Creating effective advertisements is one of the biggest jobs for a graphic designer.  The advertising industry is one of the largest employers of graphic designers, but creating advertisements requires a mastery of many different skills.  From photomanipulation, digital painting, 3D, and vector graphics, graphic designers need to have strong skillsets in order to be able to work on a given project.

In this graphic design tutorial, we’ll cover the essential advertising workflow.  By following along with this Photoshop ad tutorial, you’ll see how to take just a simple stock image and build a pixel perfect artwork around it, while also communicating valuable information about the brand to viewers.

If you liked this Photoshop poster tutorial, check out our other graphic design tutorials:

• Harnessing the Power of Geometry for a Creative Nike Shoe Design
• Create a Vibrant and Eye-Catching Drink Composition using Photoshop
• Design and Photomanipulate a Gorgeous Outdoor Cadillac Car Advertisement
• Composite an iMac Render into an Incredible Apple Advertisement
• Combine 3D Geometric Shapes and Flowing Lines for a Sleek iPhone Ad
• Design an Out of this World Laptop Advertisement
• Create a Vibrant Colorful Alcohol Product Ad in Photoshop
• Create an Eco-Friendly Nature Themed Composition

Hope you find this Photoshop tutorial informative!

Final Image Preview

Step 1

First, we need to isolate the photo of Mercedes and put it on a white background.  This will give us the base of our advertisement and a focal point to build around.  The pen tool or magic wand will work best for this extraction.

Then we start to make the shadows with soft round brush.  You can just paint below the extracted car layer on a new layer, based upon where you will place your light source.

Step 2

Invert the background layer using ctrl+i and make a new layer, with soft round brush paint some blue areas behind the car.  Alternately you can create your own fill layer with a different color.

After that, we use a smoke brush and add a little mist on the left.

Step 3

To make it more realistic, I decided to add a clouds texture (http://www.shutterstock.com/pic.mhtml?id=24208522) on the background.

With the layer mask on, we erase the areas on the bottom right corner.

Next, I took a green grass texture and desaturated it using hue/saturation (ctrl+u) or ctrl+shift+u.

Step 4

I think it is a little bit too dark, so we use the adjustment layer – curves and brighten it up.

On new layer, make the left corner a little dark, the light is not going there so strong, that is why we make it darker.  You can paint it with a dark brush and set to Overlay or Soft Light.

I want to make it all in one colour pallete, so we need to use a hue/saturation, colorized check.

Step 5

On the top of the layers we start to adding the trees (http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-photo-1204409-bonsai-tree.php?st=996a73c).

As you see, every tree is blended, so use the curves to make it darker or brighter, and hue/saturation to make it desaturated or more colorful. Don’t forget about the shadows, paint it with a soft round brush just like we did for the car shadows.

Once you’ve added some stock photos, now you can paint the rest with a small brush, use the same colours like the tree and start to paint your wooden root.

Step 6

Now, it is time to make the base. We have a dark and relatively ugly looking grass texture. So we need to search a stock photo, on www.sxc.hu and start to blend the green grass.

Use the layer mask, and erase some areas to fit the texture more.

I found some stock photos of the stones and put it on the bottom of the project, also add one more wooden root on the left.

The same stones I put on the left background, that give as an effect, like the car is staying on rocks.

Step 7

We add the rocks on the background from a mountain texture (http://www.sxc.hu/photo/916133). As you see they don’t fit to the image in terms of color.  To fix this, we use the hue/saturation adjustment layer.

I also paint some mist with soft round brush.

The final touch is the flying birds. This is always a good thing, because birds show you the scale of the illustration… the same is with the people on the images.  The human eye understands certain sizes for things, such as people, or birds, so they help establish a scale for the eye.

Step 8

Now it its almost done, but the adjustment layers will bring it on the next level. :) First a little more contrast with brightness/contrast and new color pallete with a channel mixer.

Final Image