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Let’s take an image and quickly create a professional looking “ad” right from a photograph. It always helps to have access to quality stock photography as it will make your role a lot more enjoyable and easier to do. You can also get this design itself from the iPSD Directory

Since the man stands out pretty well from the background, it shouldn’t be that hard to get a selection. I chose to select the background with the magic wand tool on add to selection at 50 as the tolerance.
50 tolerance will get a faster selection here because the similar gray background colors are within range to be selected easier at 50 tolerance (vs. 10 where you would have a narrower selection range). Make sure you select the entire background other than him.

Once you have the selection made of the background go to the layer menu and do Layer via Copy (or Ctrl/Cmd “J”). This will put the selected area of the background onto its own layer. Since it is now on its own layer, we can make adjustments to it while still keeping a copy of the original image untouched.

Now that we have the background onto it’s own layer, go to the Filter: Blur menu and choose Motion Blur. Give it a good distance; here I used 34 pixels with a horizontal effect. You can change the angle by typing in the angle 1-360 or moving the slider and you can preview it in the window and on the image itself (unclick Preview box to turn it off). When you press OK, it will apply the motion blur to the “background” layer.

Now, let’s create a curves adjustment layer. This is just going to give the image a sharper and more saturated effect with the settings I’ve used here. Curves is an advanced way to map light values (in different channels) onto a layer. As complicated as it looks, feel free to just create some ‘points’ in the curves dialog. By dragging them in different directions you can see the results.

In order to create the adjustment layer and to apply to all layers below it; simply make sure you have the top layer selected in the layers palette and go to the adjustment/fill layer icon in the bottom middle of the layers palette. Here you can choose Curves and it will create an independent “adjustment” on top of the rest of the image, creating the effect you will see next.

And here you go. Just add some text that would sound ‘appropriate’ or effective for the type of ad or design you’re making and “voila”. Note the dark brown choice of text color (and location) works well with the image because it enhances background colors quite well. Once you learn to master basic techniques you can start applying them quiet easily across all of your designs.

To recap: we’ve taken a quality stock photograph (from photos.com), selected the background layer (and put it on its own layer... you could decide to keep it on the original if you want), then we put a motion blur on the background layer to provide more of a focal point up front, created a Curves adjustment layer to bring up some contrast and saturation, and then added some text to top it off.  In the Photoshop Designer Package (or Total Package) there are some tutorials on touching up his face to make it a lot "clearer" with the healing brush and patch tool.  If you want more on creating real world advertising then check out my new Madison Avenue design secrets.