Adobe’s Creative Cloud offerings come in at around $50 a month, which makes their tools one of the most cost-effective ways for businesses to keep up with the latest artistic tools and techniques in order to thrive.

If you’re not familiar with Adobe Photoshop, of find it to be too daunting, then you’re in for a surprise – it’s actually a really easy tool to use!

This is especially true, and important if you’re a small business owner who needs to create a catalog of your products.

Ready to learn how? Follow along in order to create stunning product catalogs that blow your clients away.

Organize the Assets for Your Product Catalog

Instead of using a desktop publishing program, you can easily learn how to make a product catalog with Photoshop.

While you’ll still need to print it if you want to mail it out to customers, it still makes for a much more cost-effective way to market your products and business.

First, you’ll need to ensure that you know how to take high-quality product photos. To do this:

• Get a white background or set the products in a natural setting that relates to their use.
• Invest in quality lighting or position the products in sufficient natural daylight.
• Get inspiration from other brands that you love. How did they position their products for their own social media accounts or catalogs?
• Take a basic Photoshop editing course.

While you’re going to use Photoshop to edit your photos, it’s important that you take the photos without editing in mind.

Try to make the products look as great as possible without any editing. This will make the process easier for you, especially if you’re new to the program.

Now, draw your ideas out on a piece of paper. How do you want your catalog to look?

Here, you’ll need to think about the actual size of the pages in your catalog and try to position the photos as strategically as possible.

Think about organization. Do you want to organize your products by use, by season, or by price?

When you go to create your catalog, you’ll need to have this organization in mind as it will make everything much easier in Photoshop.

Create the Product Page Copy

For this step, you’re actually still not going to enter Photoshop products just yet. You’re going to open a word processor such as Microsoft Word and write up the copy for each of your products.

For each product you need:

• Product Description
• Prices
• Options/Features
• Colors/Sizes
• Product Code

If you add a product code to each product, it’s going to make your life a whole lot easier when you finally go to create a product catalog.

To further organize your catalog, it’s a good idea to go back to your product photos and put them all in one folder.

Then, label each product photo with its corresponding product number. If it helps, you can also create a separate Word document for each product, label it with its corresponding number, and save it in the same folder.

This way, when you go to create the catalog in Photoshop, you’ll have everything you need all together and organized as it should be.

Create a Catalog Layout in Photoshop

Now that you have your product photos, each product’s copy, and everything organized, you can begin to create a catalog in Photoshop!

First, you’ll want to open Photoshop, select “File” and then choose “New.”

It’s going to prompt you to set the document properties, and this is where you need to make sure you’re paying attention.

Change the size type from “Pixels” to “Inches.”

Then, set the file size to whatever you want it to be. This is why you needed to decide on the page size back in step one. Take a look at other catalogs to see how big their photo pages are.

Now, name the file “Product Catalog Page 1” and click to continue.

There you have it, you’ve created your very first product page! Now it’s time to add photos and text to the page.

To add text boxes, you’re going to use the “Rectangular” shape tool. Simply select the tool and draw a rectangle wherever you wish to see text.

Then, right-click on the path that’s selected and choose “Stroke Path.” This creates a border around the rectangle, which you can change if you’d like according to color or weight of the border.

To add text, simply select the “Text” tool and draw a text box inside of the borders you’ve just created. Head on over to your Word document, copy the text, and paste it into the Photoshop text box.

Take a look at the outline that you drew on paper in the first step. Lay out the first page as you’d like, and if you want, continue to create the layout of all of the subsequent pages.

You can either do this first, or stick to the first catalog page and add photos until you move on to the next page.

Add Photos to Your Product Catalog

Now you’re ready to finish learning how to create a product catalog by adding the photos themselves.

Find the corresponding photo to the text description that you’ve written on each page.

Open the first photo in a separate window. Right-click on the layer and choose “Duplicate.”

A dialog box will open and you’ll want to change the “Destination” to “Product Catalog Page 1” (this is why you named it, so you would know how to find it!).

Repeat this to open all of the photos on the catalog page.

Once all of the photos are on the page, you’ll start selecting them one-by-one. Select the photo/layer and click “Edit” and then “Transform.”

This will allow you to scale the photo and resize it to whatever you think looks best.

Finally, click on the “Move” tool to position it into place above its description. Do this for each of the products on the catalog page and voila! You’ve got yourself a product catalog.

Once you’re done, you can save the file as a PDF and prepare it for printing. Learn more about your printing options to figure out what kind of paper, gloss, and overall preparation is right for your company.

Enhancing Your Product Catalog

The steps to create a catalog for your products in Photoshop are pretty easy to follow.

If you plan ahead and have all of your assets in order, then you’ll find that all you have to do in Photoshop is resize the photos and put everything into place.

If you’re looking to really enhance the look of your product catalog, however, it’s great to learn how to edit photos in Photoshop.

Browse all of our Photoshop How-Tos to ensure you’re up-to-date on the latest and greatest design tools.