Making the Adobe icons

Hey, what's up guys? Um, this is Mac Heads 101, and today I'm going to be showing you how to create any of your Adobe icons in Flash— I mean, in Photoshop. So I'll be demonstrating this to you with Flash, so you can do pretty much anything you want because it's the same technique.

First off, you're going to press Apple + Shift + 4 to take a picture of it just so we can get a right idea of the colors. You're going to open that with your Photoshop tool. I'm going to be using Photoshop CS4, but it works with Photoshop CS3 too. Let it open; just give it a minute. There we go!

Now you create a new document. You can just press Apple + N and make it 300 by 300 pixels. That way, you won't have to worry about it getting pixelized or anything like that. So now you get a nice brush like this. You can either— okay, now you can click the foreground/background color. You can either guess them or— if you were not, this is why I open this up— you can just use the, um, what's it called? The eyedrop tool, which basically knows what you're selecting. It's right there, and you just select it.

So I'm gonna select the very bottom, and then I'm gonna take— click right here to flip it. And then with my foreground color, now I'm gonna select again the very top. Okay, now we got a basic idea of the colors. We can just make a gradient with the gradient tool. You might see the paint bucket tool; just hold it and you get the gradient tool. Just drag that straight down, and you should get a basic gradient.

Now, you're going to create a new layer by pressing Apple + Shift + N. It's going to ask you if you want to make a new layer; you can just say okay. And now you're going to hit the text tool. Okay, you can mess around with the fonts, but the font I found to do the job best is Tray Bucket MS. So you can just type very simply, "F F L." So this is the font I guess that does the best, um, feel. And to get it in black, you can just hit there.

And right now you see I got it— it basically looks like the Flash icon, but it's not perfect yet because first off, um, let me fix the size a little bit. You can just hit your text tool one more time and drag this— um, let's see, that's a 230; let's make it 250. Yeah, that's much more like it.

Now to get your— okay, as you can see, um, right now if I move my Flash and my Photoshop, you see that the letters are actually transparent. So if we want to make our letters transparent as well, first off, we're going to double-click on our properties right there, and we can just make the opacity 50. So that made the opacity 50 of our letter. But, um, we want to make the opacity also completely transparent because now it’s just more red.

So to do that, you can just— first off, let's go back to this. So we're just going to make it back to 100 percent for now, and we're going to select it with the magic wand tool, hold Shift in between it to select both, and go click on this layer. Then you can just press delete, and if you hide that layer, you'll see it will delete that part in that layer. There we go.

So right now, um, I got it looking like the Flash CS3 icon if I can just real quickly show you. But if you want to make it look like the Flash CS4 icon, first off you're going to make your background layer transparent. So, um, you can really quickly select it again. Now I can just click on this layer and I'll hide this layer. Then you can click on the eraser tool— I'll say the background eraser tool. That way, it erases the background and you don't have to worry about, um, getting out of the lines because it can only erase what's inside of the selected part.

So just wave your brush around there until you see that the whole thing looks like this checkered board. Now this part is completely transparent. Okay, so we can go back into this layer, and since the background is already completely transparent, we're just going to make this 75 to equal it out because now it's going to average to 50 percent transparent, and um, maybe that's a little bit too much. I'll say 95.

Okay, so now if I save this— or actually, I'll save it as for a web— no, I'll just regularly save it. Okay, and there it is! Let's open that up with preview. So, um, looks just like the Flash icon again. Wait, hold on; I'll bring up the actual Flash icon. Hold on, I just opened up Flash— didn't want to do that.

So package content, content resources. Just hold on to quit out of Flash; I do not want to open it up. So I'll copy this, that way I don't get rid of the Flash icon, and um, I'll open it with— um, actually, it won't let me— but okay, it looks very similar. Um, one of the differences is it's a bit thicker. So just to make it a bit artist— a bit thicker, we can real quickly— um, make sure that we're on the right layer, hit your text tool, double-click on it, and make it bold.

So now you see it's a bit thicker. Obviously, it's gonna not deal with the transparency too well, but um, since our gradients go straight down, you can always, um, not worry about that because I can always just copy a portion of this and then paste it. And now I'll just merge these layers, which basically just brings the layers back. I didn't want to merge the text layer— merge layers— and I can bring the text layer back. So now it's much, much more like it.

And, um, yeah. So again, hit the magic wand tool. I'm not gonna— oh yeah, actually, we'll center it. There we go! I'll hit the magic wand tool, select them both, go into this layer, press delete, and there we go! It can already has the transparency ready because we set that up before, and these things are already— the opacity is already 95. You notice how you can change that right there now.

So now if I want to save it as a transparent thing, I can just say file and save for web devices. It'll be right there; a little thing's gonna pop up. You can pick your format, and you can pick if the transparency works. You can also reduce the quality and do a whole bunch more. So I'm just gonna hit save and save that as a logo onto my desktop, open that with preview, and it looks great!

So, um, there we go. I hope this helped you, and um, thank you for watching, and goodbye! And subscribe, and yeah, goodbye!