Subtitles of the Movie

In this lesson we're going to finish up our DVD project by creating the DVD disk art. Let's open up my final example. You can see, I think, is just a simple, classy look that wouldn't be appropriate for all purposes. You wouldn't be selling a movie with this, you know a block buster out of Hollywood's not going to have this as a DVD cover, but from a corporate kind of perspective I think it would be really just appropriate. It's classy, it's simple, it gets the message across, it's very clear what you're getting. You're getting Corel Paint Shop Pro, Photo 11, Mac Win DVD 1, and here's the company right there. If you're making home movies, you might have a picture of your family. You wouldn't have to put a copyright, let's say, you might label it with the year and whether it's Mac and Windows, or if it's simply meant to go straight into the DVD player for the TV, that would be appropriate as well. You probably wouldn't put Mac Win, you would just put TV or something like that. So, let's open up the disk image in Paint Shop Pro where I've created it over the template and you can see my layers. It looks like the CD project; got the background template and I've just created a couple of rectangles here, which have my gradients, got my logo, a couple of vector text layers, and here's where I've rendered them into their final form with the drop shadows, and then I've got my central circle, which will not be printed. Now when I'm finished with this I would probably crop this down to outside of the DVD, wherever the manufacturer says it's appropriate, perhaps all the way past the registration marks; again, sometimes when you're working behind the scenes you'll realize that not everything is as it seems. In this case, you're providing essentially a square graphic which is going to be printed and made into a circle. So, that's why I've got these rectangle objects here and I'm not concerned about them bleeding over the edge of the DVD because it's not going to exist out here, it simply is not a problem. Okay, so click outside the box sometimes. I wouldn't spend a lot of time worrying about how to get a gradient or an image that fits perfectly within the circle, I would just slap it up there make sure that it's centrally located and I'm getting what I want on the disk surface and then ignore anything outside of that. All right, so this is the working file and this is the final file. I'm going to open up that template just to continue going through the process of what the mechanics are like, and I kind of touched on this in the last lesson, I want to say one other thing. If you're professionally using Paint Shop Pro Photo, or doing it for your own business, let's say, and production is an issue and it's not just for leisure, time is money and the faster you get working with the product and using Paint Shop Pro and getting familiar with keyboard shortcuts and this repetitive nature of doing things - copying, pasting, new layer, colors, boom, boom, boom, materials, palette, tools - you're saving yourself money and time and becoming much more efficient. Another part of that, which I think you've probably seen in this tutorial, is reusing stuff that's good. I'm reusing material here. I'm reusing the gradient, I'm reusing the text, I'm reusing the logo, I'm not creating it from scratch every single time. So if you've got a file that has your logo in it and you don't need to recreate it, grab it out of there, don't recreate it. If you want to grab this text, come into this file, open it up, instead of recreating it. So that's how it works professionally a lot of times, so it can save you money. So we're looking at the template now, going to crop that outside of the registration marks. Again you would need to contact the manufacturer here or whoever is going to print this to find out exactly what their requirements are. And now I'm going to create the gradient for the top. I'm just going to lay that on there like so. Now I'm going to create the white text box for the bottom. There we go. Now, again, I'm not going to worry about lining this up perfectly, I'm just going to overlay my white on top of the gradient and actually let's go into objects properties and turn off Anti-Alias on both vector objects so we can get a nice crisp border. Now if we zoom in we can see there that's nice and crisp. I select that white area again and turn the Anti-aliasing back on; you can see a little fuzziness there. Let's turn the blue back on too. Okay. So, let's reduce the visibility so we can see our background and now I'll worry a little bit about lining these up in sort of the center, making sure I've got a good dimension going there, and then basically, if I had the time I would continue working on this, but you get the idea. You would put your text, and whatever other information you need right in the borders, align it and design it appropriately and then you're good to go.