Another Cool Background With Photoshop

Hey guys, Mac Heads 101 here. Today, as you can notice, I have this cool background behind me where there's a hand, an Apple sign, and some fire. So I'm going to be showing you how to make this.

First, you need to download a hand and an Apple sign from the internet, Google probably, and then open them with Photoshop CS3. Also, since it's going to be a background, we're going to make it the proper length and width, so we're going to do new. It should be 200, 2560 pixels by 1,600, because that's what the proper background dimensions are.

Now let's stretch that a little. Let's copy our Apple sign with the magic wand tool that knows what you're selecting. So you're going to have to hold shift between them, and now let's select it again with the magic wand tool. Then we can pick a color. Let's use white and then dark blue; that should be good.

Use the gradient tool, and that's going to make your Apple sign funky. I'm going to make that a little darker and that one a little lighter. A little darker too—do it again! Okay, so you should get something like that.

Next, we can make a new layer and copy the hand. So let's select the hand with the magic wand tool. If you do a darker hand, it should be better if all the colors are the same. But since for the sake of the video I'm not going to make this perfect, I'm just going to copy a somewhat good hand.

So click copy, drag it over there, paste. We're going to want to make that a little bit smaller. So we can go under help and search. Wait, actually, you can go under edit, transform, and go under scale. That shows you the size! Now, if you don't want it to get messed up and get all thin, hold shift while holding the corner one. That keeps the proportions the same but makes the size smaller.

So I'm just going to make it a little smaller, put that there, and then I'll hold on apply. I'll make it black with the paint bucket tool. Oops, we don't want that color. Okay, so obviously I'm not going to make it perfect again but somewhat good so you can tell what I'm doing.

Some people like this flaky look; I personally don't like it that much, but if you like it, then go right ahead. So there we go! Now, for the background, just make a new layer and make that, let's say, you want your background to be a fade of green from light green to dark green.

So make that like bright green and then make that black. Select the gradient tool, but you might have to hold that and select the gradient tool and it to make a background. If you want it behind all of them, just drag it over there. I don't know why mine's not doing it right now, so I'm just going to bring those in front of it.

Okay, now for the flames. The flames are kind of tricky, but after a while, it's not that complicated. So I'm going to add a new layer. I'mma call it Flames. Okay, basically you're going to want to make a rectangle, preferably red at first, but actually it doesn't really matter. Click the rectangle tool, make a rectangle along the bottom and make sure it's selected.

Now you want your front color to be bright yellow and your back color to be bright red. Then you're going to want to do that with the gradient tool. First, you're going to want to select it, so let's select that with the—could not use magic wand. Okay, so let's combine these two layers by clicking merge layers. Now it knows what I'm selecting, and we're going to make it fade into like that.

Okay, next, you're going to want to make—hold on, I'm going to make this a little less, but actually that'll be fine. Next, you're going to want to use the smudge tool. You're going to want to right-click; make sure your hardness is at 86 and your master diameter is however big you want the bottom of your flame to be.

So just drag down, and I'm going to hide the other layers so you can see what I'm doing better. Hide the background, make sure you deselect that first. You can just double-click on the background. If that doesn't work, you can select something or use this tool, draw something, then click on there and then click okay.

Now that everything's deselected, go back to your smudge tool. I don't know why it's not doing this; I'm in the right layer. Okay, and smudge tool, just make sure everything's selected and just keep dragging them up. I'm going to do this really fast, so it's not going to be perfect, but drag from the bottom up.

If you keep doing this, eventually you'll get flames like I did. Sometimes you're going to want to curve them a little like that. Try to make a lot of the tops touching, so it looks like a flame. If you want some flames going really high, then just do it faster and try to get higher. Do it a few times, and it'll get higher as you go.

If afterwards, you want to get rid of the bottom part, you can just drag that down. So, um, yeah, just keep doing that. Hold on one sec. Okay, sorry, my phone's ringing. I'll just—there we go.

So, um, sorry if this is taking a long time. Hope you can get it correctly. If you don't, just send me a private message. Hopefully, it should work for you or work for me fine. You might have some problems selecting and deselecting; just watch the video carefully, because at first I didn't know how to do that properly.

As you can see, I still have a little trouble with it, but I think I'm getting it good now. You might want to drag a lot of the bottom up to make it more red and a lot of these down to make it yes, less yellow.

Okay, so um, I think that's all I'm going to be doing. I'm going to be deleting this background layer, and now if I unhide all the other layers, I'll drag this—the fire—behind the Apple sign in there, and it should look something like that.

So now you can save it as whatever you want—fire—and save. So thank you for watching! That's how you make a cool logo or background or whatever you want to call it in Photoshop.