Precious


Supplies:

Tube: 53-3-SheenaPike
Font: de-arloy

Please do not use any of the licensed supplies without purchasing them first.


This is going to be a much different tutorial from my normal. OLD SCHOOL! How about that??

First off, unzip all supplies.

Open a new image in Photoshop. This time, I started with 600×600 with a white background.

Grab the rectangle shape tool from your tools panel. You may need to right click a few tools to find it, depending on how you have your workspace set up.

At the top of the screen, you will see some options. Set them like this:

Draw out a rectangle on your canvas.

I am using the newest version of Photoshop CC 2021, so your rectangle may look a little different.

If you are using the latest version, you need to take another step to get rid of the rounded corners.

Go to Window > Properties
This will make sure you have the panel open that controls the options of your shape layer. This panel has a ton of options to play with. You can set them how you like, but if you want to be precise with the tag, these are my settings.

Using your rectangle tool again, draw out another rectangle on your canvas.

And yet, another rectangle!

You should now have something that looks like this:

In the layers panel, Highlight all three of the shape layers. (shift + click) Right click and choose “Merge shapes.” You may have to scroll down the options a bit to find it.

This will put all of the shapes into ONE layer instead of 3.

Place the tube on the canvas and position it over the rectangles. Preferably a tube that can cover them completely without any black showing from behind it. A lot of tubes from CDO come with the JPG file that includes a background. These are perfect for this tutorial. If you need to resize your shapes layer, you can do so by going to Edit > Free Transform. Be sure to constrain the proportions. Remember that you must never UPscale a tube. Instead, downscale the shapes. I scaled my rectangles down to 90%.

Now that your tube layer is above the shapes, we are going to place the shape ON the tube.

First, hide the tube layer by clicking on the eye beside the thumbnail in the layers panel. This will make sure you can see what you are doing with the shapes.

Grab your Path Selection tool from the tools panel.

Highlight your rectangles layer and use the cursor to select the shapes. If you click and drag across the whole canvas, you can quick-select all shapes. It is important to have ALL rectangles selected.

I can hear the question now… “but how do we know all of the rectangles are selected? It looks the same to me!” If you look at the corners of your rectangles, you will see tiny little squares at the corner points. If the squares are solid, the shape is selected. If they are hollow, then they are unselected. It takes some getting used to seeing in shapes, but you’ll get the hang of it before you know it!

Now that all of your rectangles are selected, go to Edit > Copy

Highlight your tube layer and unhide it.

Edit > Paste

This will place the shape on your tube. In the layers panel, you will see the vector mask thumbnail attached to your tube layer. You can now delete the original rectangles layer.

If you want to reposition the tube inside the mask, you will first need to click that chain between the thumbnails to remove the linking. Then you can use your move tool to reposition the tube. It is always a good idea to re-add the linking once you have it set right. This will make sure that any resizing of your tag won’t screw with the proportions.

Right click your tube layer and select Blending Options. Add these:

Highlight your background layer.

Using your rectangle tool, draw out 3 more rectangles on your canvas.

Select all three rectangles in the layers panel and right click. Merge Shapes.

Place another copy of your tube onto the canvas. Line it up with the other tube so that it matches.

Repeat the process of adding the rectangles to the tube layer.

Select all shapes. Edit > Copy. Highlight tube. Edit > Paste. Delete original rectangles layer.

In the layers panel, at the top of the panel, lower the opacity of the new tube copy to 50%.

Highlight your first tube layer again. This should be the topmost layer.

Hold the CMD button (ctrl on windows) and click on the vector mask in the layers panel. This would be the gray and white thumbnail that lies beside the normal layer thumbnail.

You should now have the “marching ants” around the layer.

Select > Modify > Expand… 20 px
Select > Modify > Smooth… 5 px

Highlight your background layer.

Layer > New Fill Layer > Solid Color…

Choose a color from your tube.

However, you will see that this actually left a pretty jagged edge on your layer.

Let’s fix that.

Double click on the layer mask of this layer. That would be the black and white thumbnail in the layers panel.

This will open a new panel with options for adjusting your layer mask. These are the settings I used to smooth out the mask and get rid of the jagged edges.

Now you have nice smooth edges on your mask.

Now set the opacity of this layer to 60% at the top of layers panel.

Highlight the topmost layer.

Grab your text tool and type out your word of choice. I used “Precious.”

Edit > Transform > Rotate 90º Counterclockwise

Using the move tool, position the text to the left of your tag.

Right click and choose Blending Options and add these styles.

Grab your text tool again and type out a name. Position it a bit smaller and to the right of your tag without rotating it.

Add these layer styles.

Let’s get rid of the white parts of the canvas around your tag.

Image > Trim…

Resize before adding copyrights!


And here we have our completed tag! You can now save it as a PNG or a JPG file. I prefer using the Export feature, so I know it is at the proper resolution for web-display. If you are saving as a PNG, be sure to hide the background layer.

Here are the settings I used: