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For this ad design technique, start off with your preselected thematic source image.

Go ahead and duplicate the layer by dragging it to the new layer icon on the bottom of the layers palette. Now select the background layer in the layers palette and choose white as your foreground color (d,x) and Alt/Opt backspace to fill the layer with white.

Now go ahead and hide the image layer in the layers palette by clicking on the seeing eyeball. Now go ahead with your ‘T’ text tool and create some really large block letters.

You want the text layer to ultimately be beneath the image layer so you can create it on top if you want. Use your options bar or character palette and get a nice blocky font such as Impact and use the character palette as taught in the Photoshop video tutorials training to get the letters just where you want them.

The point here is just to get a really large font so we can see the effect we’re going to do, of course making sure that the ‘copy’ or text is what we (your client) want it to say.

Now you can create a Clipping group or mask. First Select the image top layer in the layers palette so it is visible.

Make sure that the text layer is below the layer as shown so move it if you have to. Now go to Layer: Create Clipping Mask while on the top layer. This is going to go ahead and “put” that image so it is only visible in the text letters, essentially masking the rest of the image. It doesn’t squeeze it all in. Go ahead, your layer is still in the same place so use the move tool and you can move either of the layers in the layers palette, whichever is highlighted.

You can also create a clipping mask by placing the cursor as shown and then press Alt click. Press it again in the right spot to go back out of the clipping group.

Now select the type layer itself in the layers palette and right click on the longbar to choose drop shadow and just add a basic drop shadow. Now you can see it stand out even more. Note that we are doing this on the type layer and not on the image layer itself b/c you wouldn’t likely see a drop shadow when in the clipping group.

Go ahead and choose your preselected product shots from an open document with the moVe tool and drag it into the document you’re working on.

Go ahead and use Edit: Free Transform to get it to the size that you want.

Go ahead and try something else by dragging that first layer to the new layer icon to duplicate it. It will automatically be listed in the same clipping group. Go ahead and drag it to below the text layer so it gets out of the clipping group and now becomes the visible background layer.

With these two layers in the exact same location in the document you can now lower the opacity to create a nice pleasant effect.

If you don’t want to screen that layer then go ahead and try something such as an Image: Hue/Saturation and click colorize to change the hue of the background layer.

Finish it off by adding any other necessary product info. If you want to see all of my commercial designs then make sure you get my Madison Avenue Advertising Design Secrets DVD’s. I go into much more detail with advanced real world designs that people get paid real money for.

Click below to find out about my full-color video advanced Photoshop training for advertising design.  It includes 6+ hours of step by step video tutorial projects from scratch through finish.

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