This Burger Magazine Advertisement is part of a student project in Lindsay Marsh's Online Photoshop Masterclass. The mock client wants an ad with minimal text and they also want the burger to be the largest element on the page. They want something exciting and vibrant with a simple call to action to view their website for the Hot and Juicy Burger.

First I isolated my burger in Photoshop and touched it up with a few adjustment layers and using the brush tool to paint some of the green, red, and brown colors manually to make everything look as fresh as possible. I did not like the drop shadow FX on the burger so I manually brushed my own shadows under the burger. I used a large brush with a low opacity to get some general shading and then I painted another shadow layer of a much smaller brush with a higher opacity where the bun meets the wooden board below it. I also painted similar shadows behind the wooden board where it meets the background.

I created the background with the cracked stone wall image (shown below) and I used the patch tool to get rid of the lantern. I then added a color overlay, pattern overlay, and gradient overlay with opacity and color adjustments to make it look balanced. Red and Yellow colors stimulate appetite so it was easy to choose those colors for this project and the green in Juicy was chosen to balance with the green lettuce colors and to represent "fresh" and "juicy".

The last step was to add in some effects to my lettering. I experimented with different blending modes of my two fire photos to make the fire go mostly behind the word "HOT". I then used a mask layer and brushed some parts of the letters to make it blend better. I used a smoke photo behind the flames with a low opacity as well. I isolated the splash drops from the "fresh strawberry" photo (shown below) to make the two splash images behind the word "Juicy". My final touch was to add a fade to black gradient at the top and bottom of the ad along with some spots where I added a few more faint shadow spots with the brush tool at a low opacity.

I found a photo of a bus stop ad on www.pexels.com and used it to create a mockup for my Burger Ad. The mock client plans on using the ad in magazines, digitally online, and also used in situations such as at a bus stop for marketing campaigns in high traffic areas. I placed my ad over the bus stop photo in Photoshop and used Edit>Transform>Skew to line up the corners nicely. Then I added a Gaussian Blur and used the brush tool to make very subtle light shadows in the upper left area. I also added inner shadow FX since the light source is coming from directly behind.

Here are the photos I used to create my layout. I found all of these on www.pexels.com by searching keywords such as food, burger, texture, fire, hot, smoke, fresh, and juicy. I would then isolate the parts of the images I needed in Photoshop with the magic eraser tool and erase tool to then bring into my Burger Ad File. I also used the patch tool to edit some of the images such as removing the salad bowl from the picture on the top right so that it is just a wooden board to place under the Burger in my ad.