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Creating Social Media Ads with Photoshop Course (2 days)

This two day trainer led course looks at creating Social Media adverts using Adobe Photoshop. The course focuses on digital adverts for Instagram, Facebook, Linkedin, Pinterest and Twitter. The course is ideal for marketing staff responsible for their company’s social media and email campaigns.

This Social Media course includes

• 2 days trainer led in small groups
• Your own printed course manual
• Course files & exercises to take away
• Choice of PC or Mac for training
• Professional environment with high spec computers
• Refreshments throughout the day
• Lunch provided
• Printed course certificate
• Post course support via email
• Access to our FREE workshop days

Photoshop Overview

Creating social media banners, graphic images and designs with Adobe Photoshop is a highly desirable skillset. It’s a great alternative to platforms like Canva and Crello if you are the kind of person who prefers absolute creative control.

Photoshop is part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud and it is estimated that over 90% of professional designers use it for photo editing, compositing, animation, and graphic design.

Our Social Media Ads with Photoshop course aims to familiarise you with advert sizes and requirements of all the leading social platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, Linkedin, Pinterest and Twitter.

The course will show you how to compose eye-catching graphic adverts, as well as short animated GIFs, that can be used on all social media and email campaign platforms.

Which Photoshop course should I do?

This course will focus specifically on social media content creation (adverts, banners etc). This course includes working with artboards and animation techniques within Photoshop’s Timeline panel that are not covered on our other courses.

The Introduction to Adobe Photoshop course covers a wider number of tools and techniques, including selections, image repairs and adjustments and how to export for print and web. If you want a broader overview of Photoshop, then the introduction course is for you.

Course Outcomes

At the end of this training course, students will be able to build social media adverts with Photoshop by :

• Understanding the individual sizes used by social media platforms for adverts and banners
• Learning how to import graphic content and reusable assets
• Creating accurate colourways that match your branding
• Working with typography, icons, photos and layer effects
• Exporting content in appropriate file formats for social media

Course Requirements

To attend the Social Media Adverts with Adobe Photoshop course you should have experience using either the Windows or the Mac operating systems, be capable of basic file management and know how to use standard menus and commands.

No previous design or graphics/image editing software experience is required, however, a basic knowledge of graphic design, a bit of creative flair and an eye for detail are always helpful. Previous experience using any of Adobe's Creative Cloud software is also beneficial but not essential.

Course Description

The course starts with a brief discussion about your own brand(s) and which social media platforms you will be targeting. Understanding your own audience, and your goals, will better allow you to create content for your targeted platform

.

Once in Photoshop, we will do a quick tour of the interface and discover which tools and settings you will use most often. Based on your target social media platform, we will build documents with preset dimensions while enabling Photoshop's artboards to allow multiple size adverts for different platforms - eg. Instagram vs Twitter.

The course instructor will provide you with sample assets (graphics, icons, logos) but you are welcome to bring along your own media. We will look at assembling layers of content and positioning them at the correct ratios within the advert or banner. The benefits of using Smart Objects will be discussed and how these will provide a non-destructive method of building Photoshop templates.

Typography is a very important part of the Social Media adverts you’ll create in Photoshop. We will discuss the differences between serif, sans-serif and slab-serif fonts and how they can benefit your digital media creations. We will talk about font sizing, tracking, kerning and leading and how they affect your advert.

Many Social Media adverts include a focus image, some text and then a number of elements like standard shapes, custom shapes and icons. During the course we will look at how Photoshop deploys vector shapes and paths. There will also be some time spent looking at reusable assets from stock libraries that can speed up the creation of content.

The course then looks at how we can use Photoshop to create animated adverts and banners. We will talk about the requirements for animation in Photoshop and the use of both Frame based animation and Video/Property based animation. We will cover keyframing and techniques for managing short animated adverts.

Finally, the training course will look at exporting content from Photoshop in a number of different web formats including JPG, PNG, SVG and GIF. For those wanting to talk about video formats, the course trainer will be happy to do so.

Social Media with Photoshop Highlights

The course covers the following areas :

• Photoshop Quickstart
  • The Photoshop Interface
  • Creating New Documents
  • Social Media Advert Sizes
  • Working with Artboards
  • Setting up your Brand Colourways
• Editing Social Adverts
  • Understanding Resolution & Image Size
  • Importing Photos
  • Resizing Images
  • Understanding Smart Objects
  • Aspect Ratios
  • Working with Layered Content
  • Transforming Layers
• Typographic Design
  • Understanding Type Terms
  • Formatting Type
  • Kerning, Tracking, Leading
  • Type on a Path

• Shapes and Effects
  • Creating Basic & Custom Shapes
  • Applying Effects like Gradients, Shadows & Strokes
  • Working with Blend Modes & Opacity
  • Adding Reusable Frames
  • Using Flat Lays & Stock Media
• Animating Social Adverts
  • Understanding the Timeline Panel
  • Preparing Layers for Animation
  • Creating Keyframes
  • Animating Properties using Tweens
  • Timing your Animation Elements

• Typographic Design
  • How Photoshop Treats Type
  • Formatting Type
  • Kerning, Tracking, Leading
  • Type on a Path
  • Warping Type
  • Character & Paragraph Panels
• Preparing Files for Online
  • Web File Formats (PNG, GIF, JPG, SVG)
  • File Sizes for Web
  • Web Colour Spaces
  • Exporting Artboards for the Web
  • Exporting Animated GIFs

Photoshop Course Feedback - 4.8 out of 5.0 stars

"- Covered a large amount of things in a lot of detail in just 2 days therefore it was great value for money and it was a worthwhile training experience - Great course materials e.g. example images to practice on and course training book - Delivered very well - clear for people with minimal experience - It's given me practical training in how to use the most important elements of Photoshop for my job in marketing. It's given me the confidence to experiment more with Photoshop and to be able to work more efficiently It's inspired me to learn how to use other Adobe products" - Josie

"Although it has a structure the trainer is willing to be flexible spending more time in areas people are wanting to and shortening areas that everyone not find relevant - Was a good course with knowledgeable trainer in relaxed environment, where all questions silly or complex were considered with the same thoughtfulness" - Sharlean @ Paragon Customer Communications

Course Trainer

Bjorn is an Adobe Certified Instructor and Adobe Certified Expert in Photoshop, the industry recognised certification for Adobe products.

He has been involved in working with and training Adobe products for over 15 years. He has a wealth of experience using Photoshop and Lightroom for editing digital media for use in print, web and video campaigns.

Having insights into both the design and development worlds, he is able to understand the capabilities of design packages such as Illustrator, Flash and Photoshop as well as develop with server side platforms such as PHP.

Course Software

The trainers of our Adobe training courses are familiar with most previous versions of Adobe's Creative Suite and therefore will be able to guide your learning no matter which version of the software you have. We try to provide course content that is generic to versions CS3 to CS6, but your trainer will also showcase the features of the latest version. Currently we demonstrate the functionality of the Adobe Creative Cloud suite.

Course Location

This Social Media Ads with Photoshop training course is run from our rooms on Jubilee Campus in Nottingham, which is part of the University of Nottingham's Innovation Park. These are serviced by a state-of-the-art tram system allowing easy access to the city centre as well as direct hourly rail services from London, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Derby and Leicester.