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New Documents, Crop, Resize & Save in Adobe Photoshop

Lesson 2 from: 2024 Adobe Photoshop: The A to Z Bootcamp

Ben Willmore

New Documents, Crop, Resize & Save in Adobe Photoshop

Lesson 2 from: 2024 Adobe Photoshop: The A to Z Bootcamp

Ben Willmore

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Lesson Info

2. New Documents, Crop, Resize & Save in Adobe Photoshop

<b>Learn to create new documents from scratch, crop and resize existing images and save your results using the best file formats for each use case. You&#8217;ll also learn about the concept of resolution and which settings to use for different types of images.</b>

Lesson Info

New Documents, Crop, Resize & Save in Adobe Photoshop

This lesson does not contain anything exciting, but it is what you need to do to just about every image you ever work with in Photoshop. First, you gotta open the image, then you'll likely need to crop and resize the image for particular use and then you're gonna need to save it. And with all those choices, there are a lot of options involved. And so let's explore each of those. So you have a pretty good foundation of how to really work with images in general. So first off, if you want to create a brand new document, go to the file menu and choose new. And when you do this comes up on the right side are all the settings you can dial in and the stuff on the left are presets. So up here at the top, we have some headings. If I choose photo, then in here you're gonna find camp common photo sizes and down here, view all presets, we'll expand this. So you can see even more if you click on one of these, all it's gonna do is dial in the settings from the preset over here on the right side of y...

our screen. So here I'll go to a 10 by eight and you can see it dialed up in for you. If you go here to print, you're gonna find common print sizes. And again, if you view all presets, you'll find even more. So if I wanted to make a 8.5 by 11 sheet of paper, just click in. There is gonna dial it in for me on the right. If you go to art and illustration, you'll also find sizes for posters and postcards, that kind of thing. And when you scroll down here, you can also load in templates. These templates would already have information in the files and they can speed up creating fancier documents. But let's continue looking at the tabs at the top. We choose web and I'll hit view all presets. These are common sizes for advertisements on the web. If I choose mobile, we're gonna find ones for different size phones and tablets. So if I want to create a document that's gonna perfectly fit one of those screens or your apple watch, you could do so. And then finally we have film and video and these are used for professional video. Uh If you want to get something sized for a four K display or an HD TV, clicking on one of these would do so. But I'm gonna come over here and start off with uh going to print, I'll choose 8.5 by and then over here on the right side, let's take a look at the options. We could dial in at the top. You can give your file and name if you'd like. But regardless if you haven't saved the image yet at the moment, you save it, it'll also ask you to name it. So you could just ignore that and leave it at untitled. But if you want to, you can type in a name for now. We got our width and height that can be measured in all sorts of different methods. I'm gonna use inches for now. And you could choose if you want a portrait or landscape orientation. Art boards are something we might discuss later on. Uh But in general are not going to be important for generally creating images, but it isn't something I commonly use when creating a new document. Then here we have a choice called resolution. So let's talk about what that means and to do so, I'm gonna open a special document. All right, let's say this is the image that you're gonna be working with like an image you opened and let's talk about what resolution is. Well, if you take an image and you look at it closely, you zoom up and you zoom up and you zoom up, you're gonna find that it's made out of a series of squares that are known as pixels. Well, resolution is talking about those pixels. And if we keep keep zooming up until we can easily see one pixel. Let's just isolate one pixel. In what resolution is talking about is how big will that thing be if I print this image and not just that one, but every single one that makes up the image. So you could take a ruler and put a ruler down there. And if you did, you could describe this in many different ways. One method you could use is say, hey, that's 1/16 of an inch and you could call it pixel size because that's what you're talking about. It would mean how big would those squares print out? Well, not many people really love working with fractions. So there are other ways that you could describe that you could make it a decimal, but that's not very friendly either because these things are usually really, really small. And so the decimals it's, I don't know, I don't like thinking about it that way. But then instead of trying to describe the size of one pixel, why not just measure how many of them fit in one inch? Then we could describe this as pixels per inch. And therefore we can get a number that's not a fraction and that's not one of those decimal things. Instead, it's just a number and it's a number that is not bad to think about 16 or 72 or 300. It's a kind of number you're used to talking about, but it would be called 16 pixels per inch or if we want to make it. So we abbreviate that we could just call it 16 PP I now a lot of people will call that DP I but just so, you know, that's not technically the right term. The D and DP I would stand for dots and dots are things that can only be on or off like a black or white, you could say, whereas pixels can be all sorts of colors and brightnesses and everything. So it's actually PP I but don't worry if you hear of anybody say DP I and they're talking about a picture. They mean this, it's the most common thing that people call it is DP I, even though technically not quite the right term. So that is resolution. It means how big are these pixels when we print them? So let's go back to thinking about our image and let's say that this image when I go in and look at it, it tells me that it's about eight inches wide and it's 10 inches tall. So it's an eight by 10 picture. Well, what does resolution mean then? Well, if we have, let's say eight by 10 inches, the problem is describing this image as being eight by 10 inches, that might describe how big it's gonna print, but it does not describe how big those pixels will be and therefore the quality. So I could say eight by 10. And that could be this image or it could mean it's gonna print looking like this. What we need to do is instead think about how small do we want those pixels to be? We want to get them so small that you can't see them. Therefore, it looks like a photograph instead of a bunch of squares in a common setting to do, that would be to have it print at 300 pixels per inch. And that means the pixels are so darn small that you could fit 300 of them in an inch. Well, so if we have eight inches in the width of this document, doesn't that mean we'd have 300 pixels in each one of those inches. If it's 300 pixels per inch, we should, well, then you could do some math if we have eight inches and 300 pixels in each one of those, well, eight times 300 would tell us how many pixels we have total. And you could do the same thing in the height where we have 10 inches. And if there's 300 pixels in each one of those inches, then we have 3000 pixels total. So another way to describe this particular image would be to say it's 2400 by 3000 pixels. And that is more useful information than saying it's an eight by because saying it's an eight by 10 doesn't tell me if it's gonna look like a big chunky image like you saw a few minutes ago or if the pixels are gonna be so small that I can't even see them when it's printed. But tell me it's that uh mini pixels total. And I know how much information is in that file and then I could take that and say I can print that at whatever resolution setting I desire. So if I don't need pixels per inch, because I'm printing in something that couldn't show that much detail. Like the newspaper, newspaper is much lower quality than a high quality brochure or magazine. Well, you don't need the resolution to be as high for something like the newspaper. So therefore, this image could be used much bigger than if you were printing it at 300. Then there's even another way of thinking about this. If that's the width and height of this image in pixels, then I could figure out what's the total number of pixels. Because if I literally do the math that shows right on my screen 2400 multiplied by 3000. That would tell me the total number. And if I did that, I'd end up with 7,200,000 pixels total. Don't worry, I used the calculator, I don't do that in my head or anything, but that's 7,000,007 0.2 million pixels. Well, million pixels, that's kind of inconvenient to say. So let's call it megapixels. And that's exactly what that is. So if you hear you have a 12 megapixel digital camera or a 16 megapixel digital camera, all it means is whatever image it produces. If you were to take the width and pixels and multiply by the heighten pixels to get the total number, then it means how many millions is that? So in this case, it'd be 7.2 megapixels. So that's resolution. You don't have to remember everything I just showed you. You just need to know that resolution means how big are the pixels that make up your image when you print them and telling somebody how big your image is, is in inches or how big the file is in megabytes is not all that useful of information because I don't know what file format it's saved in. And when I save it in, let's say JPEG file format, there's a quality slider. I don't know if it was put all the way down. And if so you'd have a tiny file or if it was turned all the way up. And if so you'd have a much larger file. And so telling me the number of megabytes of the file or telling me how many inches it is, doesn't tell me the quality. What you need to do is tell me the width and height in inches and the resolution or tell me the width and height in pixels. And that tells me how much information is actually in that file. But let's talk about what setting should be in there because we were talking about creating a brand new document and it's a setting you gotta type in. So what are you supposed to put in it? Here are my recommendations for resolution. You gotta put something in there. And it all depends on how might you use this picture when it comes to displaying an image on a computer screen or on your phone or a tablet. The number called resolution is completely ignored. And instead it just looks at the width and height in pixels. And it says, hey, your device can display a certain number of pixels in the width and in height, we're gonna use up that many and the number for resolution is simply ignored. You still got to type in a number though in that case. And so I type in the number 100. Why? Well, it does affect one general thing and that is when you put in text, when you put in text and it says it's point text or whatever the the size measurement is. Well, it would have to be thinking about printing it. And if you were to look at how many pixels fit in an inch on most displays, it's somewhere just over 100 in 100 is just a rounded off number that's easy to remember and plunk in. And so it gets you close enough. So when you type in a certain size for text it doesn't look really big or really small because the resolution setting is used to figure that kind of thing out. But other than that, the number doesn't matter at all for the internet doesn't matter at all for displayed on your computer or anything like that. It only matters when printing. So let's look at settings for that. Well, it depends on how you're gonna print it. If you're gonna print it on an ink jet printer, like you got a printer on your desk, then this is the range of settings that makes it look good. If you go below this, you could potentially start seeing the little jaggies that make up your picture, the pixels. And if you go above this, you're not gonna notice any quality uh improvement and also certain things won't look as good because things like sharpening won't be as effective. So this is the general range you wanna be within the most common for ink jet printing is 240. Then if you're gonna print something on a printing press to go and have it printed in a newspaper, maybe in an advertisement or a magazine article or a high end coded paper brochure, then these are the ranges you should use. Which means if you go below these numbers, there's a chance you'd start to be able to see a hint of the pixels that make up your image. And if you go above these numbers, there is gonna be no advantage to doing. So your files are just gonna be bigger than they need to be and certain things like sharpening will be less effective. Where did these numbers come from? Well, when you print on a printing press, there's a setting you could ask about, you could call a magazine that you're about to have an ad printed in. And what you would ask is with your printing. How many lines per inch do you print with? And it's just known as LP I, and they'd give you a number, they might say we print at and 50 or some other similar number. They might say they print with 8585 would be common for a newspaper or they might go higher, they might be at 100 or and 50 100 and 50 would be more like a high end brochure because as you get more cod paper and higher quality printing, you can print smaller dots and therefore, uh you can have more detail. Well, all I'm doing here is I'm taking whatever number the company would tell me a newspaper, a magazine or a brochure or the most common uh numbers they would tell you and I'm multiplying it by 1.5 to figure out the lowest that would be needed. And I multiply it by two to figure out the highest that would be useful. And that's why you have this little bar at the bottom because if you really wanted to know, you don't wanna range like this, you could call up and say, hey, you're gonna print my brochure uh and talk to your printer rep and say what line screen or lines per inch are you gonna print with? And they'll tell you a certain number. LP I and multiply it by 1.5 to figure out the lowest setting you should print with, multiply it by two to figure out the highest that would be useful. But that's only for printing on a printing press uh for printing on inkjet that's not related. So here we are back in the new document uh screen. That's where we were before. I think I had chosen a 10 by eight and that dialed in the settings over here and look it put in a resolution of 300. Now, if I'm going to an ink jet printer, that would be a fine setting to use, but I could get away with using even less I could go down. And the most common setting is 240 uh and that's fine as well. And that's just used when printing and it ensures that the pixels aren't so big that you could see them below that we have something called the color mode. And when you click here, you got a few choices. The most common choice in here is R GB and that means your image would be made out of red green and blue. That's what should be used any time an image would be displayed on a computer screen as its primary use. And that's what 90 plus percent of all the images I ever opened in Photoshop are set to if you want to know about the other ones. Bitmap means that your image could only contain pure black or pure white. Uh You could use that if maybe you had a file that was your signature. So it's just black ink on white background, then this would make the file size much smaller than using one of these others where you could have shades of gray or colors. Uh And that's what BITMAP is for gray scale means that it's a black and white photo and we don't, we can't have any color in it at all. And therefore, the file size would be smaller R GB is how all images on all computer screens are displayed. If you were to take a microscope and put it on your computer screen, you would see your computer screen is made out of red, green and blue dots. And uh so this is what's used, even if the image is a black and white picture and it's on a color computer display, it's still being displayed that way. This is the most common setting. Then we have Cnyk. That's when you need to print your image on a commercial printing press, which means a newspaper, a magazine, a glossy brochure that you're ordering thousands of, then you'd end up using this setting. But to be honest, even when I do that, I usually work in this and only at the very, very end when I'm about to send the image out, do I convert to that? So this is pretty much what you use for almost everything. And this thing down here is only for color geeks and not something that you will generally use. So RGD to the right of that, it wants to know how much information should we allow to have in this file. And if you click there, you have a few choices, eight bits means that if we can have white as the brightest shade in our picture and black is the darkest. How many shades could we have in between to create a smooth transition from black to white? If you set it here, you get brightness levels, which is enough to make most things look smooth, but not enough. If you want to make radical adjustments to a picture like radically brighten, it add a lot of contrast or mess with the colors a lot, then that would be enough if the image was done with all those changes. But the you need a little overkill. If you want to make radical adjustments, this one called 16 bit would allow you to have thousands and thousands and thousands of shades between black and white and that makes it So if we have that much info, then we can make radical changes without having the image start to show uh signs of, of degradation. So if you know you're gonna make radical changes, 16 bit would be much better. The only problem is uh 16 bit will be twice as big of a file as a bit. So you only use it when you think you're gonna make relatively radical changes. Although some people use it for everything and that's fine. It's just they don't mind having really big fonts and that's fine. 32 bit is something special that you only use. When you end up combining more than one picture together in something known as an HDR or high dynamic range image, then you end up with the brightness range of multiple pictures. So instead of going from black to white as your brightness range, you could have an area brighter white or darker than black. And if that's the case, this is what you use, you wouldn't usually use it here. You would just suddenly be in this mode after merging multiple pictures which we'll get into later on. Just I don't see why I would use it here. So I'm gonna go for eight bit because I'm not planning on making radical changes to whatever I create. Finally down here, it says background contents. This means what should the document be full of to begin with? And if I click there, we can have white black. Uh Remember we had a foreground and background color, we could set it to the background color. We could have it be full of. Nothing. Nothing looks like a checkerboard in Photoshop. So you'd get that if you had it here or custom custom is like if I click this little square, I can choose what color I want my image to be full of. And then it just custom means none of these other choices. Most of the time, I just have that either to white or transparent. If you want to get adventurous, there are more settings under here. Uh Here at color profile, this determines how vivid of colors can you potentially create in your document. And in here, you won't have as many choices as I have in here. Uh The main choices that people use are uh Adobe RG BS R GB and pro photo with you're brand new to Photoshop. You've never heard of this stuff. I'd probably set this to Sr GB. Uh It, it anytime I say Sr GB, there's only one variety of it. And so just ignore all the numbers after it. When you progress with your knowledge and you decide you want to try to get more vivid colors. You might end up upgrading to Adobe R. That's primarily if you have your own printer and you want to be able to get the most out of out of that printer, get the most vivid colors. But for Now, I'm gonna use SR GB and down here it says pixel aspect ratio and that means the squares that make up your image, should they actually be square? And if not, should they be some sort of rectangle? I have the set to square pixels. The other choices that are in here are only if you're somebody that works with professional video because video like TV, screens, the squares that make up the screen are not perfectly square, they're rectangles and this would determine the shape of them. So only use these if you're working with a file that's going to video. And even then I mainly use square pixels and it's if somebody requested it like a professional, uh I would switch to whatever they told me to use. All right, we blabbed way too long about this. The main thing is up here, presets. You can click on the preset. All it does is load the settings on the right. And when you want to create a new document, you dial in your width and height, you make sure your resolution is appropriate. Uh not important if your image is only gonna be viewed on screen. But for printing that is important R GB mode 98.6% of the time. If you think you're gonna make radical changes to the brightness and color bit might help. What do you want the document to start full of? And then down here SR GB for people that are just getting started in Photoshop, if you have your own printer and you want to get into trying to push the color to get as vivid as you could print, you know, you might end up here with Adobe R GB instead and square pixels. So once you set this up at the bottom, you can usually hide that it'll be sticky and remember the settings that you had dialed in. Then finally, if you think you're going to use these settings a lot, like you make uh postcards or something else that you always dial in the same size. Then do you see this little icon here? That means let's save this as a pre. So I'm gonna click there and now it says save document preset, I'm just given a name. So I'm just gonna call it 8. or uh it's a 10 by 8, 10 times eight. I'll say at 300 PP I uh Sr GB. And I think those are the settings that I would want to know. Maybe I put the inch symbol in here. Here we go. And I'll save preset and it's just gonna make it. So in the future, if you went to the tab up here called saved, you would have it in here. So if there's anything you use regularly, like here is the maximum size of a picture on Instagram and I dialed it in and saved it as a preset. So I don't have to remember it. So let's hit create there's our file. If I want to double check the size of this file, then I can go to the image menu, choose image size. And this will tell me that if I set this two inches, we have a 10 by eight inch image and the resolution was set to 240. This can also be used for scaling an image. Uh Let's say I already have a picture. I'm gonna go get a picture. So here I have my image and I just opened it. I don't know what size it is and I need it to be a particular size. Someone told me they wanted to print this and they want to print it 12 inches wide. OK. Let's go up to image size and see what it's currently set to. Uh we'll view it as inches and OK, we're 32 inches. Well, what I would want to do is figure out how are they gonna print it? Because remember resolution is there's a requirement for it for each kind of printing. But before we get into that, they told me that this image needs to be printed 12 inches wide. And so what I want to do right now is I don't want to change how much information is in the file yet. And if that's the case, I turn this off, resample means change how much is in the file. So if I turn that off. Now I can come in here. And if I change something like the width, then this number down here is gonna change along with it because right now printing this image 32 inches wide. This is how small the pixels are. If I tell it to only print it 12 inches wide, those pixels are gonna get much smaller if we use the same amount of info. So I'm gonna type in 12 right here. And now it tells me the resolution of that picture if I didn't change the amount of information in it, but I printed it 12 inches wide would be this high. And if you looked at our recommendations for resolution, I don't even think any of them were above 300. Well, no, they were for inkjet. I think you can go up to 360. But uh that's kind of a ridiculously high setting, which means the file I sent them would be huge and they wouldn't need it to be that big. So that's when I could turn this on. Resample means I want to change how much information is in the file right now. This is the width and this is the height in pixels. That's the actual amount of information in this file. Well, if I tell it that I want 12 inches, then I can come down here and say, how many pixels do I want in each of those inches? And let's say they said they need 300 or they told me what kind of printing they were doing and I looked it up, uh, using my recommendations. I told you, well, now it's gonna scale it down. These numbers just went really low compared to where they were before. In fact, it says this used to be 62 megabytes in size and it's gonna go down to 13 and therefore that's gonna be much easier to send, especially if I'm gonna be emailing or uploading that on the internet. So how's it figuring out this stuff? Well, it's actually simple. We're telling it, we want 12 inches wide and we're telling it that in each one of those 12 inches, we need this number of pixels. And so all it's doing is taking 12 times 300 this is the answer and the height is whatever this is multiply that by 300 you would get this. That's all it's doing this setting here. Just leave it set to automatic, it'll figure out this is what kind of math should be used to do that with. And you can go in here and do all sorts of things. But this is gonna switch between these various choices depending on what numbers you type in most of the time. It's, it's what you want. So I'm gonna click. OK? And the image suddenly looks smaller here because we just scaled it down where there's less information in the width and in the height, but it did not change the magnification, we were viewing the picture at. So instead of looking overly wide, it's now got a little smaller. But if I come up here to image and choose image size, it's gonna tell me 12 inches wide, 300 that's what we needed. So now it's dialed in just right. So this image could be saved and sent off if I zoom up on the image, it has fine detail for that particular size. So image size tells you what is the current size of your image. And if you want it to be a different size, that's when you turn on resample, that changes the amount of information in your picture. Whereas if that's turned off, it means I can change how big it will print, but we're not gonna change how much information is in the file. So if I do change how big this is gonna print, this number here would change for resolution because if you scale it up, the pixels will get bigger and fewer of them would fit in an inch. And if you scale it down, uh the pixels will get smaller and so more of them would fit in an inch. So this would change, turn on resample and then it can change the amount of information in the file and it just looks at what width did you type in and how many pixels in each one of those inches and it does a little simple math and figures out how big it should be. But then there's another choice in the same menu that looks really similar and that's called canvas size. If I use canvas size and I bring this up, it doesn't show me the resolution, but I can view this in pixels or in inches and I can change the width or the height or both. And what the heck is this doing? Well, let's say the person said they need this to be 12 inches wide. That's how, why they're gonna print it in four inches tall. Well, the original image, if I scale it down will be 4.24 inches tall. So what this does is it says let's either crop into the image to make it smaller or let's add empty space to make it bigger here. I'll give you a visual, the difference between image size and canvas size. Imagine your image is literally printed on a canvas. That's what this is supposed to represent. If you do image size, then what you're doing is you're changing the size of it, all the width and height will change together like that. If on the other hand, you instead choose canvas size, then what you're doing is you're not changing the size of the picture itself, you're changing the size of the container that holds the picture. So then if I come in here, this is what I would be doing with canvas size with canvas size, I could come in here and say make the canvas smaller. The picture is not getting smaller, it's getting cropped in on, but the picture is staying the exact same size. It was, it's the container that holds the picture that's getting smaller. So it crops in or you could do the opposite. If you typed in bigger numbers, eventually the canvas would get bigger and you get empty space and you can do that on just one side if you want or on multiple sides. But that's what it does. So back here, if I came in to canvas size, and I said that I want to think in inches. And I say, well, the guy said they needed 12 inches wide and four inches tall. Well, here I type in four and it's in here. Now it's going to have to remove space from this image to make it less tall. And this means where should the original picture go within that new uh document? Should it appear at the top? So therefore, we're removing space from the bottom of the image or should it go at the bottom? That would mean we'd remove space from the top of the image. I'm gonna do it. So it's at the bottom. Therefore, it's cutting into the sky. I click. OK? And it's gonna say, hey, that's smaller, you're gonna cut into your image. It's just warning you, you're gonna lose some information. I hit, proceed and it just cut in at the top watch. I'll choose undo, do you see how much space we used to have and how much space we have? Now, that's the difference between four point, whatever it was before and exactly four inches tall. Or, let's say instead, the guy said it was 12 inches wide and five inches tall. All right. Then I come in here and I say, fine, five inches tall. Now, where should within this new larger document? Where should the original that we started with? Go? Should it be up here or down there? I'm gonna put it at the bottom. So now it's gonna add extra space and down here it wants to know how should we add that space? Should it use my background color? Which is a color right over there. My foreground color, white, black or something else and I'm gonna just tell it to use white click. Ok? And now it just added the space to make it five inches tall. We'll zoom out and it's up to me what I want to do with it. Well, I can come in here and select that and try to fill it with something I can come in here and try. There's something called content aware fill. All right, you can find it in here too. It's in a little pop up and it'll try to invent info there and made up info and now I could submit that because sometimes magazines need more space than what you had when you captured your original picture. So image size means let's make the image as a whole larger or smaller, but we're not gonna crop in on it to change its proportions in canvas size means we're not gonna make the picture bigger or smaller. We're gonna make the document that contains it larger or smaller, that's either gonna add space or it's gonna crop into your picture. An alternative to canvas size is to come over here to the crop tool. And if somebody tells me they need a specific size, I could type it in here. I could type uh 12 by four. And that's gonna make the shape of this cropping rectangle by four. And I could decide then uh how would I like it to crop in? Maybe I wanted to go right about there, press return or enter indicate you're done. And just so that it's not gonna use that every single time I use the crop tool in the future, I'd hit clear. All right. Now, let's talk about saving your image because that's the other essential thing. Uh To save your image, you go to the file menu. And if you choose, save that means use the same file format, the same file name and put it in the same location, which means save over the original file if possible. So I don't want to do that right now because I changed this image it cropped in on it somewhat. And I want the original to look like the original. So I don't want to choose save to save it right into the original. So instead we have a choice of save as save as means I want to change one or more of the following the file name. So that if I use a different name, we're not gonna save into the same original file, uh the file format or the location on the hard drive over here. I'm not gonna choose save because I wanna mess with the original image. I'll choose save as instead this comes up, it brings me to the folder, it came from the original did and up there, I could just type in cropped to 12 by four. Then it was originally a JPEG. So it dialed in JPEG down here. But if I wanted a different file format, I could choose it from here. And this is something we haven't talked about yet. But absolutely always have this check box turned off what it says on the right side will change depending on what kind of image you're working with. But absolutely always turn that on. If you do not turn that on, then the colors in your image can and will look weird depending on which computer your image is viewed on because it won't have enough information to know exactly what the colors should look like because you didn't have that on. So I absolutely never turn that off. And if I ever see it turned off, I glance at it and I always turn it on. So let's just save it. I changed the name so it's not gonna save over the original since I chose to save as a JPEG file. These are the options for JPEG. I'll tell it to do high quality and I'll just click. Ok, then we have one other choice in there and that is save a copy. And that's actually a relatively new addition to Photoshop. And that's Adobe's way of trying to make sure you don't mess things up. So let's see what happens if the original here was saved in JPEG format. JPEG does not understand what layers are. If I create a new layer in here, I know we haven't talked about layers yet, but I just made one. And let's say I put something in there like just some random paint. That is something the JPEG file format does not know how to save when this thing which I could turn on or off is separate from what's under it. So now if I go to the file menu and let's try to save the image, remember JPEG file format does not know how to save a layer. So when I choose, save this pops up, even though I told it to save, which usually when you choose save, there are no options, it just saves into the file and nothing pops up to look like this because it just updates the file. But that's not all that happened when this came up down here. The format no longer says JPEG usually it would, but that's because we have something in the layers panel that JPEG does not know how to save. So if I click here to try to change the file format before the list that showed up for format was much longer. But now it's only showing me file formats that know how to save what I have over here in the layers panel. And so it limits me and it's forcing me to use something else. Well, I don't want to save it that way. I want to save it as that JPEG file doesn't matter if I choose save or save as neither one of them will present me with the choice of JPEG because JPEG does not know how to save this. And that's when you need to choose, save a copy, save a copy means let me save it in any file format. I want to regardless if it could save all the information that's over here in my layers panel or not. But if JPEG can't save what's in my layers panel, what's it gonna do? Well, all it's gonna do is merge these two pieces together so that when I reopen the file, they're no longer gonna look separate, we're still gonna have an image that looks exactly like it does over here where that green paint is. It's just the green paint will no longer be floating up here on a separate layer. So they make you choose save a copy when you want to use a file format that could not save all the pieces you've made your image out of. They make you go out of the way to do that. So I'll just hit save and I'll give it the options that I want. And now if I close this image and open it again in my layers panel, you're gonna find that there's no longer that layer on top. And it just is trying to make it difficult for me to save this in a way where I would lose some pieces of it because now I can no longer get the sky that's behind that green to be there. So your choices we have save, which means just save it right back into the file it came from right now. It's grayed out because I haven't made any changes. So there's nothing to save save as means I want a separate file with a different file name or a different file format or save somewhere else on my drive and save a copy means uh just let me work and save it in a file format uh that I want to, regardless if it could save all the pieces this is made out of or not. And when you use that, your picture always will look exactly like it did here. It's just that when you reopen it from that saved version, all the pieces it was made out of in the layers panel, they're not gonna be there. It's gonna be all merged together in one chunk. Then as if there wasn't enough info, there's one other way, then I usually save things. And that is if I plan on uploading this to Instagram, Facebook, my website or just something online, um That kind of thing, I would choose file export. And then there's a choice right here called export. As the old version of that is this one called Save for web. They're trying to phase that out, but they haven't put every single feature that's in here into this yet. And so they're having them both, but this used to be what you choose and this is a more modern version of it. So anyway, export ask and this is here because when you save something for the internet, oftentimes the original picture is dramatically larger than what you actually need on the internet. Uh So here you could scale your image, for instance, the widest image that Instagram can handle. And if you feed it anything larger, it will scale it down to. The size is 1080 pixels in the width. So I'm just gonna tell it why save out anything more than that, it'll just take it longer to upload. So I'm gonna scale it down and it's telling me that would be scaling it down 30%. Here you see canvas size. Remember, canvas size is like the container that holds the picture. I don't want to change that. If I did it would either crop into the image if I lower one of these two or if I increase it, it would try to add empty space. So I don't really need that. And then down here, you always have these two check boxes turned on. If it's for the internet, this makes sure the colors will look OK, regardless of what setting you you used when you created the document and this makes sure that whatever software gets this knows what the colors are supposed to look like. And then finally up at the top, which file format do you want to use? And in general use JPEG for photographs. Uh JPEG is designed for photographs, the letters stand for joint photographic experts group. So it's designed for photos and use ping if it is instead of graphic like a logo or a bar chart. Ping stands for portable network graphics. It's better for solid colors in simple shapes, although it works fine for photos, but it might not give you a small of a file size. S JP in GIF is old GIF is what you used to use before. This one got invented with JPEG, you choose a quality standard and the higher this is the bigger the file would be. But the finer the details. So if you plan on printing it, uh you could crank that up because you want a high quality print. And if you want to load fast in the internet, you could bring it down when it comes to PNG. If you turn that on the file size will get smaller. So file size is important and you don't mind a little degradation and potential quality. Uh You could turn that on and then you just hit export. When you do, it'll ask you where to save the file and what file name you want and then just hit save, you'll have a file ready for the internet. Then finally, if let's say you created an image from scratch in Photoshop and now you need to save it and you simply need to choose which of these file formats to choose between. Then I can give you some guidance. It depends on what you're using the file for if you're delivering a file to somebody else and the image is completely done being worked on and you don't plan on having further work done by other people or whatever it's just finished. Then I would use JPEG if it's a photograph and I would use PNG if it's a logo or a graphic or a bar chart, something that has large areas of solid color and does not look like a photo. Although photos can look fine in PNG format, but that are the two main delivery file formats. Then there's a different category that I would use for what I would call working file formats. Which means if I plan on doing further work on the image, I'm gonna open it up again in Photoshop, I'm gonna make more changes, save it and close it and then repeat that process again and again and just, I'm not done with it yet. Well, then we wanna make sure we use a file format that preserves every little bit of what's in that file and does not degrade the quality whatsoever. Because anytime I reopen it that degradation and quality, which will happen if we use one of those delivery file formats uh makes it so we don't have as much information to work with to continue working with the image. So for working file formats where you're not done with the image here are the ones I'd use Photoshop file format or Tiff. There is no quality difference whatsoever between those two. I personally use Tiff. The main reason I use Tiff is there are limitations to how big of an image these formats can handle. Photoshop is limited to two gigabytes in file size. That's an absolutely massive file. But I occasionally run into that limitation because I create images that have hundreds of layers and each layer contains a full high resolution picture. And when I do that I could bump into that limit the Tiff format. On the other hand, maxes out at four instead of two gigs, this can handle four gigs. And because I run into it on occasion, then I just standardized on Tiff. I'm not saying you should because there's no quality difference, there's no feature difference really between them. Uh So you wouldn't notice the difference unless you run into that file size limit. I've even occasionally run to the limit of Tiff. And if you ever do, you get over four gigabytes in size, then you go to this one called large document format. And that's the equivalent to it's known as a Photoshop big file. That's its like nickname. And I do have a few that I've had to save in that format. So in summary, JPEG for photos for delivering them ping for graphics, when delivering them, if on the other hand, you're going to continue to work on the image, then either Photoshop or Tiff, both Photoshop and Tiff can save everything you put in your file, uh any layers you have and any other fancy features that you use. Well, hopefully you have a little bit less of a mystery around concepts such as resolution and resampling, which simply means changing the amount of information in your file. And then when you save a file, you see that long list of file formats, there are very few of them you really need to use. But I divide them up into two categories, delivery file formats which are for when you're done with the image. And you don't necessarily need to keep all the parts that were used to make it and then working file formats, which is where you want all those parts. And the next time you open the file, you want it to look exactly like it did when you closed it. So now we know what to use each time we want to save those files.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials

PhotoshopAtoZ_BenWillmore_BonusMaterials_1.zip
PhotoshopAtoZ_BenWillmore_BonusMaterials_2.zip

Ratings and Reviews

Nonglak Chaiyapong
 

I recently took Ben Willmore's '2024 Adobe Photoshop: The A to Z Bootcamp,' and it was amazing! The lessons are super detailed but easy to follow, even if you're just starting out. Ben’s teaching style is relaxed, and he breaks down everything step by step. I learned a ton, especially about layers, masks, and the new AI tools. Highly recommend it for anyone wanting to get better at Photoshop! And for anyone looking to take a break, you can always switch over and check out some 'ข่าวฟุตบอล' https://www.buaksib.com/ for a bit of fun in between lessons!

lonnit
 

There were several mind-blowing moments of things I never knew, that were incredible. However, it was very strange how each lesson ended abruptly in the middle of him teaching something. It seems that this class must have been pieced together from longer lessons and we don't get the full lessons here. It was frustrating when the lesson would end mid-sentence when there was something I was very interested in watching to completion. Perhaps it should be re-named the A-W Bootcamp! LOL! Where not cut off, the material was excellent, deep and thorough. Definitely worth watching! [note: We've corrected the truncated lessons! Sorry about that! --staff]

Sanjeet Singh
 

you are doing well

Student Work

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