Tutorial to Create Playing Cards in Photoshop
Preview:
This is the final image. After you have done this tutorial five or six times, you should be able to make graphics like this in ten minutes flat!
Step 1:
CRTL+N to open a new document. Now I know what you’re thinking. Why make it so big when the final image is really quite small? Good point. Here’s the answer; you can’t go up but you can always go down. Making a big image and then reducing the size allows us more room to play with and when we crop/reduce it the quality will be the same.
Step 2:
Click on the Foreground color picker (circled in red) and choose a nice, darkish green. This is going to be our card table.
Step 3:
Hit ‘G’ on the keyboard to activate the Paint Bucket Tool. If you have the Gradient Tool selected, (which also has ‘G’ as its keyboard shortcut) SHIFT+G to change between the two. Click anywhere on the canvas with the bucket tool to fill it with the previously selected green color.
Step 4:
The problem that our background image has is that it is too smooth. We need to roughen it up a little to make it look more realistic. This is where noise comes in. Go Filter->Noise->Add Noise. We don’t need to add too much, just enough to break the green surface up.
Step 5:
To further break up the background and add more texture, we can add a filter called crosshatch. Go filter->Brush Strokes->Crosshatch. Here we have three different options we can adjust; Stroke Length, Sharpness and Strength. Play around with them and see what combination you like best.
Step 6:
Ok, on to the first playing card. SHIFT+U to cycle through the tools until you come to the Rounded Rectangle Tool. Some options appear at the top of the screen. Radius is how rounded the rectangle will be. Always change this BEFORE you create the rectangle. I’ve chosen 18 pixels here, which gives a nice card shape. I have also chosen to create a path (see red circled at the top of image 6). In my opinion this is the easiest way of doing it. Drag your rectangle diagonally from top left to bottom right:
Step 7:
That done, change to the Paths panel and CRTL+Click the image of our path to select it.
Step 8:
Important! Create a new layer, then SHIFT +F5 and fill with white. CRTL+D to cancel the selection:
Step 9:
In order to place the letters and shapes correctly, we need some guide lines. These are found by dragging from the rulers on the left and top of the screen. If you can’t see them, hit CRTL+R. You can see here that I have used two from the left and two from the top. Also make sure that you have Snap enabled. To see if it is, go View-and check to see if there is a tick next to Snap. Now everything we create will snap to the guide lines.
Step 10:
Hit ‘T’ to activate the type tool and drag to use. Type your A, select it with the same tool, and change the color to red (or black).
Step 11:
ALT+Drag this type layer to copy it to the opposite corner.
Step 12:
It’s upside down! Easy fix. CRTL+T to enter transform mode, and right click with the mouse. Here you have other transform options. We need ‘Flip Vertical’. Hit Enter to exit transform mode.
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