Despite James’s apparent dislike towards Valentine’s Day, there are still plenty of people who like celebrating this day and exchanging presents with their beloved ones. But no matter how much you love your better half, finding the perfect Valentine’s gift can be quite expensive. For those of you with very tight budgets, here’s a cheap way to obtain a truly original present: create your very own Valentine’s card with Photoshop.
1. Open a blank document in Photoshop and fill it with a nice dark blue color. Make it as big as you want your card to be.
2. Grab the Custom Shape Tool (U) and select the heart shape. Draw a big nice heart in a somewhat dark shade of red.
3. Now apply a Drop Shadow effect in white and an Inner Shadow in a lighter red, following the values you can see in these screenshots:
4. You should get something like this. Press Ctrl+T and rotate the heart a bit. When you’re done press Enter to apply the rotation.
5. Now click on the heart and rasterize it. Select the layer by Ctrl+clicking on it and go to Edit > Define Brush Preset to create a new brush based on your heart.
6. Create a new layer and before using your now heart brush, make sure you open the Brush Options window (F5), click on Shape Dynamics and set Angle Jitter to 50%. Now you can start painting some more hearts on the new layer. When you’re happy with the result turn this layer’s opacity down to 20%.
7. Duplicate the heart layer and make it a bit smaller, then apply a slight rotation too.
8. Create a text layer and write your message with a nice font. Then duplicate this text layer, make it as big as the card itself and set its opacity to 20%.
9. Finally, go to Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation and add some red saturation to the two heart layers in order to make them brighter. Your card is done!