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Rosemary’s Baby, Psycho, Peeping Tom – the 1960′s was a great decade for intelligent horror films. But it also had an enormous amount of less intelligent, low-budget B movies, like Zombie Cats! for example. In this tutorial you’ll learn how to recreate the style of a 60′s B movie poster in Photoshop.
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Open a new Photoshop document 1600 x 2500 pixels.
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Rasterize the rectangle layer by right clicking on it, then use the Magic Wand tool to select the rectangle. Invert the selection.
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Create a new layer then use the paint bucket tool to fill the selection with white.
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You can delete the background layer now, so you are left with just the white border layer and the black rectangle.
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Next draw a white rectangle to act as a border for the poster.
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Double-click on the rectangle’s layer to bring up it’s Layer Style box.
Choose Stroke and set the size to 2px, and change the colour to black.
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Change the layer’s blending mode to Multiply.
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We now have a template for the poster, so we can now begin to add some images.
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For the moon choose a red colour ‘ef490f’
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Use the ellipse tool whilst holding Alt to draw the moon.
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The graveyard stock can be downloaded here.
Open it in Photoshop, and use the Quick Selection tool to select the graveyard, then paste it into your document.
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Position it below the moon, and resize it.
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Increase the Brightness and Contrast.
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Then go to Image>Adjustments>Posterize, and set the number of Levels to 25.
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Go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur, and set it to 0.6 pixels.
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Next we will add the zombie cat.
The cat stock can be downloaded here as a precut Psd file.
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Place the cat into your poster and increase it’s size so it fills the background.
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Increase its Brightness and Contrast.
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And Posterize it as you did with the graveyard image.
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Next use a soft eraser to tidy up the edges of the fur…
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…And fully erase the tail.
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Select the paintbrush tool and hold Alt to pick the brightest colour in the cats eye. Then with the brush’s Hardness at 0%, paint over the pupils.
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Position the cat layer above the white border layer, and give it a layer mask.
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With the layer mask selected, go to Image>Apply Image…
Choose your white border layer and tick the Invert box.
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This will have masked out the areas of the cat that overlap the white border.
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Keep the cat layer mask selected, and use a white brush to paint the front paws back in.
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You can download a bat silhouette here.
Place a couple of bats above your moon layer, then rotate and resize them. Then change their blending modes to Multiply.
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Create a new layer above your cat, and use the same red colour as before to paint the blood dripping from it’s mouth.
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Next we will add some text to the poster.
Click on the Text icon and create a text box across the top of the poster.
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Use Arial Black and type your cheesy tagline.
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Then another text box in the lower left corner for the film title.
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You can download the bloody font here, and use the same red colour as before.
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And add another text box for the credits at the bottom.
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Finally we will give the poster some creases.
Download the paper texture form here, and select an area to apply to your poster.
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Take the contrast right up…
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…Then invert the layer.
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Change it’s blending mode to Screen and decrease its opacity to 50%.
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And here’s the final poster design.
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