Skip to main content

Day 8: Getting Images In and Out

Lesson 18 from: 30 Days of Photoshop

Dave Cross

Day 8: Getting Images In and Out

Lesson 18 from: 30 Days of Photoshop

Dave Cross

buy this class

$00

$00
Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2000+ more >

Lesson Info

18. Day 8: Getting Images In and Out

Lessons

Class Trailer

Day 1

1

Class Introduction

19:04
2

Overview of Days 1-15

54:32
3

Overview of Days 16-30

1:11:53
4

Preview of Content, Part 1 - Layers, Comps, Styles, Masks

49:10
5

Preview of Content, Part 2 - Smart Objects and Paths

30:33

Day 2

6

Day 1 Introduction

13:31
7

Day 1 Exploring Photoshop

16:51
8

Day 1 Realistic Expectations

27:26

Day 3

9

Day 2: Best Practices I Part One

33:28
10

Day 2 Best Practices I Part 2

25:59

Day 4

11

Day 3: Lay of the Land

55:16

Day 5

12

Day 4: Best Practices II – Working Non-Destructively

47:57

Day 6

13

Day 5: Layers I

58:50

Day 7

14

Day 6: Layers II

44:51

Day 8

15

Day 7: Layers III - Masks

1:01:47
16

Bonus Video: "Layers"

09:05
17

Bonus Video: "Vector Masks"

05:54

Day 9

18

Day 8: Getting Images In and Out

55:51

Day 10

19

Day 9: Resolution, File Size, Resizing

1:00:42
20

Bonus Video: "Free Transform - Warping"

07:54

Day 11

21

Day 10: Cropping (Straightening)

49:38

Day 12

22

Day 11: Adjusting

56:22

Day 13

23

Day 12: Smart Objects & Smart Filters I (Introduction)

48:52
24

Bonus Video: "Copying Smart Filters"

02:11

Day 14

25

Day 13: Smart Objects & Smart Filters II (More Advanced)

56:34

Day 15

26

Day 14: Retouching I (Replacing, Removing, Moving)

55:10

Day 16

27

Day 15: Retouching II (Fixing, Portrait Retouching)

1:01:28

Day 17

28

Day 16: Quiz & Review

53:05

Day 18

29

Day 17: Shapes, Paths, and Patterns

49:56

Day 19

30

Day 18: Selecting I

1:05:47

Day 20

31

Day 19: Selecting II (Compositing)

1:02:01
32

Bonus Video: "Green Screen"

08:21

Day 21

33

Day 20: Type

1:03:45

Day 22

34

Day 21: Color

54:54

Day 23

35

Day 22: Painting & Brush Options

59:15

Day 24

36

Day 23: Automation I (Built-In, Not So Obvious)

58:04

Day 25

37

Day 24: Automation II (Actions)

1:00:05
38

Bonus Video: "Actions"

04:20

Day 26

39

Day 25: Presets

53:47

Day 27

40

Day 26: Video

1:03:01

Day 28

41

Day 27: Finishing Touches

1:05:08
42

Bonus Video: "Sharpen"

16:26

Day 29

43

Day 28: Tips and Tricks

52:22

Day 30

44

Day 29: Quiz, Review, Projects

1:01:30

Day 31

45

Day 30: Project, Strategies to Continue to Get Better

48:41

Lesson Info

Day 8: Getting Images In and Out

well we're well on our way we've been covering some of the important basic information we need to know when then covering some of the core functions of photo shop like layers and mass a couple more things that were going toe touch on over the next few days to really make sure we've got all these essential peace is covered and they're going to start putting it into action creating all kinds of projects and various other things so today's topic is getting things in and out of photo shop which sounds fairly straightforward and for the most part it is but there's a lot of options and that's really want I want to discuss is all the different ways you khun get files into photoshopped from various sources and various file formats and also export them back out in different ways and save in different ways and also some kind of suggestions as to work flora structure of how to save your documents to give you the most options now for the most part this is obviously a photo shop class and we're foc...

using on photo shop I've been using bridge because it's a component comes with photo shop today probably for the on ly dayal touch briefly on light room just to show you that aspect of things a little bit but overall it's still were ultimately the goal of this day today is toe look att all the ways we can get things in and get work done in photo shop and then once we're happy save them back out on the other side so first of all let's cover the obvious hopefully obvious ones and that is when we're in photo shop itself of course we always just have the good old open command and you khun change through the operating system a couple of options to say I only want to see psd files whatever it might be and then you navigate to the appropriate folder and then you find the file and say okay here's this j p guy want to open it and simply it opens in photo shop now depending on the file format you're saving you may get another dialog box so I'll show you that in this moment here but with j pegs there's always a couple of options this j peg was just a standard j pig saved that way it also is possible too first open your j peg in camera wrong we'll touch on that a bit later and you do you would see a different result when you open it but let's also talk about things like here is a pdf file so this was created in some application maybe in design say this a pdf file and when I open it this is an example of one word because pdf files are in a format that have a lot of information them this one is starting off by saying well hold on a second how would you like to open this so in this import pdf dialog box it's asking me things like size and resolution and color mode and all these things so if you know you just need a little web version of this you could say well I only want one that's four hundred pixels wide because what you're really doing is opening a pdf version of this and then it opens up you'll see that pdf files are generally transparent so I would add a layer that I filled with white and drag it to the bottom I really want to see what it would normally look like now when you open a file like a pdf file really what you're doing is opening and converting it to photoshopped format so as long as I mean if you saved again as a pdf value would save over the top of this but if you start with a pdf file and open it in photoshopped generally from then on we would probably saving it as a psd file which is the format will talk about ah whole lot so the file open command pretty straightforward there's really not too much that's unusual about it the other way we could do something from within photo shop is if we knew we were creating collage or something where we need to combine images together and ultimate wantto put an image on top of here previously I've been showing you how I would open a document and then in that separate window do that dragon drop thing to go from one one of the other the other option is to use the command called place on places like an import command and say I would like to import this other document now this is not gonna make any sense at all but I'll do a raw camera raw file so it first starts in camera I click okay and then it brings it in as a separate image when you use this place command it automatically this new layer is this smart object concept we've touched on and we will continue to talk about throughout the whole rest of our thirty days s o that's what the place command does it eliminates the need for you to open separate documents and then drag them in the good thing about the place command one of the things I like the most about in fact is if you have a really big file that's much larger than the one in which you're putting it into it will scale initially the size down to fit so let me show you what I mean I think that's important distinction to see so if I just had a regular open on this file and opened it as a separate document and now I want to combined the guest I do that drag over release now you see it's really big and if I go to use free transform I can't even see the handles it so big so I'd have to go and change my view down to fit on screen to be able to see it so if we delete that again comparing that with the place command the place command is going to say still open and camera look okay but the difference is you see right away it's already scaled it down to the boundaries of this image so now I can more easily scale it so that's one of the reasons why we use the place command it is also possible in some areas to place more than one image of the same time unfortunately not with the place command but it is possible to get to that and result the on ly real drawback I suppose you would say to using the file command for either open our place is that we're stuck with the operating systems interface that where you see the images and while that's ok I really like to use bridge because in bridge I can really control how I see my images how big they are all the previews that kind of thing so if I switch over to bridge well see here's the four folder I'm currently in it has a j paige and illustrator file another j pay raw file and that pdf file but I'm seeing them as thumbnails and if we all to scale my windows you can see I do have the option of scaling them larger if I want or if I had a folder full of all kinds of things the other nice thing about bridge is that I khun tap on one images to selected and then hit the space bar and it goes full screen preview so now I can scroll through all my images nice and big and see the one that I want so that that's ah bridge function but let's say I want do the same thing I want to place this image into the existing one in photo shop all I have to do is in photo shop make sure this is my current image then in bridge I select the one that I want and I choose file place in photo shop now imagine this says into the currently active document in photo shop because that's what it really means and the net result is exactly the same it still goes into camera on a click okay and it's still scales it down to fit so the real big difference here is I'm seeing a preview and bridge instead of using the file place command now there is another little option which personally I really like and I unfortunately think I'm one of the few people out there apparently that really is a big fan of this thing called mini bridge many bridges eh little pop up panel I've got mine at the bottom of the photo shop where noone has collapsed down initially but here I've got it basically pointing to the same folder in bridge and what many bridges the best way to describe it is it's basically taking bridge has to be open the full version of bridge has to be open and many bridges just showing the contents of whatever you haven't bridge in this small window the nice thing is you can do a lot of the same functions with many bridge and part but probably the reason I use it more than anything else is if I had for example ah a couple of files may wantto import place this file and this one I can drag them both in the same time and first that deals with the pdf file and I can bring that in and decided I wanted this big sudden pdf but is actually illustrator and then it does the camera raw file so instead of having to be two separate operations now it lets me do it in one operation so any time you're placing multiple files one of the advantages of many bridge is its first of all it's very visual and secondly you khun drag and drop multiple images at the same time so many bridge is a nice option I tend to use it a lot because I'm a very visual person and like to just say oh that's the one I want it's very easy to see oh by the way the same rule applies in many bridges a dozen big bridge it's not really called big bridge I just call it that is if you click on one of the thumbnails once and then hit the space bar it's exactly the same it goes to this full screen view and I can look through them and decide which one I want if I come to the one and say oh that's the one I want I just pressed oh for open and it goes through and does the opening command so that's many bridge now the other option of course is light room if we're working on something in our light room catalog let's just uh pick an image here like this one and I decide I wanna work with this one in photo shop I have a couple of options the main one is I can choose edit in and it allows me to say edit in photo shop cc when I do that it gives me three choices edit a copy with the light room adjustment so I've done anything in light room to do adjusting added a copy so you won't see any light room adjustments or edit the original file and light room of justice will not be visible now like almost everything we talked about this is another one of those it depends which one should you choose for the most part I would think you would want to say I do want to apply the light room adjustments and then work on it in photo shop but again that's a personal choice if I choose edit and then do something dramatic let's just change it to black and white and then lower the opacity I'm going to save it and now if I go back to light room you see there is a file and it says and it that the file name was one dodge a pig so now there's a one decided that's called one edit dot psd so when you start in light room and you edit in photo shop then you have the option or if you say that I should say it goes back into your light room catalog and we're not going out again this is a photo shop class I just want to touch on this because I know some people many people start with light room so this is just one of the ways you khun work in light room and photoshopped so the other option would be to choose this command open and photoshopped as a smart object or open as smart object in photo shop and what that does is it does this smart object which allows me now to edit it but not in light room here's the kind of trick to it if I double click on it it's become a camera raw smart object so I can adjusted and camera click ok same thing applies though once I've finished working on this and I save it it's going to appear back in my light room catalogue so that's all we're really gonna talk about light room for now as a starting point but it is important to know that option exists bridge one of the reasons why I like to use bridge let's go back to bridge is if you have a folder full of a number of images and let's go back to one of our other examples I showed you before so here's a bunch of images that I want to use for some purpose together if in bridge I select and I'm not going to all of them because that would be too many but let's just select a few so I just clicked on the first one held down shift key and clicked on the second one we have this command that I showed you before but I want to talk about it again called load files into photoshopped layers and that will automatically make a new document and then each one of those files will be put on a separate layer so very quickly I've been able to create a new document made up of ah whole syriza blair's now you could use this for a couple of different purposes for situations like we talked about in a previous session where we were replacing heads between two photos you might want to load them both into one document because it makes sense to do that even if you're building up say ah collage or a layout of a bunch of photos even just doing this to get them all into one document is a nice way to do it the little caveat though here in this case once again is there's a recurring theme you'll see where any time you do an automatic kind of like open multiple files or anything like that you you lose thie camera raw smart object option that's no longer in the equation not that these are but if they were camera raw files then I would lose that camera raw added ability back and forth like I would normally so that's one thing to consider and let's talk about this one more second because it is important so when we have a raw file by nature automatically when you double click on it it goes to camera ross to make your edit changes there and I'm going to stress this again I suggest that you click on this little hyperlink and have this open and photo shop as smart objects turn on that means that I've created what amounts to a two way editing street between photo shop and camera or camera on photo something I look at it so let's make a bad edit and I had open object it's gonna open in photo shop but now this little icon in the corner of my thumbnails tells me this is this camera smart object as I've shown you before I could be adjusting this and doing something to it making whatever change I want and then deciding I'll wait I don't really like that doubleclick will go back to camera so I can adjust it however I want when I click okay it updates so starting with a camera raw file and going into photo shop will if you have that check box turned on will create that two way street you can know it by this little symbol on here personally I highly recommend this I can't in fact recommended high enough because otherwise to me you're just you're passing up a a really valuable opportunity to be able to constantly edit your files and as I've said before and I'll say probably many times again anything in cameras easier so moving sliders and going back and forth between photo shop on camera is a really nice work flow now that happens automatically if you have a raw file what if you have a j peg or a tiff and you want the same thing to happen well let's take a look let's actually close this j peg that okay so here's the j peg files in bridge if I simply double click on it it will open and photoshopped as a regular j peg if I want to tell it I want to be a little bit different than I would either right or control click and then you'll see one of the options is open in camera raw when you do that it the j peg kind of gets convertible but because now it first opens in camera raw so again I can make whatever adjustments I want and I'm for the purpose of demonstration again I'm going overboard so you can see I've clearly done something it again says open object so now when it comes in technically it's started life as a j peg but now it's this smart object which means even if I again make changes and this is something I never could have done before with the j peg or a tiff I can double click on it and go right back to cameron's okay that was a bad idea let's take that off and let's do this back and put that up whatever it is you want because for all intents and purposes it's treated the same as a raw file now there's an important distinction a camera raw file by nature has much more information built into it so we need to make kind of heavy duty adjusting changes with camera I got a lot more room to play the new with the j peg but still introducing the option of a least having a bit mohr edit ability of j pegs thanks to camera ought to me is a big plus now having said that once I say this ultimately it's not really a j peg anymore it's a j peg that's embedded inside a psd file so I'm gonna probably keep it as a psd just to keep my options available okay all right so in typical fashion there's lots of different ways to do all of these things I could open or place all the different file formats just want to show you that even an illustrator file when I go to open it again it will have that intermediate box to say and now even though this is an illustrator file it will say import pdf because that part doesn't change it's still a matter of me saying yes that's the settings I want for this eh I file for photoshopped perspective illustrator files are treated as if their pdf files and in illustrator the white background behind something is not doesn't get included unless you specifically draw a white box so that generally speaking I files will come in on this kind of transparent background all the time and the only thing you have to be sort of conscious off you do it again because I didn't think to point this out but I go back and open it again because for the most part illustrator is kind of designed as a print tool often it comes in in c m y k mode so you may want to decide to say well I only need rgb or gray scale I don't only need cm like unless you pacific lee going into color and that will have an impact on the size of your file will make a smaller file and now it's in the mode that you want it's on a crucial function but if if you did open and in c m y k mode you might suddenly looking go how come I can't use this filter and because some filters don't work in c m y came out so that only comes into play with pds and illustrator files with that intermediate dialog box you get that's like the import options for a pdf file okay in uh some cases like here you can look at something in bridge and get an indication of where things stand for example this is a jpeg file however this little symbol that I see on top of it means at some point I must have opened this in camera because that little symbol means some editing has been done in camera so now I should be able to tell just by looking at it if I double click on it I should expect it to open first in raw because that was the last way I saved it so when you open a j peg and then work on a camera and just save it without doing a kind of layer type functions technically it's still a j peg but it's ajay pig that has this kind of camera ability attached to it if you will so that's a nice option because here's for example just to make a point here is something that you can't normally do to a j peg if I take the crop tool in camera raw and hit open object you'll see it opens a cropped version now this was a jpeg file and I just used the crop tool normally and hit enter as we'll see very soon then that would be it those pixels will be gone but because this is a camera a raw version of j peg aiken double click go back to the crop tool and tell it you know what let's just clear that crop I hit okay to update it at first it looks a little funky so I just have to go in here and choose reveal all and I may have to do a quick little trim to get rid of the transparent pictures and put it back so it took a couple of steps but the real point is j peg is very permanent if you crop and save a j peg pixels are gone if you take j pick and go through camera raw then it's opening up those nice possibilities giving us a bit more edit ability again it's not going to give you the full breadth that a raw follow do but it's still pretty nice option and just to make a point here a lot of people when they talk think about opening and j peg or a tiff in camera they're thinking of it just as an extra option that's available but there's actually some really interesting possibilities I don't have an example to show you right now but I just mentioned that I've done things like taken a color graphic that was saved is a j peg and open that in camera raw because I wanted to tweak the color slightly and again it was just so much easier to do in camera that would be in photoshopped or trying to restore an old photograph recently was working on a project where I had old photo black and white it was kind of faded and had kind of speckles of dust everywhere when I looked at the dust I thought that kind of looks like noise you get from a higher eso or something and I thought well you know what camera has a really nice noise reduction capability so I opened that tiff scanned file in camera raw to use as a restoration to actually a really good job just a few steps I was always already off to the races which with a better looking image because I'd produced the dust and I'd make the blacks look a little better so even using camera raw on j pegs and tiffs from image restoration restoring old photos kind of standpoint it's a really interesting tool so you're probably gonna get tired of me talking about how much I used camera but it really is true I find it for lots and lots of things I spending less and less time using what I would call traditional adjustment methods in photo shop and doing maurin camera just because it's easier and I can create that nice two way street okay so back to our story here so bridge again has all these options let's let's talk about one more thing here since I just did this because I the order in which I did things I open that j peg camera nose down has little crops that will decide if I ever want to say ok I've gone down a path that I'm just not happy with and I want to tell it let's just stop all of that if you write or control click you can choose developed settings and just clear them completely then it goes back to being a good old j pick again without any adjustment with any cropping and it's pretty much broken the ty um that it was in camera raw now that's one of the things you might want to consider doing in bridge and that's setting it up to determine what files do you want to open in photoshopped your operating system will for the most part take care of that initially that for example if you double click on a j pick it may open in some other program for example on the mac platform often j pegs want open in preview the mac application and the same kind of thing can happen a window so what you might want to do and I would suggest doing this initially just if as I'm making assumption here for the most part you want photos off to be your tool that used no matter what for matt you're getting graphics and you go to bridge and you find the preferences and one of the preferences file type association and there's a list in here which is unbelievably long in terms of all the different file forms that are out there and what you want you're to be open in a photo shop so there's a whole mixture in here because I have multiple applications but for example this is where I would say yeah I want my j pegs to always open in photo shop and if there's raw files I want that opening photoshopping along this will happen by default but if you go down this list you may find that it's opening a particular format in something else other than you want now of course I wouldn't suggest suddenly saying all my pdf file should open in photo shop because you wouldn't want that to happen but basically this is where you go through and say these are the file formats that I want to open in two photo shop and what that allows you to do again just to make sure that when you mean to open a file and photoshopped it won't override that suddenly open in some other application now I have all of my preferences set here too open and photoshopping all the ones that are appropriate if I didn't I could I don't personally do this myself but there is the option to say here is a file on my desktop if I drag it into the photo shop window it will open so that's fine personally I just have it somewhere if I double click it would do the same thing but that is another option that's available if you want to kind of quote unquote force of filed open in photo shop you can also do that as well so that's just another option that's available to us so let's talk about this for a second okay so this is just to give you a little kind of a heads up of of where we're headed throughout the rest of this class will talk we've already talked about layers when talking about massive a bit we'll talk about smart objects and smart filters and we made in touch on these things called channels when you're using those functions and photo shop it's generally because you want to make sure you preserve access to them so any time I could go back in and say I want to work with these layers I want to adjust this mask we do that by saving as a psd file so a psd is photoshopped document it preserves everything everything you see layers it preserves mass all that stuff is generally saved in not generally is always save in there without having to do anything now they're having said that when you go to save as a psd file will ask you do you want to include layers which I would always have turned on but that is really an option that's gonna happen but by nature everything is saved in there so when I'm working in photo shop I'm always and I don't say always lightly or I mean always going to save a layered version because that's the one that I know is what I call my master file it's has everything I need once I'm finished and I always do finished in air quotes because with the reality of life as you may never really be completely finished a project and then once I'm ready I'm going to do a save as I'm going to say that as a j peg the j peg takes all those layers everything else that makes a flattened version which is a smaller file format so my suggestion is a workflow is we're going to keep that master file with all the layers save a copy that's j peg now I say j peg it could beat if it could be some other format as we'll talk about this for some other purpose what using j peg for the purpose of demonstration that often it's j peg but the real point of this is psd includes all of our information we need j peg is thie flattened copy we are going to send to our lab or whatever might be knowing that we still have access to our original file so the other way to look at it is that this is our latin version so psd is like our master copy and j peg is that final again with final in quotations and some people out there are probably thinking well couldn't I just save as a tiff and the answer is yes you could and I have a reason that's pretty silly I guess in a sense of from a technical standpoint because if you looked as the technical side tiff is justus good in some cases probably better than ptsd from a file size standpoint but here's my worry take a look at this and imagine this was I was looking inside a folder on my computer and I see three files that one says plain dot tiff once has planed up psd and one says plain dot jpeg at first glance I know j peg doesn't have layers in it because it can't but the tiff could but it might not so this is my approach is to say I use psd because I know for me personally if I see a file that has dot psd on the end I know absolutely that is my layered version if I see a tiff file for me tiff file means it's flattened but saved his tiff as opposed to j p and the main reason for doing that is I worry that otherwise I wouldn't know so I might send someone a tiff file who doesn't have photoshopped thinking here's the file they could work with and all the sudden there like I can't open this because there's something about this tiff format that my software doesn't understand so just to avoid that issue that's the reason why I suggest using psd is very simply psd is master copy with all the layers j peg is your flattened version now having said that we were talking about some ways that we can get to this and result very quickly easily of saying I need to save files and work on them and all that good stuff let's go open this file right here this is a layered file I know that because it says dot psd on it so as I'm working away it's already save is a psd and every time I had saved it's updating this psd file remember when we talked about preferences and said that one of things I have set up in my preferences is settings for final handling so I'm going to tell it saving the background and automatically save recovery information so that's our backup but as I'm working if I hit any milestone that I'm having with when I hit save its saving as a psd file because it's already in that format so it's overwriting the file it's already there so as soon as you make some changes hit safe remember that even if you hide a layer and had saved it's still preserving all this information so never removes anything as long as you're saving as a psd file now having said that if you decide you want to make a j peg you have to determine which layer zehr showing because when you choose save as j peg it will automatically save whatever files what's used in whatever layers are visible so for example let's say in this case I wantto save two copies one with the type player and one without so I would make sure that type player was showing I would save as which I'll show you how to do it a second and then I would hae this layer and save a different copy under a different name now this is where the process of going from a layer document to a flattened version j peg or tiff is very important what some people do and I would suggest how should I say this don't do this now think carefully before you do this and frankly it's unnecessary if some people are thinking well I need a flattened version to be able to save a jpeg or tip which is not actually the case so what I see some people do is they choose flatten image and then they go and save in a different file format my worry is what if you had saved by mistake and you can't get out of it somehow I would hate for that to happen so let's undo that instead frankly here is an easier way and this is what I would do if I have one or two images open that are psd that I want j we'll look later on and how to do it more of a batch kind of a function so instead of going save I go to save as and you'll see in this dialog box so here's the file it's called alex dot psd that's the one I'm currently working on what I want to do is I want to make a version of this that's j peg or tiff so if I tell it save his j peg before I do that remember there that layers check boxes automatically assuming since this is a psd that I want to have layers in it so I choose j peg a soon as I do that layers becomes unchecked because a j peg cannot have layers so in this one dialogue box it's letting the save as a different name and a different follow form and automatically flattening it for me so this eliminates though thie perp there's really no reason to flatten and then save so when you hear me say that flatten is a dirty word you should never use flatten what I mean by that as the command flatten and the layers panel where you're safe flattening my layers saving a flattened version that's fine because we're still preserving our layered original so all I'm really saying is the purpose for flattening and saving I can hardly ever if ever think of a reason to do that but I save a flattened copy all the time but the two important words and there are flattened copy not flatten and safe understand the difference because it's really important now if I was doing all this work and then I wanted to save a tiff file that didn't have layers that have to do one ex little step because as we mentioned a moment ago if I choose tiff as my file format it will assume he wantto have layers included which I don't in this particular example because as we talked about before I want to make sure that I'm preserving the layers in my psd file either the flattened one is either j pay court if if that's what someone wants and then I would choose save as uncheck layers and now I've got a flattened tiff but it's the same story I'm still saving ah flattened copy as opposed to flattening and saving and I'm gonna keep hammering that because here's why I worry about that and this was a number of years ago but still I had been teaching a workshop and talked at great length about keeping layers and not flattening and saving and all my kind of thing and thought I had been just about as clear as I possibly could be about why I think this is such a good idea and a couple weeks after the class someone sent me an email that said so I was working on a project had all these layers and then I flattened and saved the next time I opened it there were no layers and I felt like I should reply that is correct because I'm not sure what he was wanting me to say that's exactly what's going to happen I mean there is no solution I guess he was hoping that I would have some magical magical way of saying well that's okay just go to this menu and unf latin ifyou or something and it doesn't work so nondestructive we talked about before this is the way we keep things non destructive is by preserving psd files all the time so everything we talked about this non destructive layers masks smart filter smart office all things we'll talk about throat all of the rest of this session or this class this is what makes it happen is saving as a psd file could you say it was a tiff file yes you certainly can that's up to you is if you khun distinguished between whether it's maybe you put the word master in the name I don't know that's up to you personally I just found for the difference in the file size it's not significant enough for me to worry about enough to change my workload for me it's psd is my layer document j peg artifice the flattened copy of it now let's imagine for a moment that I was working on a project where I had a whole series of psd files I don't want to open each one of them and save them as j pick so that's where there's some nice automated commands built ten I can either do this through photo shop under scripts there's something called image processor and what it does it allows me to say look inside a folder and save in a different format I'm going to show it to you through bridge personally I like doing it in bridge better because again it's more visual so in this folder I'm going to say ok there's a psd and I want this raw file a lot of these air already j pegs but we'll just pretend that they're all not because pretty much all of them this is a psd and so is this and you'll see some are taller and summer wide I'm gonna pick that even though I don't really need teo so now I've selected just some of the images in this folder and here's the difference between using image processor from within photo shop is it says do it to the entire contents of a folder doing the same command brought from within bridge means as you just saw I convince julie say these are the ones that I want so this allows me to take multiple files let's pretend these are all psd files which they obviously aren't but we'll just pretend for the sake of argument they are and then I go to tools in bridge by the way photoshopped image processor and it jumps back to photo shop and it says okay you've chosen five images in bridge where would you like to save them now he had the option of putting him into a different folder completely which frankly I would normally think of doing except in this case because if I choose saved save in the same location it will actually automatically create a new folder so have to worry about overwriting any files so this is what I would normally look like you've got the option of saving us a j peg saves a psd or save as tiff now saving a jpeg is automatically going to flatten the other ones if there are layers that will preserve it so in here I've got the option to say save is a j peg picked the quality setting for quality of j peg and also have the option of re sizing to fit so let's say for the sake of argument that I'm doing this to be ableto posts um images to facebook or something like that I would choose resized to fit and then it gives me a measurement for width and height now imagine this says resize the longest measurement or the longest side too so that means if it's a wide image it will be a thousand pixels if it's a tall image the height will be a thousand pixels this does not mean it will re size to a square so just for the sake of argument let's put thes both to nine hundred pixels and later on we'll talk about actions if we had something set up we could run that as well but the thing I love I'll tell you right now the thing I love about image processor is its simplicity it doesn't make me do a lot of things I don't have toe record any steps or build anything or it's really just open these files save them as this file format simple so I hit the run button and it goes through and flashes through and goes here is that one hears that one hears that one and eventually down the bottom I now have a new folder it wasn't there before called j peg so I look inside of it well now there's only two now I did pick five files but I'm sure that happened because some of them were already j pegs and I probably went what do you doing re saving a j pick so normally I would use this with either a bunch of psd files or a bunch of raw files or whatever it is and say all of these I want saved at this size and of course now you'll see it's no longer layered file it's flattened one but I previously saved my psd version of it so image process is a very nice way to be able to say I need to create a bunch of files copies that are flattened in some other form I use it all the time when again I've done a project with many p s defiles I'll wait to the end so here's a typical scenario I do a photo shoot's gotta bunch of raw files in it I go through and say these are the raw files I want to work on I work on them as psd files and save them that way so then in the same folder I have raw files and psd files one of the advantages of bridge is I can look inside a fuller and say show me on ly the whatever so in this case I could say show only on ly the photoshopped files and then I could select those and use image processor so it's a very nice way do you have a whole folder full of images like that scenario just mentioned I have a bunch of raw files and then a bunch of psd that my master files all I wantto save as a jpeg is those psd so I'd go into that filter option and bridge I should say show me only the photoshopped files select them all and then go image processor so then in that same folder I have raw files psd master files and my final j peg version so that's kind of the workflow that I would suggest so here we are back in bridge and we have this illustrator file now if I double clicked on it it would open in illustrator I wanna open in photo shop well instead of going to photo shop and choosing file open I can force the issue by right or control clicking and telling it to open with photo shop so that's another way we didn't talk about before me that's just came at this point so this allows me to to take that elsewhere found force it to open an illustrator it's still going tto do that preliminary let me decide how big I want it to be kind of thing so we'll just make it doesn't have to be very big purposes had opened so as we saw before opens with this transparent background happening at this point I want to make sure this is ready to use on a web sites are going to make sure it's rgb and then I also want to save it as a png file now when it comes to creating things for an on screen use using formats like png we have a couple of options here the first one will just be a simple save as and then choose the file format to png now because this is on a transparent background it will be saved with a transparent background so that's one of the advantages of png over j pegs you khun save transparency the only kind of catch to it is you have to make sure that it's the right size in photo shop so we'd have to look at our image size command which will go into more detail very soon and make sure it's the right size and then I could say there's png but let's imagine for a moment let's go back a step here let's say I opened it force it open and photo shop but it was considerably bigger than I need and I'm gonna make sure in this case it's rgb and now I decided I need a png file but it needs to be smaller than this this is where we could use save for web now this command's called safer web I would almost considered safer web brackets or any onscreen use because really that's it's real strength is preparing something to be used in an on screen kind of a situation so here it is here save for web and this is where I can pick different options are going to say make it a png soon as you do it shows me there's thie transparency but then the other advantages in here I can say but I like it to be fifty percent of this size so now it's going to automatically resize it down and show me the results and there's all kinds of other settings I'm not going to go go into here but this means we can save in thes where formats jeff j peg png etcetera pick the one that's recommended by whoever you're doing with but the other nice thing is from within safer web we have one other option here and that is I can preview it in a browser so here's so far in and saying there's what it would look like and here's all the information in terms of the html code for it so this allows me to do is say what if I made it even smaller and had preview so you can kind of see it's looking still pretty good so it's a really nice way without having actually saved it yet so save for webb has these nice options including the ability to save it or preview it in various browsers by default it'll go to whatever one you have open or is your default I guess um all kinds of options in here and it has preset so if you know there is a setting you use on a regular basis you can do that here now you also notice that has j peg high quality and all that kind of soft the reason for using this is you might have let's actually open our um where is it this one we'll go with that so here's a layer document and I want to make it a j pick instead of just simply choosing save as in here and hoping I would like the way it looks I always also have the option of doing safer web and here we can look at it and see j peg when you see here here's all the presets like j peg low quality what does that really mean in terms of how it's gonna look let's see my preview it it looks okay it's a little low quality so let's compare that with the preset that says j peg hi now j peg hi means equality of sixty which is not maximum so preview that a little better let's go maximum quality because these days even at maximum quality it's still going toe I mean honestly if people are using a fifty six k modem and is going take thirty seven seconds to load than well yeah it's also a fairly large file so again I could say well I need this to be six hundred pixels high at j peg maximum and hit preview that looks pretty good and it's giving me again all the information so safer webb is the place where if we need to be able to go in and say I need a bit more information or I need to preview it and it has the added bonus where you khun save presets in different combination so again this is I want to stress is it's called safer web and that's of course is one of its main purpose but even if you're thinking I just want to save a j peg to post on my facebook page you might want to consider using this just to get an idea of the settings to use once you've done that then you may end up going and just choosing save as in photo shop for using image processor but either way this is gives us this gives us more of a preview the other one is more of a batch kind of thing and again there's plenty of options in here you can even compare if you want multiple versions so you could go in and say for example here it saying here's j p one hundred j peg fifty and j p twenty five and you can see very detailed comparison between them let's put it up to eighty percent so you can see it's pretty subtle I mean I can see it mostly and some of these edges between the original that was really quite large for the two point large for a web page one point six megabytes now I'm getting down too pretty small sizes and the quality is pretty decent so that's where safer web kind of comes into play mohr is for this kind of purpose so when we're getting things out of photoshopped saving is obviously a big part of it we also there's things that we may or may not talk about for example you have the ability to export just parts of photo shop like you working illustrator you can export a path so if you look under the file menu here and you see export commands that things say things like paths to illustrator and render video those air very specific functions based on other options now if you are a creative cloud member the other thing that's kind of nice is that there's now a nice simple way that if you decide that I worked on some project and I want to share this work especially to get some feedback maybe you're like me you work as an individual you don't have other people in your office and just show your work and say give me some thoughts on this be hands is one of the aspects of creative cloud that's kind of nice and built into photo shop cc is ability to share on b hands now what it's doing member this is a psd file so it's going to go through and when it says preparing your image it's actually doing that safe cunts kind of safer web function and making it a preview that I can work with so I can call it uh test of an idea tag it was something you have to have at least one tag in here if I could spell and I'm calling this new work and I had continue then I can pick kind of a preview image to say this is what I want people to see and then hit crop cover and published I'm not actually going to because I've done this before people wonder why does it keep sharing the same thing over and over again so let's close out of here but I'll show you what it would look like in my quit of cloud by look at my work see that somewhere in here we're just gonna pick one of them but here's a bunch of things that I previously done if we do work in progress which is where I often upload something for example this one I uploaded and got some people that were commenting and giving suggestions so they'll be han se's is exclusive to creative cloud it is a nice way to share your work directly out of here so let's look quickly a photo shop again we've got save for saving our psd files we have saved as to get things out there and also save for web now later on we'll talk about automating photo shop in funny things like actions and one of things we could do is build our own actions and as one of the steps would include a safe option so then we could also do ah batch process we say take all these images run this particular process and save it in a separate folder so image processor is a script that simply says I will take whatever you give me and save it in whatever size informant you tell me the batch processing the using actions takes a little step further but it requires some input on your side now the other part of photoshopped in terms of getting files out of course is printing and this is by no means intended to be in depth discussion on printing because that could probably a whole class on printing but there are a couple things that I want to mention right up front and these air based on comments that I get from people all the time and that is when I make my big case for saying don't ever flatten or emerge often the responses but I thought I had to in order to print and the answer is absolutely not you could but there's no reason to photoshopped prince whatever is visible so really there's no compelling reason to flatten everything unless well even to say unless later on I can't really get into it right now but the main reason people say they need to flatten as they want to sharpen the whole thing before they go to print but as we'll see later on in the future class future session we'll talk about how you could even get around that but the bottom line is if I want to print this I don't to do anything except file and then print and that brings up the print dialog box which is where I khun pick the printer and do all these settings and decide on the side you see it's I didn't have to do anything I have to flatten it saying well since these are the layers that are showing these are the ones that will print now again I'm not going to go into all the settings for printing and all these kind of things but it is also possible you khun reposition it in this preview but let's say we had a really huge file and we didn't want to waste a whole bunch of printing ink yet so one of the options would be to make a small selection of a portion of your image and then when you hit print one of the options further down his print the selected area so now is only gonna print the part that you've selected so you can kind of do a quick test print to make sure the settings are okay and the way you've adjusted it in the brightness and everything else is good before you duel ah complete test print so again this that's just one small thing I want to show you the main reason I did that is its toe because a lot of people miss that it's actually quite useful otherwise of course there's a whole world of color management of let the print man it printer manager the colors versus photo shop and again that's way beyond the scope of our discussion in this overall thirty days of photo shop that's something you probably want to look up and see what the experts have to say about that but the main thing I wanted to stress is that please don't get caught in the trap of assuming you have to flatten before printing because almost all the time you don't and even if you think you do there's a good chance you could do it using this smart object smart filter method that will talk about in a future class so since this was a class really just about getting things in and out of photoshopped good news you don't have any actual assignment to do dave except well open a few files and just try some of the different ways for getting files in maybe if you have a folder full of psd files or raw files try image processor to see how quickly it works to export a bunch of things but basically just really easy one for you explore some of the different ways you can get files in and out of photo shop and we'll see you tomorrow

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

30 Days of Photoshop - Bonus PDF Supplements
Homework Files
Q&A Check In with Dave Cross

Ratings and Reviews

Melinda Wong
 

Very good teaching. I really liked how clear Dave was with everything, the order he taught the material, and I thought the stories were very helpful. I REALLY wanted to understand photoshop and extremely thankful for his wisdom and knowledge. Thank you so much! This is what was holding me back from getting my photography started! :) It just seemed so intimidating and now I have a greater understanding.

a Creativelive Student
 

I'm a beginner and have found that the information Dave gives is great, although a little to fast at times. I'd like to buy the course but am curious. If I purchase can I watch it and pause it and rewind it? That would be extremely important to me. Thanks for a great service CreativeLive...

a Creativelive Student
 

Lots of information! Initially I thought I'd just watch the free version as I already have several Creativelive videos on Photoshop but I really like how the classes are broken into subjects and shorter, 1 hour sessions-it will make reviewing much easier! I love Dave's teaching style-he covers everything very well. (Plus the fact that he's Canadian, eh?) :D Thanks for offering such a great course! I'd would love to see Dave do a similar one on Illustrator.

Student Work

RELATED ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES