Valentines is just around the corner and your sweetheart will be really upset if you don’t at least get a card. I know the economy sucks, but come on you can afford a card right? Well if not, here is a great way to give your Valentine a cheap card online. Here is a simple little demonstration of how to create Valentine’s Cards in Photoshop. You’ll see the basics of creating a 3D Photoshop effect in minutes. There are 3 videos in total so make sure to check back in the next couple days as the second and third videos are uploaded. This technique will teach you the basics of depth and using a little creativity with some of the Photoshop tools. Watch the video below to see how to create a Free Valentines Card.

Below is a transcription of the audio of the video.

Welcome to PhotoshopDemos.com. This is Aaron and I want to show you today about creating a three dimensional “Happy Valentine’s Day” card. And everything I’m going to be doing, it’s just really the raw basics of Photoshop, just so you can get a grasp on creating a very, very basic three dimensional look in Photoshop with some of the tools so that you understand how to use the essential tools.

So without further ado, let’s go ahead and get started. As you can see here, I have a card that’s already set up. You can see I have some elements here. We have the gradients going on in the background, some little things down here. A little bit of a reflection, as well as the letters and the symbols.

So I’ll show you how all this stuff is applied right now. So let’s go ahead and minimize that and start with a brand new document. Let’s go ahead and start with a pretty standard size. I’m going to put this at 250 pixels and hit OK.

Now, I’m going to fill this with a solid color. I’m just going to fill it with white for right now. I’m going to hit Control+Delete. And let’s hop over to our Layers menu.

So now that this layer is actually by itself, we create a brand new document with a transparent background, and it’s not locked or anything like that. If it is locked, just
hold down your ALT key and double-click and it will unlock.

What we’re going to do is create a brand new layer right above that, and I’m going to fill it about halfway. I want to make sure this is on “normal” for our rectangular marquis tool. Make sure this is on “normal”. Let’s make sure about half of this actually selected. Then I’m going to hit ALT+DELETE. That fills it with the foreground color, and that’s fine.

Then I’m going to come back over to my layers.

Now you can see I have my Layer 1, which is my full background layer, and then as well as a top layer. This top layer is going to basically be the sky, so let’s go ahead and name it Sky. And this is going to be the ground. Eventually, we’re going to actually combine those layers, but I just want to show you how to get the background layer prepped.

So what we’ll do is once this layer is actually filled in, you can double-click it. Once you double-click you’ll get this Layer Styles menu. What we want to do is fill it with color gradient. So we’re going to actually do Gradient Overlay. I’m going to take that color off, and you can see by default this black and white is selected over here. You can see that, and the black goes from the bottom to the top.

What we actually want to do is reverse that. So we’re going to click on “Reverse”. You can see that it switches that automatically. And we want to change the color. Let’s go ahead, I’m going to click this, because by default you should actually have…Let’s see. If I do “Reset”, you should have these colors by default. But if you don’t, you could always select either “Reset Gradients”, or you can choose from one on the list here. I’m going to choose Default from the list.

And I’m going to click on this, it’s going to let me change the gradient. So I’m going to click this little icon here. I get the color option down here. I’m going to choose a nice blue; something a little bit more sky bluish, around there, and hit OK. You can see now I have a gradient from blue to white, and hit OK. And once again, hit OK.

So now you can see we have the sky effect going on here, which is fine. Now let’s go ahead and do the ground. So again, this is covering up the sky, so when we do the ground, it will actually fill the entire thing. But because of the sky, it’s covering up, so we’re all good to go.

Double-click on the ground, and we’re going to basically do the same thing. We’re going to do Gradient Overlay, and we’re going to get this grayish effect. And just for a really quick demonstration on really basic three dimensional concepts, is whenever you’re doing a landscape, it’s always a good idea to have a slightly lighter color sort of in the distance and a much more saturated, brighter color in the foreground, because obviously those colors are closer to you, and as they move farther way, they’re going to become more dull and less saturated.

Same thing with the sky. As the sky actually is closer to the horizon, it’s going to be lighter and more faded out. And as it gets closer to the top of the sky, it’s going to get more saturated in color. That will always give you a nice depth of field and you’ll have a better sense of three dimensions that way.

Now that we have the gradient selected from this area, we can actually click right on the gradient. We don’t even have to mess around with these tools if we don’t want to. We can click right here and we can drag this gradient up and down.

So I’m going to bring this gradient down just slightly, because I don’t want it filling up that entire space. I don’t want this so black and so dark; just slightly. So now that that’s in place, I can go ahead and hit OK on that.

The reason I am leaving it gray is because I’m going to add another effect to this. Now I’m going to hit Brand New Layer just to get the new layer icon, then I click on both of these. I’m going to right-click. Actually, you can’t see that, so let me pop this out for just a moment here. I’m going to right-click on this and…Actually, you still can’t see it. Sorry about that. The menu is going right below the video, so it’s a little bit tricky.

OK, here we go. So you right-click, you see “Merge Layers”. We’re going to click on “Merge Layers”. So now those layers are merged. That’s fine. That’s exactly what I wanted to do. So I’m going to re-dock that; that’s fine. And I’m going to come over here, I’m going to right-click this. Actually, I’m going to double-click it. You can right-click too. Blending Options—you’ll go into the same menu, just so you know that’s there. Same menu, double-click—gets you into the layer styles, or you can right-click and go into Blending Options and you’ll basically get into the same area.

So what we’ll do here is same thing—Gradient Overlay. This time we’re going to actually change the type of gradient. So click on the gradient, come over to “Gradients”, open up this menu, and then we’re going to click on this little, little tiny arrow that’s up in the upper right-hand corner. Once you click that, you’ll get a list of gradients. We’re going to click on “Color Harmonies” and hit OK.

So now you can see we have different color harmonies here. Those ones aren’t really going to work for me, so I’m going to click once again. I’m going to come down here, I’m going to use the Noise Samples and hit OK on that.

So you can see, now I get this nice arrangement of a lot of different colors. So you can either hit “Randomize” and go through these until you find, really, the color that you want to use, so you can kinda toggle through here until you find the exact color that’s going to work. I’m just going to hit this a few more times till I get something I kinda like. Not really seeing anything quite yet. Let’s go ahead and go with something a little bit more purple in the purple range. That’s pretty OK. That’s pretty good.

All right, so that’s pretty good. And if you want to take out the green, you can do that as well. I’m going to kinda mine some of that out just slightly so there’s not as much green here. Hit OK. And we want to actually change the angle. So we want to change the angle to something more like that, as well as change the opacity down just a little bit. I don’t want it too overboard. And then I’m also going to change this too…Again, you’re not going to see it in the list, but go all the way down to the bottom, there’s something called “Color”. When you select “Color”, you’ll get this kind of effect. That’s really fine.

Another option or another thing you can take is just leave this on “Normal” if you choose, bring the opacity down just a little bit, hit OK, and you’ll see that there’s some layer effects here. What I particularly like to do is right-click on “Layer”, and you can see you have some different options.

Well, those aren’t going to be the correct options that you’re going to actually want. You have to make sure that these layers down here, even though when you actually left-click them, nothing really happens, except this menu pops up. But you don’t get that secondary menu.

So if you actually right-click on those, you’ll see a completely different menu which has some different options here. From here you can scroll all the way down to the bottom. Again, you’re not really seeing it. Let me see if I can pull this up. I’m going to right-click this, we’re going to go to “Create Layer”.

Now when I “Create Layer”, it actually takes that effect, it applies it right above it into this new layer. From there, I can have that layer selected individually as an adjustment layer, and then “Filter”, and I can do “Blur”, and I can do something like Gaussian Blur if I like just to kinda blur that effect slightly so it’s not so overpowering.

And then from there, too, I can continue using these blending layers, I could use the opacity. It just gives you a little bit more flexibility to pop those layer styles out onto their own layers. So now that we have that in place, I can dock this back into place and I can look at kind of what we have here.

This is kind of what I want, so this is fine. Now, if you want to soften this out just a little bit, we can do that as well. Because again, we have that layer already set in place. So what I would do is go ahead and merge these two layers together, just, again, clicking and then right-clicking, and then down at the very bottom of that Layers menu is the ability to…if you right-click that, you’ll see “Merge Visible” or “Flatten Image”. So you can just click those.

Put that back for just a moment. Let me hide that for just a second here. To Be Continued…

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This is the first of three video tutorials on this topic. See the next Valentines Card tutorial here.