Huge collection of free nature & science images & poster tutorial

The Biodiversity Heritage Library provide free access to their recourses, including thousands of scanned copies of books which are no longer under copyright. I've collected a few of my favourite images from the site below. As always, double check the links to make sure that the images are still copyright free when you come to use them in your projects. Scroll down to see how I used one of them to mock up a simple poster design.

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Poster Tutorial

Open a new A4 document in Photoshop and paste in a copy of the fox image.

Hit M to select the Marquee tool and draw a rectangle around the brown edge. Hit delete to remove it.

 Right click on the Marquee tool and select Eliptical Marquee. Type 10 in the Feather box, this will create a soft, feathered edge to the shape.

Draw an ellipse around the fox and press CTRL C and CTRL V to copy paste it. Toggle the eye on the original fox layer to hide it for now.

Hit I to select the Eyedropper tool, click somewhere on the sandy part of the image to select that colour (try to pick the bit that seems to form the majority of the background colour).

Select the background layer and press Shift F5 to open the fill tool. Select foreground colour and press ok.

Create a new layer behind the fox layer and press B to select the Brush tool. Using a watercolour brush (you can download some for free here) we can start to extend the painting. Use the Eyedropper tool to select the appropriate colours.

Work your way around the edge of the fox image, adding splashes of watercolour where you feel appropriate. Experiment with the different brushes and layering the colours until you are happy with the effect.

Click on the fox image layer and select the clone stamp tool. Holding down the Alt key, click on part of the creamy background colour, next to the Fox 1/3 wording near the bottom. A bullseye will appear.

Hold down the left mouse button and drag the circle over the wording. Keep clicking and dragging until the wording has disappeared. You can find a tutorial on using the clone stamp here.

Type in the details for your poster. I used fonts AdornsS Condensed and Hummingbird.

Tada!

Photo Typography Tutorial

Open a new document, size A4

Select Image, Image Rotation, then select 90° clockwise

Choose Text (or hit T on the keyboard)

Choose font (Impact) size 90

Type “escape the ordinary” in capital letters 

Click on the Move tool and drag the words to bottom of screen

   

Go to Pixabey click download and save this image https://pixabay.com/en/alpine-lake-turquoise-water-person-768638/  (I used the 1920×1271 one)

Open it up in Photoshop and press Ctrl A then Ctrl C to copy the image.

Paste it into your Escape the Ordinary document by hitting Ctrl P 

 

Making sure the image layer is selected, hit Ctrl T to open the Transform tool

Hover the mouse over one corner of the image and the curser will change into a diagonal arrow. Hold down the shift key and pull on the corners of the image until it fills the page.

It will be slightly too wide so just position it roughly in the centre.

Click on Layer 1 and drag it below the text layer. Double click Layer 1 and rename it Image

Hit M on the keyboard to select the Marquee tool

Draw a selection (click and drag) so that it's the same width as the letter E, then drag it up to the top of the screen. 

Click the create a new layer button (bottom of the layer palette) 

 

and hit Shift F5. This opens the fill tool. Click on the Contents box and select black. Hit OK and (with the marquee tool selected) click anywhere on the screen to remove the marquee box. 

Repeat for all of the other letters. As a shortcut you can copy any duplicate letters in the word. Drag Layer 1 down to the new layer button to duplicate it. You can also duplicate any of the filled boxes and use the Transform tool (T) to make it fit the next letter. 

On curved letters like the “S” and "P" the edges wont look very neat. You can tidy this up by beginning the marquee box lower down the letter. Fill it with black then make a small marquee selection over the curve detail and press backspace to delete.

Draw a marquee box below the curved part of the letter

Fill with black then draw another box over the interior curve

Press Backspace to delete the inside of the box (make sure you have the fill layer selected!)

Once you are done making any adjustments you can merge the layers together. Select the top marquee layer, hold down shift and click on the bottom marquee layer to select them all. Right click and select “merge layers.” 

Right click on the text layer and select “rasterize font”

Left click on the text layer, hold CTRL and click on the merged marquee boxes layer so both are selected. Right click and select “merge layers”.

Reduce the opacity of the text layer to 50%. We want any interesting features to be within the bounds of the letters but the man in the centre of the image is not quite in the best place. 

Select the move tool and make sure you have the image layer active. Move it around until you are happy with its placement.

Click on the Magic Wand tool (or press W on your keyboard). 

Click anywhere on the first letter “E”. Right click and select “similar”. This will select all of the extended letter (You'll see marquee boxes around each letter).

Right click again and select “inverse”. Click on the image layer and hit backspace on your keyboard to remove the image outside of the letters.

Click anywhere on the page to remove the selection.

On the layers section, toggle the eye switch next to the text (this hides the text layer without deleting it).

Let’s just tidy up the image a little more before we finish and remove the faint sky detail from the right hand side.

Click CTRL L to open the Levels tool. Change Input Level 255 to 235 (or you can click on the right hand slider and move it slightly the left) and Input Level 0 to 30 (or slide it to the right). Click Ok.

Fin! You can save it as a JPG if you want to keep the white background. Or you can toggle off the background layer and save it as a PNG instead.