60 Photoshop Tutorials to Perk Up Your Posters

by on October 4th, 2010 1 comment

Everyone at sometime is going to need a poster to promote an event. We want you to throw away those smelly over sized markers and poster board and sit down with these tutorials and create something that will knock the socks off  the people that attend your next yard sale.

General Poster Tutorials

1. Create a Refreshing Beer Themed Poster Design in Photoshop

When you create a print advertisement, it’s important that all the elements of your composition are geared towards selling a product and promoting a brand. Today, we will demonstrate how to create a refreshing beer-themed poster design in Photoshop.

2. How to Create an Essentially Beautiful Flyer

In today’s tutorial we will be showing you how to make use of simple elements and colors in Photoshop to get an essentially beautiful outcome. People always over complicate things, that’s why we will be having a simple approach towards this large piece. We will be teaching you in a step by step manner and hopefully you can learn something new from this tutorial. Let’s get to it

3. Creating the Step Up 3D Effect in Photoshop
3D is taking over the film industry, with more and more movies, games and magazines being released in 3D I thought I would share the secret with you on how to achieve 3D effects in your photos using Photoshop. I am going to use Step Up 3D’s Movie poster and then transform it into a 3D image using Photoshop. This is a easy tutorial to follow and I am sure a lot of people will find it very useful. You will now be able to turn any photo into a 3D image. Let’s get started.

4. How to Create a Retro Hippy Van Poster in Photoshop

In this tutorial you’ll be learning several Photoshop tools and techniques, as well as a couple of Illustrator techniques to create a trendy, retro/abstract style Hippy Van poster from scratch.

5. Create a Realistic Space Scene from Scratch with Photoshop

In this intermediate-to-advanced-level design tutorial, we are going to create a stunning space scene that has realistic-looking planets, stars, and lighting effects using a few innovative Photoshop techniques and some textures.

6. Design a Stunning Sneaker Advert

Learn how to design a stunning sneaker advert, using a variety of lighting effects.

7. Design a Sleek Diamond Poster Advert

Learn how to design a sleek diamond poster advert by making your products pop through a combination of lighting, photo manipulation and blending options.

8. Design a Retro Styled Poster

Learn how to combine patterns, textures and typography to create a retro styled poster. You will also learn how to manipulate shapes and images, in addition to integrating blending options and layer masking.

9. Create a Stylish Club Poster

Learn how to add photographic details to a base photo, to create a stylish, grungy club poster.

10. Design a Sleek Nature Themed Phone Advert

Learn how to combine multiple photo elements and light effects to create an impressive phone advertisement.

11. Make a Turn of the Century Vaudeville Poster

In this tutorial, we’ll learn how create a turn-of-the-century Vaudeville poster. This uniquely appealing style of advertisement was popular in the late 1800s and early 1900s. You sir! You madam! Step right up and prepare to be amazed as we transport an image of two friends back in time to create a poster advertisement without compare!

12. Add Visual Texture to Your Post in 3 Easy Steps

The use of textures in design are incredibly important in defining a surface.  While we can not create actual tactile textures in digital design, we can create the visual illustion of 3D texture.  This Tutorial aims to show you an easy way to do just that.

13. Design a Professional Laptop Advert

This tutorial will teach you how to manually create your own vanishing points, and how to use these techniques to create an awesome ’screen explosion’ effect – something that is sure to dazzle your viewers!

14. Design a Sin City Style Poster

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to create that effect in Photoshop, but this time we’ll use Illustrator to create the perspectives and text. I’ll walk through the process of creating the effect; However, it’s always good if you play around and test different settings to see how it works. That for me is the best way to learn.

15. Create a Cool Movie Poster in Photoshop

In this tutorial you are going to learn a few good techniques and tips for color correction. Hope you like it. Hopefully this tutorial can benefit in your pursuit of becoming a better designer.

16. Designing a Portable Gaming Device Poster

In this intermediate Photoshop tutorial we will be walking through the making of an interesting, creative advertisement poster.

17. Quick Grungy Poster

In this tutorial, I will show you how to create a sort of grunge poster. We will learn how to make some elements look a bit dirty, create textures, and add some depths to the elements using shadows and blend modes.

18. B-movie poster art

In this tutorial, it shows you how to combine 3D renders with stylized photography, text and smoke to capture all the camp horror of an alien invasion.

19.  Create a Trendy Typographic Poster Design

n this Photoshop tutorial, you can produce some great looking contemporary designs that fit well as impact posters, by stripping back the tools to creating an interesting and eye-catching poster with a single typographic word.

20. Design an Awesome Watercolor Poster

There are plenty of ways to create a Watercolor Effect in Photoshop. Some are very cheesy and you can easily tell that a simple filter has been used.

Text Tutorials


21. Smoke Type in Photoshop in 10 Steps

Learn how to combine multiple photo elements and light effects to create an impressive text style.

22. Create an Extruded Glossy 3D Text Effect in Photoshop

People love 3D effects. They also love the look of shiny, glossy, graphics as well. Today, we will combine those two popular styles and create an extruded 3D glossy text effect in Photoshop. Let’s get started!

23. Create Metallic Text on a Concrete Background!

In today’s quick tip tutorial I will demonstrate how to create some cool metallic text on a slick concrete background. This can be done in just a few steps so let’s get started!

24. Create Awesome Splashing Water Text Effect in Photoshop

In this tutorial, I will show you the steps I took to Create Awesome Splashing Water Text Effect in Photoshop. Along the way, you will learn how you can incorporate water splash brushsets into your text and create great effect from that. Have a try!

25. How to Create an Ice Text Effect with Photoshop

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to create an ice effect completely from scratch using special Photoshop Brushes. Some time ago playing with Photoshop and trying to make an ice effect I discovered that “dead trees” can simulate very well the ice’s “veins” giving a cool feeling to an image. I’m not going for realism here, but I do like the final effect for this tutorial. I used some text as reference, but this effect can be applied to any shape you want and can add some great style. Let’s get started!

26. Create an Atmospheric Under-Water Text Effect

Learn how to create an atmospheric underwater text effect using a few simple steps. You will learn how to properly extract water, and manipulate it to fit your typography.

27. Create a Unique Burning Text Effect

Learn how to create a superb, unique burning text effect, whereby areas of flaming text actually peel off to expose an under layer.

28. Create a Retro Metal Text poster in Photoshop

In this tutorial we are going to create a retro/grunge looking metal text using some basic Photoshop techniques as well as a texture. We are going to then finish off the image using another texture and a few other techniques to bring the whole image together.

29. 3D Text In Clouds Tutorial

In this tutorial we are going to create some 3D text. What is so special about this 3D text is that we are going to make the shadows editable, which will make it easier to work with and to make changes with it.

30. Text Effect Quickies: Bubble Text

In this Text Effect Quickie, we’ll create an easy to use layer style that will quickly transform ordinary text into bubble styled font, perfect for use in underwater scenes.

3D Tutorials

31. Awesome Milk Typography Effect in Photoshop

The idea is very simple, I used some stock photos and a very blocky typeface. Instead of wasted my time looking for the perfect font, I decided to create it in Illustrator. So the first steps I will show you how to create the font and then in the others, in Photoshop, I will show you how to mix that with the photos.

32. Using Light and Shade to Bring Text to Life

In this tutorial we are going to take some very basic principles of light and shade to make a rather impressive-looking text effect.

33. Hell of Tutorial in Photoshop

My idea was to create a 3D text with fire coming from the inside of the document like a hole.

34. Photoshop Tutorials: Colorful Light Burst Text

In this Adobe Photoshop tutorial, we’re going to see how to engulf text in an explosion of light and color. There’s quite a few steps involved in this text effect, and we’ll be using a couple of filters that are not used very often in everyday Photoshop work, but creating the text effect is quite simple and the end result is definitely worth the effort.

35. Galaxy Style Text Effect

In this tutorial i’ll show you how to create some galaxy type text, the inspiration behind this tutorial is “mario galaxy” on the nintendo wii.

36. How to Create 3D Text Blocks in Photoshop

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to create a 3D Blocks text effect. You need to have Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended to practice this tutorial. This will be fun and I’m sure you can do lots of cool things using this technique. Let’s get started!

37. Create 3-D text with some extreme lighting

Today we are going to take an object/text, change it from 2-D to 3-D and give it some realistic effects. We are going to be using Illustrator to create the object, then bring it into Photoshop to add highlights and shadows.

38. 3D Cliff Text

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to a text that look like it was formed by cliffs of mountains.

39. Shiny 3D Text in Photoshop

This tutorial is going to show you how to use a simple 3D text as an element for modification using Photoshop.

40. Create a 3D Planet with Atmosphere in Photoshop CS5 Extended

There are lots of tutorials out there for generating planets for space scenes in Photoshop. Almost all of them right now are aimed at 2D solutions, so you end up painting the planet by hand, which is not a bad way to go. However, it is not very flexible if you need to reposition lights or change textures.

41. Make a 3D Recycling Bin Icon with Photoshop

Through this Photoshop icon design tutorial, I will show you how to make an appealing drawing of a recycling bin with crumpled and creased white paper inside and around it — all from scratch. We will take advantage of tools such as the Gradient Tool, Custom Shape Tool, Rounded Rectangle Tool, and simple Photoshop functions such as Skew Transform and Free Transform to design our icon.

42. Design a 3D Floor Plan with Photoshop

In this tutorial you will tackle how to create a 3D effect looking plan from a simple 2D plan. This effect works fairly great in highlighting a significant interior space in a presentation. Apart from this, this tutorial will teach you how to define a pattern for applying materials.

43. Create Dj Festival Poster and 3D Text in Photoshop

Create an a very colorful poster n this video tutorial.

44. 3D Leather Text Effect

This tutorial will show you how to apply an effective leather look to your text.

45. Design a 3D Newspaper Cropped Text Effect

In this tutorial you will be showing how to create a 3D text effect using news print.

Tutorials for Working with Photos

46. Make Photos More Suggestive

In this tutorial you will be showing how to create much more suggestive imagery for your poster design.

47. Add A Realistic Rainbow To A Photo In Photoshop

In this Photoshop photo effects tutorial, we’ll learn how to easily add a rainbow, and even a double rainbow, to a photo!

48. Creating a Rocking Silhouette in Photoshop

If you’ve ever wanted to shine in the spotlight, try this tutorial. It shows you how to create a silhouette of a person taken from a normal photo, adding colorful light to it as if the light source is located behind this object.

49. Create a Cool Halftone Effect

In this tutorial, we’re going to go a bit retro. You’ll learn how to create halftone patterns and creatively cut up an image of a model holding a boombox. You’ll then use those cut elements to make your design. We use some layer styles to get everything to come together cohesively. The effects are fun, and you can apply these methods to other designs as well.

50. Add Dynamic Lighting to a Flat Photograph

In this tutorial, I will show you how to spice up a fairly dull and flat photograph. It’s very easy and fast! Go from flat photo to a uniquely lit style.

51. How to turn your photo into movie-like effect using Photoshop?

We will show you how to add some cool movie like effects to your photos using Photoshop.

52. Fill A Photo With Photos

In this Adobe Photoshop tutorial, we’re going to create a bit of an optical illusion, filling one photo with many smaller photos, or at least, many copies of a couple of smaller photos.

53. Focus With Light

In this Photoshop tutorial, we’ll learn how to add focus to an image with light using Photoshop’s Lighting Effects filter. We’ll see how easy it is to add multiple light sources to the same photo, rather than limiting ourselves to a single light source, so we can control both where the light is coming from and its reflections.

54. How to Create a Sparkling Fantasy Photo Manipulation

In this tutorial, we’re going to create a photo manipulation using different techniques. We’ll be adjusting each layer and element to make a compact final image. We’ll be using multiple photos and a handful of effects to create this work. Let’s get started!

55. How to Apply Textures to Uneven Surfaces

Applying texture to a flat surface, or flatly applying a texture across a whole image (as a means to age it or degrade it) is simple stuff. Realistically applying a texture to an uneven surface is much more hands-on (more so than simply overlaying a texture and changing the Blending mode).

56. Create a Stylish Two-Tone Photo Montage

Learn how to combine several photos to create a stylish two-tone composition.

57. Design a Stylish Fashion Advert

This tutorial teaches you how to take an ordinary photo and turn it into a stylish fashion advert.

58. Add A Realistic Water Reflection

In this Photoshop photo effects tutorial, we’re going to learn how to easily add a realistic water reflection to any photo. It’s a very easy effect to create and you can add it to any photo you like, although it tends to work best with images that don’t already contain water in them.

59. Text-made Image

Every day we see a lot of text. Various documents, advertisements, prospects all have become part of our everyday life. But what if you create a picture from a text? Few recall that earlier we had ASCII graphics – that we in fact created pictures from texts in text editors. Now I will describe an easy way to make a picture text in Photoshop.

60. How to Turn Humdrum Photos into Cinematic Portraits

There are a plethora of ways to treat a portrait for a myriad of uses, but that is for another feature. Let’s tackle adding drama or a cinematic quality to a regular, humdrum portrait. Let’s even throw in a little bit of faking HDR. That way if you work on a project that requires a stunning shot without the stunning photography, you’ll be able to cobble something together using your mad skillz!

Wow, that is a lot of tutorials. With these you should be well on your way to creating an awesome poster for any event from your aunt’s baby shower to your neighbor’s hair transplant surgery. If you know of anymore tutorials that would be useful in creating a poster please feel free to share them in the comments.