How to Make a Movie Poster in Photoshop
Photoshop is a very powerful tool that is used all across the digital media industry. Sure it’s great to retouch up some photos or even to add an object or something similar into the a new space, but there are countess other things that you can use it for. As a web developer, I use Photoshop for almost every project I work on to resize and compress images.
I had used Photoshop quite a bit before I took an Image Editing class while studying at Utah Valley University. But it I really didn’t realize how powerful Photoshop was before taking that class. A great resource we used in that class was a book called Adobe Photoshop Creative Cloud Revealed by Elizabeth Eisner Reding. It’s a few years outdated by now but it did really help me to get really comfortable with using Photoshop and includes images to work with.
One of my favorite projects I worked on in that class was creating a movie poster. Being a Star Wars fan, I decided that I wanted to make a poster image for the next Star Wars (episode 9) movie. Here is the finished product.
How did I make it?
If you are familiar with Photoshop, you can probably figure out everything I did here. I didn’t do anything too complicated here but if you are newer to Photoshop, I will walk you through how I designed this poster.
Background
To start the project off, I made a black background. Then using a render > fibers filter I added some blur and a levels adjustment layers to make it look like there were stars.
For the grey background area I played around with different filters to get the look I wanted. I also rendered clouds on top of the image and made it slightly opaque to give it a little bit of a smokey look. I then took the grey backdrop and used a layer mask and a special brush to give it the fibrous look on the outside surrounding the grey background area.
Characters
I then added the different characters and used layer masks to put them on the new background. Here are all the original images I used.
I gave the characters a slight drop shadow so they looked like they were actually standing there. I also added a blue glow to the back of the Millennium Falcon to simulate the glow from its engine.
Text
I was able to find a free font on dafont.com called Star Jedi that matches the original Star Wars font really well. I used that for the “Episode IX” and the “December 2019” text. For the star wars part of the text I just used an existing image that I changed to all white with a slight opacity. Finally, I added the Star Wars and Disney logos to the bottom of the image.
Landon Hatch is a student in the Digital Media program at Utah Valley University, Orem Utah, studying Web & App Development. The following article relates to (Midterm Project) in the (DGM 1063 Course) and representative of the skills learned.
