All language subtitles for 1.1 Setting up Photoshop for Pixel Art

Hey, what's up, guys?

Welcome back to my pixel art tutorial

I'm Nelson, and today we're going to be setting up

Photoshop to create pixel art.

So I'll be guiding you through the whole process

and the tools that are essential to making pixel art.

Now, I'm not going to lie

There's a lot of different shortcuts and tools to use

so I'll try to ease you in the best I can.

I'll first show you guys the basic tools

and shortcuts that are the essentials

and move into more complex tools later on.

It's not really necessary to use the complex tools,

but it definitely saves time once you get the hang of it.

Alright, let's just jump into it.

So first, we're gonna want to create a new canvas for our artwork.

You can click the "create new" button or you can go to

"file" at the top left-hand side

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and click new.

Afterwards, you're going to be taken to a new window

called "new document"

Now this step is really important

because the canvas that you create

determines how your pixel art will look like

the preset doesn't particularly matter.

What matters is the dimensions that you put in

So I'm going to choose the "photo" tab.

And then on the right hand side, we have the dimensions

Change it to pixels

and usually I go for the 100-200px range

because that's the look I achieve with my pixel art.

Make sure to change the resolution to 72 DPI.

72DPI is most commonly used for the screen resolution.

So we're going to want to change it to that.

300DPI is more commonly used for printing purposes

so we'll get more into that later

when we want to export our drawing.

Leave everything else the same and click create.

Alright and now we're in our canvas

This is probably going to be one of the longer indepth classes

where I talk about what each and every tool does

so if you guys ever get lost All

I'll include a list of shortcuts in the class notes, so

so you guys can take a look at it anytime.

Now there's a lot to unpack here.

So I'm only going to include the ones that you'll really need.

So we're first going to start off talking about the pencil tool.

Without this tool, we wouldn't be able to make pixel art.

So if you go to the left hand side on the toolbar

you'll notice that it's a brush tool by default.

The brush tool is like an airbrush, now that the canvas is so small.

So what we're going to want to do

is go to the brush tool

go to the icon and hold down on it,

and then you can select the pencil tool.

So what the pencil tool does is that it essentially makes

your brush have hard edges all over

it doesn't have any airbrush effect anymore, its just pixels.

So in theory if you have like a really cool brush already

and use the pencil tool

then you can still make pixel art with a custom brush that you have

but I just use the default round circle brush that Photoshop gives me.

Let's talk about the Eraser tool.

It's also located on the left hand side on the toolbar.

By default, It should still be on the round circle brush that photoshop gives you.

The only change you need to make for pixel art

is that you change the mode from brush to pencil.

This way the eraser will replicate the same settings as the pencil tool.

I didn't really mention this earlier,

but I always keep my hands on the undo button.

So I always keep it on "CTRL + ALT + Z"

so I can just keep undoing things really quickly if I make a mistake.

Other than that, I keep my hands on a copy and paste

which is "CTRL+C" and "CTRL+V"

whenever I want to duplicate an item or something.

All right back to the lesson.

You can also use "CTRL, +" or "CTRL, -" to zoom in and out

and then you can get a better look at your drawing.

Now the pencil tool isn't perfect,

as you can see the circle brush once it gets smaller and smaller

it starts to become a square.

Anywhere less than the 4px range starts to become a square

and then you'll eventually lead up to 1px

I'll also quickly talk about the layers

layers are really important for separating your work

and keeping it organized.

All you really need to know now

is that this button creates a new layer

and this button deletes that layer.

Let's talk about the transform tool now

The only changes you need to make for pixel art art

are to change the interpolation to "nearest neighbor"

Any of the other options like bicubic

will just make your pixel art blurry.

So after you set it to nearest neighbor

finish your transformation by clicking enter.

You'll notice that the pixels are still crispy

but something feels wrong about it, right?

Some of those circles I drew don't really look like circles anymore.

Something feels really off about it.

And that's because the program doesn't understand where

to put the pixels with such a small amount.

So afterwards, you're going to have to go back and

do a little bit of cleanup

to get the shape that you're looking for.

Alright, let's talk about colors now.

When you're using the pencil tool

you can hold "ALT" and use the Eyedropper tool

to select any color on the canvas.

On the bottom left-hand of the toolbar

you'll find these two swatches

and you'll be primarily using that

to get your colors from

so the swatch on the left is the color that you're using right now.

You can click the swatch and then it'll bring up the color picker

Let's try picking a different color this time.

You can also use this little arrow button

to switch between the two swatches you have.

Or you can just press "X" to alternate between the two.

The alternate swatch will show up on top now

and now you can use it for drawing

So if you want to save your file

go to "file" and then "save" and then save it to wherever you want.

Alright guys, so that was already alot to work with

I'll leave you off with that just to get started.

Those were just the bare essentials of what you need to make pixel art.

Please give it a try and let me know

if you guys have any questions about it! I'm always here to help!

Alright guys, so for my next lesson.

I'll be talking about pixel art art fundamentals and the different techniques.

different techniques there are, emphasizing on readability

See you in the next one, bye guys!