• Creating a Banner:
• Extend Background
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Create Banner in Photoshop CS3 by extending Background

In this tutorial, I'll show you how I created a banner ad using a stock illustration purchased from istockphoto.com. You will see techniques on how to extend the background to fill a 468 pixel banner.

This what the finished ad will look like ...

The left side is left empty for ad text and graphics, which I'll show you in future tutorials.

This is the stock illustration that I used after sizing it down to a height of 100px.

The stock image number is 2060673 from istockphoto. If you are following along with this tutorial, you would need to purchase this stock photo for your use or find another similar stock image.

1. I am going to create a standard "full banner" ad that is 468 pixels wide and 60 pixels high. So I create a new document of that size in Photoshop.

2. Because I want the illustration to be as large as possible but yet still fit into a height of 60px, I want to crop the top and bottom of the illustration. After zooming in closer, I used the crop tool and crop as shown...

3. That is just perfect, because I also had cropped off the rounded corners. The cropped image turned out to be 79px high. So do "Image -> Image Size" and change the height to 60px to match the height of our banner.

4. Using the Rectangular Marquee tool, I select the stock image and do Ctrl-C to copy.

5. Do Ctrl-V in banner document to paste at right edge of banner.

6. Now I fill in the rest of the background. Zoom in close so I don't strain my eyes. Draw a marquee as shown with the top of the marquee matching the height where the color changes...

7. I want to set the foreground color to be the bottom red color. I click the foreground color swatch to open up the Color Picker dialog which gives me an eyedropper cursor. Using the eyedropper cursor, I click on the bottom red color and click OK to the Color Picker dialog.

8. Using the Paint Bucket Tool, click inside the marquee to paint it red.

Do Ctrl-D to de-select the marquee.

9. If you see any color artifacts like the below, you can use a paint brush to paint over them. The foreground color of the brush should be the same color already. You can adjust the size of your brush by pressing the [ or the ] key.

Most likely, you will have to zoom in close for this type of work. Do Ctrl-Alt-0 to zoom back out to 100% scale.

10. Now I want to dupicate the top background. I make a selection as shown making sure that I don't cut any flowers.

11. Do Ctrl-C to copy. Then do Ctrl-V to paste. Now you should have a new layer containing the copied background. Use the Move tool to move this copied background to the left so that it leaves no seams.

12. I am going to merge the Layer 2 and Layer 1 so that it is easier to work with. With Layer 2 selected, bring up the context menu and select Merge Down.

13. Now we just have one layer. But there is a "hole" in the background due to the partial white laptop that we captured in the original marquee.

Use the same technique of copy, paste, move, and merge down to fill in that hole.

14. Copy a new section of the background and continue the copy-and-paste process until you have the full background filled. One you have did one Ctrl-C, you can simply to do multiple Ctrl-V without needing to do another copy.

15. Alternatively, you can drag the copied layer to the "new layer" icon to duplicate it.

17. After many layers, I like to select all of them and Merge Layers.

16. Finally, I do "File -> Save for Web and Device" and select JPG format. Because the top background has a gradient, the JPG format will give you a better gradient transition than in GIF format.

17. Here is the final result...

In future tutorials, I'll show how to add ad text and graphics to the left side of the banner.