okay here we go here i am in Photoshop Elements 11 I'm going to create a nice quick ebook cover maybe something romantic with using all the options that Photoshop automatically gives you and not any additional photos purchased anywhere so let's see here I'm going to click file let's do new blank file I'll call it romance I'm going to title it romance cover the reason I have it 1563 x 2500 and 300 pixels per inch is because this is the optimum size that amazon kindle books say is a great width and height and resolution so i'll start with that i'll leave the background contents at transparent alrighty so we've got these options for our romance cover 1563 pixels 2500 height 300 resolution RGB color and right now i'm going to leave the background contents at transparent because where you'll see will pop in one of the images that photoshop automatically provides us so let's click OK and hopefully you're looking at the same screen that I see with these options over here on the left our tools and this on the right I'm in expert mode and you can see under my view what's going on here what am I oh I'm sorry under my window I have tools checked on layers and panel pin and romance covers just what I've named it okay so let's do this let's go to graphics and as you see you have different options here I'm choosing by type because i'm looking for backgrounds so let's see that you can see they have a plethora of backgrounds here just automatically offered so I thought if we create a nice romance type of cover let's look for something cute that kind of looks cute oh that's cooking you can actually hover over them and they'll give you an idea of what they are so we're not really cooking necessarily but you know what i'm going to double-click that you can see it says downloading asset please wait just to get a better view of what the heck it is there we go oh now I can see that's kind of cute with different utensils very cute I don't know if we'll use that one could be something kind of hot and spicy but I don't know if I'd really want to create that oh there's something cute about love so we have hearts which might go with a nice kind of romantic book some kind of chick lit or stuff I don't even write so okay poinsettias like nice and Christmassy so basically you just scroll down through I kind of like that foot on the beach travel beach scene or beach scene I don't know what the difference is between these two let's double click and get a better view oh it's a footprint in the sand I like that that reminds me of that popular poem footprints in the sand and that's when Jesus carried me I want to double click the one next to it just to see what the difference is because they look similar let's see if we can notice any change it's still downloading because I see it working and I guess it's done and I don't really see a difference so let's go with that okay so we have this nice background it's an image Photoshop already provides in order to put text atop it we're going to choose this horizontal type tool and that's my text how I get text on top of my book color I think white would look kind of nice on top of the sand so I'll click back there and you see what I just did there I didn't mean to create that text box so I'm going to click cancel so I change the color to white let's look for a nice romantic type of text font I'm not a big fan of script because you want it to be readable that curls is kind of cute but we don't want to get too cutesy here I do like this giddyup standard let's just try it and see how it looks and regular doesn't give me any options and it just kind of clicked and I like it right aligned in this instance because we need to work in this area we don't want to write white on top of this white to make it unreadable okay let's do this we're going to start drawing our text box I'll still start here in the corner I'm just holding down my mouse or trackpad clicking on the left side and while it's still held down I'm dragging a nice big text box in fact let's just drag it let's drag it all the way down almost to the length of the photo background but giving it a little bit of room now it's telling me do you like this box green check or cancel I like the box so I'm not going to hit anything yet I'm clicking within the box to start typing I'm going to type a title how and I'm hitting return to love me and as you can see already that is today's small very small so I'm highlighting it just dragging clicking my left side of my trackpad and dragging it down and instead of 36 points let's see how 60 points would look not bad this particular text could stand 72 points let's hit in urdu pull it down a little bit and that's that's good you could even force a larger font in here let's try 95 you know what that almost works just trying to get it situated say if we go down like this we could even look at when this turns you said it if you can see that but it just turned to a narrow so I'm going to pull it down a little bit and I'm going to say ok okie dokie we've dragged that down that box down a little bit once that turned let's click back in the box once that turned to the arrows that's when you can adjust things let's say if you see that I could actually squeeze it like that or out like that so let's kind of leave it right there it goes well and whoop before we say okay I'm going to go ahead and i want to add the author's name you see what happened here i have to click back on the text you can say apply the transformation and back on layers i'm on my text box there we go so i want to hit enter and i'm just going to add the author name at the bottom let me give myself a little more room there we go let's try right around there so I'm here I just hit enter and let's just give it the author name of what's a good name Helen du Bois you can see I kind of went off the page there so what I'm going to do is just highlight her off their name I'm going to make this a little smaller knock it down to 36 points and let's get that too let's knock that down to 36 as well and we could even change the font within the text box that's a little small what I'm going to do are a couple things I'm going to choose a different font for her name let's choose this Cooper standard and I could even Center her name if I want it and instead of oh wait yeah let's italicize that why not that gives you that option blackett Alex different fonts give you different options ok and I'm going to hit enter I'm highlighting her name again because if i want i can change the author name to a different color let's make it this color pastel yellow it's a little hard to see with that here but there we go so looking better looking better and if we want to do something a little bit fancier with the font one thing I want to do is pull that down one little bit oops pull that down just a little so it won't conflict the white won't conflict with the white of the phone ok go ahead and say that looks good making sure everything is spelled correctly how to love me Helen du Bois for example a made-up name next I'll choose filter making sure I'm still on my text box box options actually I'm sorry what choose is I've done this in a while layer layer layer style style settings now with the preview button checked on I can do certain things like add a drop shadow that makes it a little interesting you could even change the color of you drop shadow let's see if we changed it to grey some of these changes are in the distance it's very subtle the glow I love which is less subtle the inner is more subtle but if you click the outer you see that that's kind of nice I kind of like that you can change the opacity of the glow make it hardly any you know the opacity the thickness the see-through the see-through pneus rather we go all the way that way so that's kind of dreamy and romantic go out that way all the way if you want why not the bevel gives it a little depth so it does does that's a hard word to say take it off or put it on I don't know let's take it off I sound like Peter Brady there and the stroke I generally don't like but just to give you an idea of what kind of crazy stuff you could do with a stroke there but we'll take it off for now so that looks good enough and say okay and note the way we drew a text box there we could actually draw a separate text box if you want like different layer styles we could draw a text box only for our title and then a separate text box for the author name and then that way we could play around and do something different let's go back here and if I wanted to I could decide to make this a little bit different instead of that color see how it looks in magenta or since i put the glow on it it turns out kind of pink which is kind of nice if it were like a romantic book so I'll say okay that's still a little hard to read when you click back on text and perhaps give this an even stronger color let's see what red looks like let's make it a little bit perhaps lighter let's see how yellow would look so a lot of it is playing around that's a little bit easier to read and we could move it up and around if we wanted to but for now let's go with this so we've got that background and we've got that text and we're looking good so let's save it file I do say for web I like to keep the options of no preset unnamed I like it jpg maximum quality and since we put in the width to begin with of those optimal sizes we'll go with that I'm going to click Save romance cover is what I've called this particular one and save it and that's it so now whenever we use that ebook cover for whether it's a kindle book whether it's another type of ebook that's how you could use photoshop the backgrounds that they automatically give you under this graphics tab throw some text on top of it and you've got a nice large beautiful optimized cover alrighty happy book writing