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Design Tutorial – Adrian Peterson Trading Card

**Note, this image was taken by me on assignment for Photofile.  This was strictly done for portfolio.  The cards are not for sale and no profit was made.

As most of you know, I shoot sports, amongst a million other things that I do.  I decided today that a pretty cool way to have these as portfolio pieces would be to make my favorite shots into trading cards.  And as a New Year’s gift, I’ll share most of how I did it!  Enjoy:

1 – Pretty simple, select the image you want to use.  You should always keep the final idea in mind when you pick your photo.  Select one that is in focus and composed the way you NEED.

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2 – In Photoshop, with the pen tool, trim the player out.

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3 – Adjust the photo the way you like.  There are many different ways to do this.  Just do it the way you like.

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4 – Now bring back your background and adjust it the way you would like it to look.  In this case, I applied a Gaussian blur to add more depth to the image.

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5 – Now open Illustrator and place in your images.  For starters, I selected a concrete texture for the very back of the card.

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6 – Now, create a new layer and design what will become your clipping mask.  This gives you a sort of frame for your background image to go in, to offset it from the background.

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7 – Place in your background image and select it and the design you made for your clipping path.  Apple click and select create clipping mask.

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8 – When you select Create Clipping Mask,  you should end up with something like this:

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9 – On a new layer, Place your clipped out player image.  Create another clipping mask for it, so it looks the way you need it on the card.  **Note, all of these things should be done on different layers.

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10 – Now create a layer on top and below your player and background layers.  On these layers, create your custom designs how you see fit.  Depending on if you want your design to overlap or not, will determine which layer to use.  This is how I got the results below:

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11 – The final step is to add your text.  You do this in Illustrator because your type will be vectorized.  This means it will not lose resolution no matter how big or small you make it.  This goes for the designs done in the previous step.  Illustrator is your friend!

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And that’s that!  I hope I was able to teach you something new today.  Just wanted to give back.  Hope you all have a safe and happy New Year!