We like memes, obviously. If you do too, and you want to make an internet meme that wildly spreads across the web, makes you really popular with your friends, and launches you into a professional career as a famous memer, check out this tutorial! Not only will you learn some very basic uses of photoshop, but you’ll also learn how to make the best kind of meme: a cat meme.
What you’ll need to complete this tutorial:
- Adobe Photoshop
- A huge sense of humor along, with some helpful joke making tips like this.
- A Bigstock account
1. Download a hilarious cat image from Bigstock. For this tutorial, download this extremely funny image, titled “two friends kittens dancing and speaking”. Download the small size.
2. Open the image in Photoshop and crop it. Open the cat image in Photoshop. Select the crop tool from your toolbar on the left side of your workspace. Click and drag the crop area you want for your meme. For this tutorial, we are making a square. Maintain square proportions by holding down shift when you click and drag. For maximum hilarity, leave enough space above and below the dancing cats for some large type, which is usually done by eyeballing and estimating. You also don’t want to block too much of your subject, and you want to keep your subject close to the center. When you select a crop that makes you LOL, click the checkmark at the top of your workspace (or hit enter) to apply it.
3. Create your top message and style the text. Select your text tool from your tool bar. Click on the top area of your cat photo. Type out “Jerry is that you?” or whatever line you want to write, as long as it’s hilarious. Click the checkmark at the top of the screen (or hit enter) to apply the type. Open your Character Palette, which you can toggle on/off, on the right side of your screen, or if it’s not open, go to Window > Character in the menu bar. Here you can apply several attributes to your type.
Select “Impact” from the font menu, because it’s the funniest font on the internet. For this tutorial, give your type a size of 57 pt, but generally you want your top text to almost fit the width of the image. Click the pull down options menu (on the right hand corner of the character palette) and select “All Caps”, because all caps is funnier. This will automatically make your text all caps. Click the color swatch to edit the text color. A color picker dialogue box will open.
Click and drag to the upper left hand corner of the color picker to get “meme white”. You can also type all zeroes in the CMYK fields as shown above. Click “OK” and now your text is white.
4. Give your text a black outline. In the Layers Palette, double click on the text layer just to the right of the title. Your Layer Style dialogue box should pop up. Give your text an outline by clicking on the “stroke” box. If you click on word “stroke” you should be able to edit the stroke. On the option that says “size”, slide the tab until it says “10″. Click on the color box and when your color picker box opens, click and drag to the lower left corner of the picker. This will give your text a thick black stroke, which is known to give funny internet jokes emphasis. Click OK.
5. Duplicate and move your text. In the layers palette, click and drag your text layer to the “Create a New Layer” tab at the bottom of the palette. This will duplicate the layer.
With one of your text layers selected, select your move tool in the tool bar. On the image, click and drag the type layer. Move it to the bottom of your image. Now your meme should be starting look pretty darn funny.
6. Type in your extremely hilarious punchline and center the text. Double click the text and you will get a cursor to type. Select all of the type and replace it with “It’s Been what? 20 Years?” or whatever uproariously funny joke you would like to type. Insert a return anywhere in the type so as to make it fit on the image in two lines.
Open the paragraph palette and select the “center text” button.
Open the character palette and adjust the leading to be 55 points by typing “55 pt” in the leading field.
7. Center align the text . With both text layers selected, go to the Layers menu in the top menu bar. Select Layer > Align > Horizontal Center. This will center align the two text layers. By this point, you should be laughing uncontrollably.
8. Size and Save the image for the internet. If you’ve managed to make it this far without giggle tears blurring your vision, Go to Image > Image Size and a dialogue box will appear. Go the Resolution field and type in “72″ which is the proper resolution for a web image. In this case it will automatically make the pixel size 501, which is also about right for an internet meme. Click OK.
Finally you are ready to save your image as a jpeg. Go to File > Save As and save your image as “hilarious_cat_meme.jpg” and now you have a funny internet-ready file. Here’s what our final product looks like:
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