The next couple steps

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The next couple steps, just go ahead and create some text on top of the green screen. This will be our magazine content directory. Use the same font for these. Go ahead and create a text layer and duplicate it twice, put these in a layer set.

In the layer set, select each layer and drag it down. You can use View: Rulers and drag in guidelines to line up the exact placement of each layer. Drag each layer down to an equal distant place. Yes, they are all still the same text...we will change this soon.

When you have three of these layers total in the layer set, you can drag the layer set down to the new layer icon and create an exact duplicate. Do this and drag this new layer set down using your guidelines again and rulers to get it in an equidistant space.

Now you can go ahead and change the foreground color to white and create some more text. Make the font size smaller and create some complimentary text as such. Typography is an important part of magazine design. Note that there is still some contrast between the text and the background because we want to make the text at least a little legible.

Create another text layer as such that you can put on some darker background...this also works good for balance of the entire design. You can get this .psd design itself from the iPSDirectory when you order my Photoshop Designer or Total Package (includes er'thing).

Go ahead and create a new layer set and drag these white text layers into the folder and label it “whitetext”. Now...the cool thing about creating these separate layers for our directory (yes we could have created one text layer but that gives us less flexibility) is that we can independently adjust, move or add layer effects. Go ahead and move each layer compensating for the length as shown (I moved the shorter ones to the right keeping in mind that I want it to look appealing and balanced). Note that I have a layer set within a layer set; this is available only in the all new Photoshop CS).

Now you can go ahead and do something wacky with any of the independent layers. Just make sure to select the layer within the set itself. Here I’ve added a gradient overlay and changes the angle and attributes. This brings a special visual function to this layer to make it stand out. You couldn’t do this if this was all just one text layer because it would apply to all of the text lines.