In order to make a movie poster in Photoshop you need a couple of photographs to put in the poster. It is important to include photos in your poster because a poster with just text would certainly not be as interesting. First you need to shoot and process your photographs in Photoshop so they match the theme and style of the movie that the poster is for. For my poster I have chosen to give my photographs slightly cartoon look because in my research I noticed that many classic film noir posters (e.g. "Double Indemnity") were made this way. I have achieved this look of my pictures by using a combination of Artistic filters in Photoshop.
After you make your photographs look as you like you can start creating your poster. First you have to choose background you want to use. I have used plain black background as I think that it works best for film noir posters. Then you can place your photos pm the background and, using layer masks, hide the parts of the photos that you do not want to have in your poster.
Another thing that a poster needs is text. It should include the title of the movie, names of the main actors and other things like date of premiere or a few words that are supposed to encourage people to go and see the movie. Important thing to remember is not to include too much text. The posters are often placed next to streets and are read by drivers so too much text would distract them. Therefore the amount of text in a movie poster should be limited to just the things stated above. It is also good to match the style of the text (font) to the film style. The picture below shows how I have made my poster.
The layers of the poster file are:
- Black background
- Layer 1 and Layer 2 containing the photographs used for the poster. I have added a slight red shadow for Layer 2 by right-clicking the layer and selecting Blending Options.
- Four text layers (one for each line of text), also with effects added.
- Layer containing an 18 age rating picture with Outer Glow effect used to make the picture merge into the background.
In order to produce a timeline of photographs in Photoshop you need to open all the photos as layers in one Photoshop file. To do it, go to File-->Scripts-->Load files into stack and select all your images you want to use in your timeline. Once all the photographs are opened you need to activate the Animation window by clicking Window-->Animation. It will cause the Animation window appear on the screen. Then you need to create the timeline by adding new frames to your animation (small icon called Duplicate selected frame). The rule of adding new frames is that the top visible layer will appear as each frame. In order to select the photo as a new frame you have to create a new frame and Alt+click the small Eye icon next to the layer. Once you do it, you can set the time for each frame. To do it click the small arrow underneath the frame and select delay time. You can do it for multiple frames at once by selecting all the frames you want to change the time for before selecting the delay time. The picture below shows part of my timeline with time set up for each frame.

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