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Transcript

We’re now going to look at how we can add images into our creative projects. Again, these practices will be applicable no matter what type of media you’re creating. We’re using a template I found on ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Express and we’re going to use ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Stock imagery to replace the photo from the templates with a photo that suits our purpose better. I’m able to do this just by dragging images on top of the image that’s within the template image under templates is cropped to a circle. So when I drag a new image, it will take on that same crop and we’ll look at cropping in a bit more detail in just a second.

But many of us will be starting with templates, so this is a nice way of just replacing media with new media that fits our purpose better.

We can even add on to the background like I do here. It’s got a filter on it. So the apples are now pink, but if we don’t want to replace any media, we can just drop it into this kind of gray space outside of the image and then we can manipulate its position just by dragging it across the canvas. Just showing you the layers panel on the right hand side as well. You can rearrange your layers there.

We can also search for images. So I’m just going to search for ice cream. Drag and drop. And we even get a quick preview before we even release the image into that cropped shape.

We can change the crop. So from this circle, we can change it to a free form, a love heart, a diamond as I’m showing on screen here, and just drag the little handles on the corners to manipulate the shape of the crop.

It’s nondestructive so we can just jump back into crop and change the shape of the crop.

We can also upload from device. So with that same folder I’ve been using for the last couple of demonstrations, I have this nice photo of our ice cream on the kitchen counter. Now it’s not going to take the shape of the crop automatically, but with our crop tool we can change the shape and the crop at any point.

That’s put it back to the original.

I’m just going to move some of these elements around and I’m going to flip them horizontally just using those mirror buttons on the left hand side so we can flip vertically or horizontally. And both of these, in my opinion, just need to be flipped horizontally to fit the image a bit better.

We can hop into adjustments done so once we have any image selected, we can change the contrast. Brightness, highlights, shadows or saturation. So make it a black and white warmth. So cooler or warmer. And with the detail we can add some sharpness and some blur as well.

We also have effects. So think of these as filters.

We can choose colors from a brand case or from the page theme or just recommended colors that express give to us so we can get really creative with some of these. What we do have some presets which reduce commonly up on the top. So a darker tint it darken it grayscale and these are kind of sepia as and we can edit these at any point as well.

We have a couple of basic blending modes within Express two, which can be useful when you want to change how colors blend with other colors on lower layers.

So I searched for a paper texture and I’m going to use my blend modes here to multiply one in fact. And now our image has a nice papery texture because of the blending modes that I’ve added.

If you’re a Photoshop user, you’ll be accustomed to having this sort of functionality within your creative tool. So it’s nice to see that same functionality appear in Express.

Just very lastly, you may have noticed me doing this in this demonstration, but we can also crop an image just by dragging the handlebars on the edge of the frame.