you know it; you've duplicated a text effect on just about every single movie poster made!

You can also further scale text down with Ctrl T + Shift when you are outside of the text editing field. You can free transform but not distort or perspective unless you rasterize the layer.

You can drag layer effects by simply grabbing them and dropping them on the base of another layer (text here) with the hand I should start calling 'Thing'.

My favorite new feature of Photoshop CS? The ability to use 'Thing' in both full screen modes by pressing the space bar and being able to move the entire design around the whole workspace. 'Thing' is otherwise known as the 'H'and tool.

Now create some more cinematic typography by headlining your star's names towards the top of the design. Here I've just kept them in the same text editing field with a lot of spacing. This makes it really easy to center the text off of the background layer (done by linking to the background layer and then selecting the background layer and clicking on the moVe tool and choosing 'align horizontal centers' in the alignment option bar.

You can lower the opacity of that dark frame paint layer to make it less strong.

I've organized all of the men into a layer set folder (click on the new layer set 'folder' icon and drag in layers with Thing in the layers palette).

You can turn layers on and off to see what you've got and see your design in a different 'light'..

Here it looks more like a mafia theme and you would maybe want to find something like a dark street corner or tall buildings in the background with a large pistol in the foreground. Keep your creativity alive and keep mastering the technical skills needed to create your visions.  Yes those downloads to the left are free!  Make sure you grab them from my new website.

I felt I needed something a little more solid down on the bottom to back up our text so I thought of making a new blank layer and then grabbing a large black brush and creating a brush like rusty underlay base for the text (note the layer order).