Beautiful post introduction images: examples and Photoshop tutorial

Creating visually attractive introduction images is a good step towards a successful blog post. This assumes more significance for posts targeting social media, or typically impatient visitors.

In this post, we take a look at a few examples of introduction images, and a quick Photoshop tutorial on creating one.

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Examples of post introduction images

TechZilo – source post

Hongkiat – source post

Creating the image in Photoshop

1. Open a new image of suitable size (for your blog’s post column width) in Photoshop. In this example, I’m using an image of width 500px and height 400px.
   
2. Drag and drop a suitable background into the image, depending on the topic of your post. I’m dropping this Apple wallpaper into the image, since I’m creating an image for an Apple wallpapers roundup post.
3. Crop the image to fit the drag-dropped Apple wallpaper image.
   
4. Use the Marquee tool (shortcut M) to create a small rectangular selection along the bottom of the image.
   
   Create a new layer and fill the selection with black (#000000). Lower the opacity to 40-60%, depending on the background of the image.
5. Pick any font bold and crisp font (I used Delicious). Using type tool, write the caption for the image in 34 pt Delicious Heavy font of white color. Position it within the fill area that we created in the previous step.
6. Double click the type layer and use the following settings for drop shadow.
   
   Enter the color #c8c8c8 (click the square to the right of Blend mode).

   Use the following settings for the gradient overlay (run a gradient #dddddd to #ffffff):
   

7. The final image would look like this:
   

Of course, this is just one style you can adopt – see the example section above for other styles you can use. Typically, you would need only a semi-transparent background, a good, bold font, a gradient overalay and drop shadow on the font for an intro image.

Here are good lists of Photoshop text tutorials – at Listfied, Photoshop Star and Hongkiat. A Google query on best Photoshop text tutorials will provide you with lots more.

Leave URLs to your intro images in comments (remember, we have dofollow comments here) – it would be fun to see what different people can come up with.