*Transcription Disclaimer: the following transcription was automatically generated, and may have errors, or lack context.*
Hello. Hello, everyone. My name is Alex Lazaris and I am so thrilled for day two of Adobe Express.
We are working with Lord of the Rings inspired creative for the last two days. I'm very, very excited. Yesterday we made wedding posters for Gimli and Mayu's wedding, and you are all invited.
I know it's very, very exciting stuff. I'm beyond thrilled, honestly. I love working in Express and I'm excited to show you the tips and tricks that I've learned and I love to use within the platform.
So come on over. If you're not familiar with Express, let me explain what it is to you. So Express is kind of one of the best of everything, all in one tool.
It's kind of the best. It's Express, it's easy, it's lightweight, so you can get some photoshop in there, a little bit of, like, After Effects, Premiere, Pro, all these good things. If you want to make animations and gifs, you can do that.
If you want to just make social content, that's great. It will also help you schedule your content out, which is super duper helpful. Today we're going to be unleashing your inner ORC.
So all things ORC all things Lord of the Rings inspired. Whatever your favorite ORC quote is, please drop it in Chat. If you are wondering where Chat is, you need to be over at Slash Adobe Live.
Type in chat there. If you're on YouTube and you're wondering why I can't see your messages, it's because we're chatting and reading off of the Behance page. So make sure you go over there.
Be net, slash, adobe live. While coming out and type in Chat. I see a bunch of our regulars.
I see Steve, Gareth, Sam, Paco, Sean. Hello. Hello, everyone.
I see Sean already very excited. ORC Exclamation. Mark, let's go.
All right, sweet. So, without further ado, today, all about ORC stuff. So Sam says, I love a good ORC.
I just saw that in the corner of my and I was like, what's going on? Yes, good orcs bad orcs all orcs orcs don't get a lot of love in the universe, I feel like. So let's bring it in. Let's make some good lighthearted fun, have some good times with our orky friends.
So, welcome to Express. This is what the Express screen looks like. If you have not seen it before, it makes your life so much simpler.
So whenever you're going to be making, like, an Instagram post or a story, maybe a Facebook post or a poster or logo even, you have this top area of the page that allows you to jump into it very quickly. So if I was to say, like, I need an Instagram story, you can do that really quickly as well. Let me just get that fixed.
So there we go. Template. So if you wanted to, you can go in there, start adjusting the copy, start changing things out very quickly.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah type very easy. So that gives you a very quick understanding of what a template might look like. If you're going to be working within.
If you need to make a logo really quickly, maybe you're like a small business or an Etsy store and you need to make a logo. You can do that with the logo templates as well. Very good starting points for your business to get off the ground.
You also can see that there's a try a Quick Action section here as well. This quick Action section allows you to quickly just remove a background or resize an image. If you need to.
Maybe animate it, convert it into a GIF or download it to MP4. That's all super helpful really quickly. Just jumping to some of my favorite things that you can do within Express.
You can schedule it out. So if you are connecting, maybe you're like managing your own social media or managing your client social media. You can do that all through the scheduling tool.
You can link your Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn and you can start scheduling out content. This is so incredibly helpful. Set it, forget it.
Knock out content like within minutes. So this is a huge, huge time saver. Please use it.
It is awesome. All right, without further ado, the other second thing that I really love is the brand section. As you can see, I've got a bunch of brands that we've worked on before on the Adobe Express streams, but you can also just go in and you start creating your own brand from scratch.
So right now our default one that I have up is called Halves, and this was one that we did a couple weeks ago. You can upload your logo, you pick colors, you can choose your fonts. You can use Adobe fonts or you can also upload your own font.
So if you have something maybe bespoke something you built yourself or maybe something that you licensed that isn't on Adobe fonts, that's totally fine. Upload it and you can use that stuff. It will help you.
As you can see here, you can start to see some screenshots of what it would look like in auto layout, and that's super helpful for you as well. So going back today all about works. So what we're going to do is we're actually just going to start making like, I don't know, let's say we want to do a story or a post.
Let's do like an Instagram story to start and then we can resize it. So I'll show you how do we do all that stuff? All right, so we can either start with whatever template we have, which is super helpful, or we can just make one ourselves. So yesterday we started with a template for our wedding invites for Gimli and I.
I'll show you really quickly what that looks like and then we can jump into creating this. So we ended up making this Save the Date social post and flyers as well. Beautiful.
Lots of floral elements. You got the ring in know I know you're not probably going to be giving your wedding ring as the Lord of the Rings ring. That's okay.
Gimli and I have something very special. And sometimes he likes to wear the one ring to rule them all. So that's why.
But you can see in there really quickly. We have a bunch of different layers that we've used and we grouped them and we kind of moved these elements around. But we leveraged the same type that the template had and a bunch of the elements.
We just changed out the background really quickly and had a brand new asset for us to use. I'm going to go into projects. We're going to go click Instagram story.
I see Annika. Hey, Annika. How you doing? Annika's been doing lots of really great streams as well.
Make sure you check her out. Instagram stories. So we can just start from scratch.
So what we're going to do is we're going to look for Photos. We've got orcs because it's Adobe stock, we have a wonderful amount of collateral and images that we can start to use, which is awesome. So Express is absolutely free.
You don't need a Creative Cloud account or subscription to use it. That's totally fine. But the Express program does get better with your subscription.
And what I mean by that is there's these icons in the corner in the left where they are crowns. These crown icons mean that these assets are included with your paid subscription for Adobe Creative Cloud. So that's just something to think about.
You have assets like this one here that doesn't have that. You can just use it automatically and just pull it into that piece. So there you go.
This asset is totally free, easy to use if you need it to. And then you can just go here in the photo section. It works again.
I'm going to throw this guy in there. I already did that. I'm going to zoom this in.
Then we got a canvas big. I'm going to enlarge him. Boom.
What I love about working in Express as well is that the images shrink and they expand really, really well. It keeps high fidelity going very, very well. So it's nice keeping everything high resolution, not pixelated.
Feels good. So we've got this image of this ORC we have different options. I kind of like the moodiness in the background that he has.
But maybe we want to edit the image. Maybe we want it to feel like he's removed from the background. So if I want to, I can click Remove and Sensei will actually try to detect and start to remove that background itself.
We can also go in and help it out. So you see, it's done a really good job masking out the background around his arms, shoulders and other arm as well but there's a little bit of fuzziness happening at the bottom of our screen. So what I want to do is actually just restore this area here.
So I'm just going to paint over it. Let's just see what we have. Cool.
So that's why it was detecting as, like, the background, because it's a very dark area of it. That's totally fine. So what I ended up doing was just kind of making like a fake leg on him.
I think that's probably his real leg also, but just wanted to double check. And then I'm just going to just ever so slightly touch this up. If I want to increase or shrink the brush size, you can do it over here, and this will change it.
It'll be larger or smaller. You can also use the brackets like you would in Photoshop. So if you're a Photoshop native, that's super helpful.
Right now, I'm just holding the left bracket and the right one to expand or shrink it. That's also super easy. And then I'm just shrinking it.
And then I can just touch up a little bit of his sleeve here and there just to make sure that there's no weird elements happening. I think we're pretty good. I'm just going to touch up that fur a little bit.
It might be a little bit too harsh because we don't have all the feathering that I would like, probably. And then I'm going to do an erase, and I'm just going to get rid of that tiny little element hanging off of his sleeve. I know it's like a tie, but the resolution or to mask that out properly would just take too much time.
So we're just going to cut it off. Nobody's going to notice anyways. That's totally fine.
And then we go boom. Clever says, I want to put a feather bow on. That work.
Fabulous glam work. Absolutely. I love that idea.
Maybe we can throw a feather bow on him. All right, so we've got this image removed from the background. We can change the background now.
If I want, I could put, like a green maybe that's his thing. It looks kind of nice, especially with the green color palette on the ORC to begin with. It's already kind of like moody and foresty, so that's cool.
I could also just go in and look for dark forest, see if we have any additional forests that we would want. All right, there's some pretty good ones. Let's see here.
So if I like this, see how this goes. It's like, oh, no, it's covering my ORC now. So if it's covering my ORC and I don't like that, then I can go down to the layers section in the bottom right of screen, and then I can just drag this element up.
So I'll click the ORC and I'll pull him above the background. Actually kind of moody. I like it.
Feeling pretty good. But I'm looking at this image, I'm like the lighting is a little bit different, right? You got like kind of harsh light on the ORC and then the background kind of feels different. So maybe I can go to the filter section and see if there's any enhancements that I would want.
So maybe a higher contrast to make the background darker. So that tree starts to really kind of match the blacks on the ORC as well. Brightness.
I can also turn it down if I need to kind of match that vibe. Saturation I don't think we really the background forest element is already so desaturated that I think it's totally fine to just keep it as it is. Let's see the highlights.
We might not really see any benefit from that. We're seeing it in the top section above his ear. That's an interesting spot in terms of the lighting coming in heart, like a little bit brighter, but again, not fully necessary.
Maybe I'll keep it just as, like an interesting point. Shadows. I don't want the highlights to be so high and then the shadows be so dark.
So I'm just trying to balance that out. Warmth. We don't need it to be warm.
He's a very cold like, he's already got greens and blues on him. So that means it's like a colder color palette. If we're going to make it warmer, you're going to add more oranges and reds to it.
So we don't want that. We're going to actually just keep it nice and kind of I'm just not going to change that. Sharpen we don't need to do is I'm going to put a little sharpen on it.
The reason why I'm going to put a tiny bit of sharpen on it is it brings in a little bit of the gritty, noisy texture on top that matches this orcs photograph really well. So that's what I'm doing with that. So we're kind of getting into like little Photoshopping territory, little photo chopping, if you will.
But now we've got a pretty cool background. We've got a cool foreground that's all working. Clicking, really nice.
Time to add a quote. Everybody loves quotes. I love motivational quotes.
Anybody on my design teams loves when I give them motivational quotes. It works really well for morale. Just kidding.
It's a joke. All right, so anyways, we're going to take this copy that I got from the show or the movie. Looks like Meets back on the menu, boys.
But I want kind of like a cursive script. So I want this to feel like one of those, like, hang in there, cat poster motivational things. Maybe this is like something that you would want in your office, right? Maybe this is something you need to take if you're having to return to the office and go to work.
Maybe this is something you should bring in and decorate your cubicle with. Maybe we'll keep this actually like a lighter blue. Do a little blue and then we're looking at this, and it's like the quote is cool, the images are cool, but now we're not seeing enough contrast between the type, so it's kind of hard to read, right? So if I'm looking at it like that and I want it to feel more legible, what do I do? Sean says hanging there cat.
Yeah. You know the hanging cat memes, where it's got like the cord and the kittens, like, hanging off the top? Yeah, it's classic. All right.
Anyways, so there's a couple of ways that we can use Express to make our type more legible. It's either I can change the background, obviously, that's a pretty straightforward way to do it, or an easier approach would actually be to just add like a shape language. So I could click the shape button over here and that's going to add like, a highlight to it.
I can change the shape as well. If I want to have different call outs or sections or banners, that's all super helpful, but I don't necessarily need that. Don't really want how heavy this highlighter feel could look also, so what I'm actually going to do is I'm going to add a drop shadow, and I'm just going to add like a black drop shadow just to increase the legibility around it.
What I can do is I can also change the angle. Let me zoom in specifically on the type so you can see that better. So if I change the angle over here, you see how it starts to rotate around those letter forms.
So you have a lot of different angles you can choose from. Pro tip that I think a lot of people don't realize is humans have been evolving for hundreds of thousands of years to get to where we are today. So the best way to think about lighting is treat it like you're lighting things from the sun.
So whenever you're lighting a button in maybe XD, the button angles and shadows and drop shadows need to come downwards. So right now, having it above the letters feels weird. It feels like whenever you take a flashlight and shine your face upwards.
Whenever you do that, it gets scary because you're not used to seeing that as a human. So if you just take your drop shadow, pull it down just like the sun would be casting shadows, that's going to make all your shadows, your drop shadows, your buttons all feel much better. So I'm going to zoom out.
Cool. So that's helpful. We can also change the distance.
You can see how close it is in there by just increasing it. Sometimes I like to keep mine still connected. I don't like it like this, where it's like fully disconnected.
So that's what I'm doing. I'm just going to keep it like 50 just so it still has a tie back to that letter. And then I'm going to zoom out.
Cool. So we got that. I don't like the line height.
I think I mentioned line height yesterday as well. But what we're going to do is we're going to take this and we're going to change the line spacing. So line spacing will shrink the spacing between both all the lines.
Very self explanatory in the name. But this is something that you should always look at whenever you're building paragraphs or type. You also have letter spacing.
Letter spacing is also super important for your legibility. As you're reading things, you want to make sure that the letters have a good cadence between them, kind of helping your eye move through the copy. So I'm going to keep letter spacing at zero, line spacing at zero.
And then I can end up just bumping this up. So I can either use the type tool over here and go up to like 132 if I want, or I can just custom drag it and pull it and just change it up here. Boom.
So now we've got that. That's great. But we need to add a quote like, who is this from? And it's from the Uruk high.
If I misspelled that chat, please let me know. Think I got it right, though. All right, so we got that.
Got his title. I know that this is not actually an orikai. I'm aware it's what we're using from Adobe stock.
It's fine. We got an image of NORC. That's pretty close.
I'll take it. All right, so we're going to do is we're going to change the type family as well. So we got recommendations here on the right side.
So we can choose any of these if we want, or we can choose our own. We can also use this type treatment over here. We might use this later on if we have a little bit of extra time today.
We might do like feeling stylish with orcs on stuff like that. That's always great. But you have the option on the left side to use templates.
You can scroll through these things, just find something you like and just start changing out your copy. Super duper easy. Or if you want, like I said, on the right side, you got font recommendations.
This will give you alternatives to what you might be using currently. That's always great as well. I'm actually going to shrink this down.
And I might just I might just shrink the keep it all caps. And then what I'm going to do is actually do an outline. No, not outline.
I'm going to do a shape this time. And I'm going to do where's my square? Square. Why are you doing this? All right, so let me just adjust this real quick.
Shape, turn off my outline, turn on my shape, turn on my rectangle. And then this should start editing it. I don't know why it's shape.
Let's adjust it really quickly. Mask text. That's always great.
Opacity is 100%. Should be working. Cool.
Okay, so I see 100%. So 100 there now. Okay, we're good.
And then change shape. Oh, no, I keep turning it on and off. Boom.
Shape. All right, now I'm going to choose to do a rectangle. There we go.
Now it's feeling good. All right, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to change the color palette to be the blue, and then I'm going to shrink this down. So this is where I'm giving my little drop quote.
Boom. Scroll, scroll, scroll. Cool.
I'm actually going to probably wonder if I should adjust that further. Should it be bigger? I think it's probably okay if it's just a little bit tighter on his name or the role, I guess. Boom.
We got the quote, we got the drop. It's all working. It's great.
Cool. So we've got five minutes left. Now I want to show you some fun real quick.
What we're going to do is we're going to call this, like, ORC one. But what we can do really quickly is we can go to duplicate up here on the menu. Boom.
Duplicate, chef. So we're duplicating it, calling him Chef. So we got our quote already.
We're going to Abercro dabber it, and we're going to duplicate it. We're going to put, like, another quote really quickly together. I'm going to click in, like, not an official quote.
So I apologize, Lord of the Rings fans. We put the ORC in fork. All right? Put the ORC in fork.
That's a great quote, but you're like, what? I don't get it. Alex, why are you saying that? Well, Chatters, let me explain to you. I've got this beautiful chef hat, and I've got the remove background tool so we can quickly spin up a brand new chef hat for our urukai.
Just say cool again. All the great stuff that I already showed you with the remove background tool is there, so you can adjust that if you need it. You can also just change this up just ever so slightly.
I'm going to rotate it, make it fit on his head. Boom. What a beauty, right? Isn't that great? We put the ORC in fork.
I'm going to just actually take off the capital wi because it feels weird. Actually needs it. We put the ORC in fork, and maybe I can find, like, a kitchen the kitchen background.
Let's see if I can find, like, a industrial kitchen. Oh, this could be cool. Alex, why is this a meme? This is a meme.
This is a meme. Now we're just making meme templates. Let's see here.
If we were to take this and then throw it in the background, I'm wondering if I need to adjust the that actually is pretty cool. All right, hold on. So this is all good, fine and dandy, but the resize tool is here for us, so we're going to actually change this to an Instagram post.
So really quickly, it's thrown all our layers into another background or another canvas very fast. I'm actually just going to try to get the that's too big. What I'm trying to do is just match the visual spacing of the element so it feels like he's actually part of it.
And actually, let's see here. Let's make a mime. Make the memes.
All right, so we got this guy. Now I'm going to take this and this. Take the urukai himself and bring him to the foreground.
And maybe I just like have him to the side. Oh, yes. This is beautiful.
I'm very proud. He needs a bigger hat. Real quick.
Boom. We put the ORC in fork. What I'm going to do here is I'm just going to pull the quotes together.
I'm going to actually pull the color palette to make it feel a little bit more consistent with the greens that are happening here. So I'm going to take this and then use my eyedropper tool from the color palette and pull this green. Everybody knows green is ORC's favorite color, so that's very important to make sure we do right.
And then I'm going to just adjust the shape layer and change that to this green. Kind of nice. The masking on the type is a little bit difficult to read, so I'm actually not going to mask the text anymore.
I'm going to change that to be flat. So we put the ORC in fork. It's centered.
It's feeling pretty good. So really quickly you can see we've got a bunch of things we can do with Adobe Express. This is so much fun.
You can bang out assets so fast you can get them scheduled within your scheduling tool, do a really quick recap of yesterday's work as well. So yesterday we did several different versions of the save to date. We did the resize that I just showed you in that top right? If you needed to, you can also take these assets and animate them.
So if you were to take this wedding invite that we did here, we could also just quickly click the animation tool. Click typewriter. It's going to animate everything for you.
You can adjust which things animate first by going to the layers panel. But you have everything at your fingertips to make incredible assets. Using Express, you can hammer out assets so fast, so easy.
It's one of my favorite tools to use, so make sure that you learn it, love it, use it, bring it on all your client projects. You're going to have so much fun with it. I hope you enjoyed this stream.
I've loved making the “orcs with forks” and having some fun with the Lord of the Rings characters. So thank you all. Make sure you tune in.
We'll be right back. All right, bye.
