Using Photoshop for Making a Brochure

By | September 18, 2011

Adobe Photoshop is a great graphics design software that is used by many artists all over the world.

Adobe Photoshop is a great graphics design software that is used by many artists all over the world. That is because Adobe Photoshop has many features that allow you to put so many effects on photos, create graphics, draw illustrations, and stylize your texts. So it is also a good program to use in designing brochures. You can also easily save your design as a high resolution file for brochure printing in a professional printing house.

But Photoshop can also be a tricky program for newbies. It has many instructions that can get confusing for first-time users. The only consolation is that it is not impossible to get used to it, so you might as well as learn from step-by-step tutorials online.

1. Adobe Photoshop can be a bit challenging to use when designing a brochure. But once you are comfortable with the program, it can become your best friend as you realize the many things that it can do. You will need to have some practice time doing some sample works in order for you to become more familiar and comfortable using it. Some of the things that you need to learn are common skills like importing pictures, adding text, merging layers, and masking backgrounds. Once you have harnessed the basic skills needed to operate Photoshop, you can already do more than just brochures.

2. When making your brochure, you first decide on the size of your pamphlet. Use inches instead of pixels because it is easier to make computations for the sizes of your elements. You may want to make a tri-fold brochure from a short size bond paper. So set the paper size at 8.5”x11”.

3. Now that you have created a document for your brochure, drag the ruler to put imaginary lines on your page. That will indicate where the fold are going to be. Drag some more horizontal and vertical lines for the margins.

4. Import your graphics and photos from your computer. Drag them around the areas and see which ones go where until you hit the right spot. Adjust sizes by dragging corners of the photos. Highlight them with effects like shadow, glow, or bevel.

5. Key in the text. Do not use too many fonts for your copy because that will make your layout look cluttered. Instead use only one or two fonts styles then just play with the colors and sizes. You can also use effects on the text much like what you did with the photos.

6. Save your file from time to time. Making just one side of a brochure can already be time consuming, depending on the processing capacities of your computer, the effects that you are using and the number of elements that you have in a single file. So save your file so that you will not lose your work in case the computer hangs or shuts down without warning.

7. When you are satisfied with your work, you can just save it as is or save it as a jpg file (or flat file) that you can bring to the printer for brochure printing. Your brochures will look so much better if it is done using Adobe Photoshop as compared to if you did the design on Microsoft Word. The possibilities are just endless with this program that is why many professionals use it.