Hey everyone Kelsey here and welcome back to Gal! Today I'm going to be showing you how easy it is
to create your own Photoshop mock-up template using smart objects in Photoshop. And once you
have it set up you can use it over and over again just by dragging and dropping whatever
photo you want and it perfectly blends in with the material before we jump into the tutorial
I want to tell you a little bit about today's sponsor Yellow Images. Yellow Images is a great
marketplace for creative assets like premium mockups creative fonts images in 360 and there's
also a creative store full of amazing graphic assets like lettering icons illustrations patterns
and all different types of UX and UI kits to help you design better you just simply search
and you can find any mockup that you need that you can just drag and drop and easily place your
images and logos and stylize it to your brand but once you're done you can just export it and send
it on to your client or team for approval i'll be showing you how to use one of their object mockups
later in the video but for now let's jump into photoshop and i'll show you how you can create
your own object mockup templates from scratch starting from zero and don't forget that you
can download the project assets to follow along in my description box below so thank you yellow
images for sponsoring and let's go ahead and jump on in the first step is to create a placeholder
for the image this is going to be the place where you will drag and drop the image you want to use
whether it's a photo graphic or a logo to do this let's click on the new layer icon
and let's rename it to placeholder and next we need to fill in our placeholder
to do that we're going to use the rectangular marquee tool to draw a rectangle around the canvas
and it's okay if there's a little bit of space around the images because we're going to create a
mask in just a moment so it perfectly fits around the outline of the canvas so next we need to fill
in this rectangle with a great color let's double click on the foreground color and let's type in
the code for fifty percent gray which is 808080 you'll see that nothing happens after we hit ok
and that's okay because what we need to do next is press option plus delete on a mac
or alt plus backspace on a pc to then fill in this layer with the 50% gray
and next to deselect this gray rectangle press command d on a mac or control d on a pc
now as we zoom in we can see that it's created a perfect gray rectangle over the canvas and you'll
also see that we kind of lose the rounded corners of the canvas as well as the texture of the canvas
so to make sure that the placeholder will be applied to the canvas itself we need to create
a selection and a mask but before we do that we need to convert this layer into a smart object
to do this go up to filter and choose convert for small filters and hit ok and now we have a smart
object now we need to create a selection of the actual canvas itself using the pen tool or your
favorite selection tool so first let's turn off the visibility of the placeholder layer and now
i'm going to select the pen tool and make sure that you're in the path mode and from here i'm
going to zoom in by hitting command and plus on my mac or control plus on a pc to zoom in as close as
you can so you can see the edges of the canvas and then you can begin to click and trace the edge of
the canvas perfectly for the corner you can click and hold to make a curved line i'm going to fast
forward here as i trace but the most important thing to do is to be as precise as possible
So once you close off this selection by selecting the first point that you
created we can zoom back out and you can see that it's a pen path around the canvas
but how do we make this into a selection what we need to do is use the key combination
command and return on a mac or you can press ctrl and backspace on a windows so now you can
see it's a selection and now we can turn the gray placeholder layer back on with the visibility on
and now we can make it a mask by selecting the mask icon and as you zoom in you might see that
the selection may not be exactly perfect as we thought you can see there's a little bit
of white of the canvas peeking out on the edge so to fix that let's go back by hitting command
z on a mac or control and z on a pc then from the select menu up at the top we can go to modify the
selection by selecting expand and let's expand it out by a couple pixels one or two pixels will do
and then once again we can go to modify and go to smooth and let's smooth it to around three pixels
so now we can go ahead and go back to selecting the mask icon again and now we can zoom in
and see that it's perfectly overlaid on the outline of the canvas we don't see any more
of the canvas the white canvas coming out but when we zoom back out here you can see oh the
grey image is quite flat there's no canvas texture and there's no shadow on the side of the canvas if
we turn off the layer you can see that there's a shadow on the original canvas but when we turn on
the gray layer it's gone same with the texture so to bring back the shadow and the texture to
make it more realistic we need to select the mask layer here and we need to change the blend mode
to multiply and look at that the texture and shadow is back it helped darken the image
so now we're nearly there we just need to add some more lighting controls to the highlights in the
shadows of the image to create these controls we're going to duplicate the background layer
so select the background layer first and press command j twice on a mac and you'll have two
copies and let's rename one of them to highlight and the other to shadow and then let's drag both
of these layers up to be above the placeholder layer so let's start with the shadow and let's
turn off the visibility of the highlight because we just want to control the light and not the
color let's desaturate this shadow by making it black and white to do that select the shadow layer
and select command shift u on a mac or ctrl shift u on a pc and this will make it black and white
so now that it's black and white next we need to create more shadows by darkening the layer
and we're going to use the same blend mode that we used before which is multiply but because this
is a template we need to also give more control to change the intensity of the shadows for each
image that we put in this placeholder in the future so this is where we're going to create
a curves adjustment layer and from here we're going to drop the shadow slightly using the curves
just by selecting it and moving the curves just a little bit lower but right now this adjustment
layer the curves adjustment layer is affecting all of the layers below it and we don't want
that we only want it to affect the shadows layer so to do that all we need to do is hold the alt
key on a pc or the option key on a mac and select the line between the curves and the shadows and
it will apply the curves just to the shadow layer below it so next we also need to limit the shadows
just to the canvas itself and to do that we need to copy the mask onto the shadows layer
and to do that we're also going to hold the alt key or the option key and drag it onto the shadows
and now it's only affecting the shadows next let's go to the highlights and do the same thing
so let's turn it back on and just like the shadows let's also desaturate it first so
we're just working with the light and not the color just by pressing command shift u
and then instead of changing the blend mode to multiply which will darken it
this time we want to let in more of the highlights so we're going to change the blend mode to screen
and again we want to create a control for this so let's create another curves adjustment layer
and then also press alt or option and select the line between these layers so the curves
are only applied to the highlight layer so now from the curves control we want to click up at
the top of the curve to preserve the highlights more and then we're going to make another point
here at the top right square and then we're just going to drag it down slightly just to unbrighten
the shadow areas a little bit and preserve some of the light and just like the shadows we don't want
the highlights affecting the whole picture just the canvas so what you can do is do the same as
we did before just by pressing alt or option and dragging the mask again on the highlights but you
can actually see that there's a lot of layers here so let's not do that and let's make a group of
these highlights and shadows first so select the shadow hold the shift key select the top layer and
then right click and let's make a group from the layers and let's call this highlights and shadows
now all we have to do is move the mask from the shadow layer on the group itself and now
you can see that the mask is being applied to both the highlights and the shadows as a group
so i still think that the highlights and the shadows are a little bit too much so what you
can do here and this is where the control comes in handy is you can control the opacity so let's
move the highlights down to 35 percent and the shadows also to 35 percent and we can always
change these values at any time and i'll show you how to do that once we apply our image to this
placeholder later on and now we can turn off this group and you can see what it looked like before
to see how flat it was without the lighting and now let's turn it back on and you can see it looks
far more realistic so now that the template is done we need to save it as a template so to do
that you can go to file save as and save it on your computer and rather than saving it as a
psd file we're going to save it as a template so if you're on a pc you can add a t to the end of
psd which stands for template and you can save that to your local hard drive but if you're on a
mac just save it as a dot psd and then once you're in your finder this is where you're going to add
the t just by double clicking inside of it and adding a t to the end of it and then select use
.psdt and now we can close the existing project and now the cool part about opening up this
.psdt file is it'll open up as a new untitled project meaning that it's making a copy and the
original template is not affected at all so to add in a placeholder image to our canvas template just
double click to open up the placeholder and i'm going to go to my finder and drag in this
avatar image that Zac Dynes made for me it's the avatar that i have on my youtube channel
and i'm also going to make another layer and use the paint bucket tool to fill it in yellow for
the background then i'm going to save it and now when i go back to the entitled template
project you can see that the image is nicely composited on the canvas in a realistic way
and of course you can go in and make adjustments to the opacity of the highlights and the shadows
until it looks just right but when you zoom in you can see that all the canvas texture
is there and it looks really really cool and it looks like you literally have printed this on
canvas and then you can save it as its own file so if you become really good at creating your
own mock-up templates you can actually become an author for yellow images and sell your mock-ups
there but if you don't want to have to go through the whole process of creating a template or it's a
bit more complicated of an object yellow images has a ton of different object mockups that you
can search for and once you download it all you have to do is just drag and drop the placeholder
image in the placeholder and play around with the lighting and that's it you can ship it off
to your client or your team to review and it's really easy to use so don't forget you can get
20 percent off any object mockup or any of the assets on yellow images using my code
gal 20. So if this video helped you out be sure to give it a big thumbs up it certainly helps grow
this channel and lets me know if you want more photoshop tutorials on the channel also be sure
to hit that notification bell after you subscribe so you're notified when I publish more tips on the
channel and also a huge shout out to all of the patrons that help support the channel as well
and you can get some perks there such as free templates every now and then and some direct
message support if you have any other questions which brings me to this week's comment of the week
DR. Dd Darlene de Haan wrote how do you get the files uploaded to After Effects. I am new to all
of this this is the one step that is giving me issues so this comment was left on my video on
how to edit logo reveal templates in after effects there's no way to upload a file to after effects
but you open it up and then if it was created if the template was created on a previous version of
After Effects you just need to convert it to the most recent version and it will usually have a
warning box and you just click ok and then you'll save it as its own converted version and that's it
and from there you can open it up and start using the template and replacing the different scenes
with your own videos and photos and graphics and different colors as well and that's all
there is to it so hopefully that answered your question and if you guys have any questions that
you want answered in a comment of the week in a future video just leave a comment below and
i'll take a look and pick one to feature in the next video so that's it for this video thanks
so much for watching and supporting the channel and I will see you guys in the next video. :)
Bye!