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Adobe Encore CS3 Tutorials
Custom Buttons & Menus / Custom Backgrounds pt. 2
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Encore CS3 / Custom Buttons & Menus / Custom Backgrounds pt. 2)
OK, let's continue with the adventure and create a sci-fi background that looks like a star grid and it has all kinds of text and little pointers and that kind of stuff. So the first thing I want to do of course, as always, is change my background color. I'm going to choose a really dark blue. Once again, this can be used as a background for your Encore projects. Now I'm going to take the Type Tool and I'm going to change the color of the font to something light blue, like something that would be on a screen and I'm just going to type some nonsensical words like this and I'll put a point one for example on that one. And I'll move it up here, I'll press Command or Control T to scale this down and I'll accept that. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you a little shortcut for duplicating something. I'm going to hold down the Alt or Option Key and click on this text and move it down like so. I can move it over here if I want to. And as you see, I have the text here. I can double click on the T and change it to something else. And I can do it again, put it over here just to kind of make a little panel of some kind. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to put a layer style on just one of these guys and then copy it. Layer Styles are little special effects that are included in Photoshop down on the this little bottom little layers panel. We see the FX and I'm going to click Outer Glow. I'll move this over to show you that we have this glow effect applied to our text. I'm going to change the color of that by clicking right here and make that white and I'll move this over to preview. Very cool; I'll click OK and you'll see we have this Outer Glow. I can right click on the Outer Glow and copy that layer style and then click on the other layers by holding down the Shift Key and paste that layer style. And we're going to paste more of that layer style a little later on because then we're going to add some straight lines. So what I want to do is grab my Pencil Tool and I think I'm going to go to a brand-new layer and put this at the top of the stack, call this Lines. Now with the Pencil Tool selected, I'm going to hold down the Shift Key and just draw a line under this text here and then I'm going to put my mouse right under the words and just draw a line; well, actually, that's a little crooked. So let me hold down the Shift Key again and draw one like this, hold down Shift and draw one like this. Each time I'm doing that, by the way, I am letting go of the mouse. Now, to deselect the Pencil Tool, sometimes I click away from the canvas like so. If you don't do that, sometimes the lines want to be connected. So I'll go ahead and click here and add a short line like so and I'll click here and I'll want it like this. Let me show you what happens, by the way, if I don't click somewhere else. See how that line just shows up down there? So I turn the Pencil Tool off temporarily by clicking up here somewhere. I'll draw a line here, I'll draw a straight line here and if you mess up, just Undo. And one more straight line right about there. So those are the lines and I have a little bit of a mess there. Not a problem. I'll grab the Rectangular Marking Tool and get rid of that. I'm going to add some more lines now and call it the Grid. So I'll go ahead and create a new layer called Grid. Now, by the way, if this stuff seams a little complicated and a little advanced, don't worry. You can check out the full Photoshop CS3 training at the Virtual Training Company website. But this I felt I'd add to the tutorial for those of you guys who know how to use Photoshop somewhat and you could follow along and at least get an idea as to how you can create your own backgrounds. So I have one line and I'm going to do the same trick we did a little while ago. But this time I'm going to hold down the Shift Key as well. So hold down Alt or Option and Shift and then duplicate that line and do that a couple times trying to keep it as even as possible. Just use your eye to eyeball it. As you see here, I have a whole bunch of grid lines. Let's go ahead and hold down the Shift Key and grab all of them and we're going to merge those down. So go to the little menu at the upper right-hand corner and then choose to merge those layers. Now they're just Grid Copy 9. Right click and paste that layer style. Now I'm going to create another grid, but I'm going to copy this one here. So I'm going to click and drag down here to create a new copy of that, press Command or Control T, hold down the Shift Key and rotate that so it goes in the opposite direction and then scale it out with the handles here. And now you have a sci-fi grid that you can use with your production. But if you want to go a little fancier, feel free to add a gradient to the background or make the background even darker, add some other numbers, add some pictures of stars, maybe a spaceship or whatever you'd like to do to really spruce this up. But hopefully this gives you an idea as to how you can create a different themed background for use in your Encore DVD menus.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Adobe Encore CS3 |
| Author: | Dwayne Ferguson |
| SKU: | 33884 |
| ISBN: | 1-935320-00-9 |
| Release Date: | 2008-09-30 |
| Duration: | 6.5 hrs / 101 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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