So at this point, you've planned out your board, essentially, you have the idea of the concept or visuals that you're going to use to make your board and you need a tool to go and do that. Now there's a bunch of different tools or methods that you could go to create this, of course. You might have Photoshop and you can easily edit some photos together and sort of make a collage of some type. You might also have InDesign and InDesign is a great tool and allows you to put images inside of these boxes, essentially, and mask them to that space. Super useful. The challenging things with that is you need Creative Cloud, of course, and they kind of work standalone and then you can take some time to go and do. InDesign is used for publications and Photoshop is used for image editing. So Moodzer fits in this sort of a niche in between this. It's also a free product, you can just jump in there and create a board very easily.
So I'm on the homepage for this latest version of Moodzer, which is beta.moodzer.com. And as it says, the ultimate mood board maker. So Moodzer makes it really easy to create a mood board or a collage of images for whatever project you need it for. Here's a couple of sample boards. We're going to make something like this earth tones board today. And again, you get this grid and it also has some really cool image editing features already built in. You don't need to bring it into another tool or anything like that. So to get started, just click on the red button that says get started for free and you're into your board. So this is the board creation tool. Up top, you have the title of your board and here you can add images to your board. You have a couple of simple tools up tops, add an image, add color, and control the gutters. You can also export and we'll get to that.
So at this point, though, you should already have some images ready to go. I have a folder here of some earth toned images from a collection I found on Unsplash. And so these are pretty large photos from anywhere from two megabytes to 3.7 megabytes. If you find high quality photos, for example, open up this one here. That's a pretty big photo. You might find photos on Behance or screenshots or some stuff on Pinterest and they're going to be a lot smaller. The bigger your photos are here, the longer it's going to take to upload those, just like any other tool. So I'm going to upload roughly about 20 megabytes right here. Now you can upload images up to the max size of 10 megabytes, though, you probably don't need to upload an image that large, you could really just take a screenshot of something and that'll work just as well. So you can see here it is uploading and it's uploaded, it takes a couple seconds, of course, to get all these images up onto the internet, essentially, and to your board.
And so they all are there and already kind of fills in my board and I could be done there. I could literally just drag this down and kind of fill the rest of the board space up and I could call it a day and export that, it's ready to go. But I have the ability to collage and move things and do all of that and I'd like to take advantage of that. So we'll start with this main image here. So this acts as an image unit. Each unit has anchors at the corners and the mids essentially vertical and horizontally. You also have the ability to edit the image, duplicate the image, and trash the image. And then to move the image, just select anywhere on the image space here and just drag it where you want to take it. So you'll see the little gray outline box or shadow box that kind of shows you where it's going to go. And then I'm going to make this a little bit larger, so I will grab the bottom one and drag it down.
Some of these other units, I can just sort of move around. As I go through it, I don't really like this image, so I'll just click trash and it'll say, "Do you want to delete this unit?" I'll say, "Yes," and I'll remove it. The next image, I really like this image, that's cool. This pottery one's cool, but maybe it's a little bit too large. The cup of coffee is not really doing anything for me, so I'll delete that image as well. Cool, so I'll move this down below here. I like this pink background tabletop shot image, so I'll make that larger. I'm going to make this pottery image a little bit smaller and you can see it when I make the units larger the art board automatically, essentially that white board behind, automatically gets larger as I scale this unit.
This hand, this photo of this couple there, that's kind of interesting, but maybe I want to zoom in on the hands or, I don't know. Maybe I can use some of this pattern actually for something that might be interesting. So to do that, I'm going to make this a smaller unit. This is the smallest unit you can make. You can see the edit tools and there's a little bit of space to the left of it to size it and move it around. So maybe I'll do something about that size and then I'm going to edit it and you'll see where this little tiny box, but then we can scale this image and it's proportionate to the size that that unit will be. So if I drag on the scale tool, you can see these are really big images, I have a lot of space I can zoom into. I really like that texture, but I wish it had a little bit more contrast. So I can go over to my effects here and I can apply some contrast to it, maybe brighten it up a little bit as well.
And then I want to lower the desaturation so it still kind of matches the rest of the board. That looks pretty good. Now, while I'm in here, I have some other options. I have flip vertically, horizontally rotate, and I have fit to space. And here you saw some of these. I have hue, saturation, contrast, and brightness. And for these image effects, I can do some really cool stuff. I got multiply screen, overlay lighten, and I can change the color of these to any color I want and get a very interesting effect. I also have the ability to add type on top of it and the type will show up in that space, I can choose a various type faces. And I have some sizing, some font weights, alignment tools, centering, changing the color, the tracking of the essential letter spacing, and the line height of the texts that I go and add. But anyways, this is good for now. Now once I set that cropping of that unit, if I was to rescale this, it's going to essentially reset it because it's saying I want a different cropping because you're changing the proportions of that image at this point.
So for this, I think is good for now, but I'm going to move some things around a little bit and see where that takes us. So we'll get rid of this. I like this pottery photo so I'm going to bring in, maybe zoom in a little bit on the hands. That looks pretty good there. And now I have a little bit of that sort of texture in here. This is an interesting photo here with the text. Maybe we want to get closer into that and maybe do something like that. I don't really like the composition, but for that horizontal sort of look, so I'm going to move this over here and then drag this and then maybe I'll scale this up like that. And then I should be able to see that the composition is different, I can now bring in and maybe set up a little bit more interesting composition based on this... Yeah, that's looking a little bit nicer, so it kind of brings you into that content there. I got a couple of empty spots here and I'd like to adjust this a little bit, so I'll bring this up a little bit like so, kind of center that. And then I will fill in a color unit maybe into this space.
So if you click on this color swatches, this little color palette, I guess, you could say, click on this edit icon, it brings up a color selector. So I can go and immediately choose a color here. Or I can click on this eye picker or color picker here and if I click on that, I can go and choose one of the colors from the scene, essentially, or my board. So I'm going to go with this dark reddish brown color and immediately it brings it back open into that. I'm going to duplicate this. Now I have two of those and the second one, I'm going to do the same thing, but this time I'm going to pick a different color. I kind of like maybe there's a green or a pink tone. So I'm going to go with this pink tone and I'll do one more. I'll take this one and kind of shrink it down like so and then I'll zoom in a little bit closer in on those hands now. That's kind of interesting, maybe something like that. And then I have a space for another unit, I'll click add duplicate icon on that one. Then if I hover on this edit, I'll select the color picker one last time and this time I going to maybe get some green or something in there. Let's see how this green here looks with it.
So these are my colors now. I got a little bit of type, I got my photos. These are looking pretty good. If I wanted to go further, I could go and edit some of this. This is a little bit too dark, so I could go into this and maybe brighten this up, bring up a little bit of that contrast really quick and click save. Now, you'll see you have a little bit of a border there on this image. That's because it's coming up really close to that edge. If I just scaled this up a little bit and then maybe I'll move it over some. That's quite a bit, you'll see that's gone now and I've cut that sort of out of that space.
Okay, the final thing that I might want to go and do, scale this up a little bit and kind of bring her into to the shot. Maybe that's a little bit too much and you can see this goes way up. That's quite a high resolution photo. If your resolution of the photo isn't that great, you're not going to have such a large scale capabilities. So the bigger the photos that you have, obviously, the better that's going to be. So maybe something like that looks pretty good. Again, I can do the same thing here, I maybe we can boost the contrast up a little bit, or I can reduce contrast if I want that sort of gray and misty kind of look. Bring up the brightness a little bit, that looks pretty good. And now I have nice sort of brightness, I have some colors, I got some text. Maybe this photo could use a little bit of brightness. I can boost the brightness just a tad on that as well and I've brightened that up as well.
Okay, so this is all ready to go. I can now turn off gutters if I want. So this is without gutters, you can see all the images sort of merged together. This is something that you could easily get away with InDesign. If you want gutters on, that's a hard thing to go and pull off in InDesign. You'd have to use strokes and then the strokes wouldn't exactly line up. So it makes a really nice sharp grid when you add gutters to it. I used to do everything with just this without gutters and I liked that look, but lately I love the gutters, it makes everything look so fresh and modulized and organized, I guess. So I like my board, it looks pretty cool, I'm happy with this. I can click on this export button and I have some options to PNG, JPEG and PDF. I'm going to choose a PNG. And right now it's going to process this board now convert it to a PNG and then download it to our computer here.
So, obviously if you have a lot more images, it's going to take a little bit longer to create. And so there's our board. You can see it's quite large, takes up my whole screen, which is awesome. And I have the nice gutters and everything in there. If I want to have a title on my board, note that this said untitled board and that export didn't have a title and that might be really useful if you just want to print it or you're going to put it in a slide deck or something like that. If I want to maybe print this and I want to give it a title, like it's version one of three or something like that, I could go and give this a title, something like Earth Tones and then just click off and I've now set a title for it. I'll say export and this time I'll say, download PNG. Do the same thing, it's going to export that board, but this time it's going to automatically integrate in the title into the board for you and it's ready to go.
So we'll click on this again and now you can see there's Earth Tones with the title and we got a little bit more white space, so great for writing notes or additional things you want to go in and somebody wants to give feedback or if you want to add a couple words in here about some keywords that you're going for, things like that. So it makes for a really awesome tool. So definitely check this out and give it a try. And this is free so play with it, see what you like, what you don't like and give feedback too. That'd be wonderful to hear what you had to think about this or what features do you think this is missing or what sort of bugs or enhancements that could be added to it.
All right. Well, I hope you enjoyed this series on making mood boards and I hope you definitely check out Moodzer. I've spent a lot of time and love and energy I put into it and I think it's a fantastic tool.