Export Artboards as PDF & separate JPGs in Photoshop
Overview
Daniel Scott
Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor
instructorI discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.
Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.
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So it's time to export, that's where, with the naming of our Artboards was super helpful. If you haven't done it just double click in it, and it's Artboard 1, 2, and 3. Give it a name here, it is handy, especially when you want to update your files if you make changes. You can click in here, nice little tip is, you can hit tab. Tab, tab, tab, Means you can keep typing, or copying and pasting the names. So we've got all our names in here, actually this one here is wrong. Cover, this was meant to be Instagram. They don't have a cover image but they have-- this is for their posts. It's probably going to crop to a square. Okay, didn't think that one through super well, but let's export all these files.
So what we're going to do is go to 'File', let's go to 'Export'. We'll start with the Export to Files. PDF is pretty easy. We'll do that in a second, but most of the time I want to export a big pilot JPEG. So I can now go and upload them to the different social media platforms. Stick mine on my desktop. There you go. Give it a name. This is just a prefix, it's going to add it to the end. I don't want anything added, I've named them nicely over here. This one here, Export Selected Artboards catches me out every single time.
With this on it's only going to export the Instagram one I've got selected. So I'm going to turn that off. The File Type, you can decide, I'm going to use JPEG. Export Options is on by default. You can turn it on and just decide how-- what kind of quality you want to deal with, and hopefully on my desktop. Thank you, Photoshop. All ready to go, all got JPEGs all nicely named. Awesome! What's really nice about it is if you make an update. So let's go to this one, and I hit 'Inverse'. I'll do the same for this one, and I do the same for this one, for no good reason otherwise. Other than it's easy to see. I can go to 'File' and just run that thing again, because I've named them all, 'Artboards to Files', put in the same place on my desktop. Wish this would remember what I did. Click 'Run'. And on my desktop now, you can see there, it didn't make duplicates of it, so you got to be careful of that, I guess. But it's nice all these things are updated, ready to go. Somebody's made a change, I can just run it.
Now if you need to just run one of them, let's say, only this one's changed, it's inverted, and now is black and white. So just this one needs updating. Do this one. Just right click it and go to 'Export As'. And in here you can say I want you to be a JPEG, I want it at 80%. It's using the right name, I can click 'Export'. Stick it on my desktop. It's going to replace it. Yes, please. That's an easy way to do just one. Where is it? There it is, there.
The other thing you can do is export a PDF. So 'Export', let's go to 'Artboards to PDF'. Where is it going to go? It's going to go to my 'Desktop'. This is using the file name now, not my Artboards. So I'm going to call this one, it's my 'Illustrator Advanced July'19'. This is going to be my 'A' because I'm going to show you a B version with some different settings. Export Selected Artboards? No, I want all of them, not just the one I have selected here. You got these two options, Multi Page Document just means I'm going to have one PDF with five pages. You click on this one and you're going to have five PDFs, all separate. Up to you. We'll do this Include Artboard Name. That will be our A and B testing to show you the difference. We'll run it without it. And you get what you imagine, right?
You just got a PDF for them all in here. Desktop here, where is he? There he is, there. Open them up, and I've got a PDF. Because it's a small one it's not so great as a super large version. There's all my PDFs, five pages. Now there is a way in Adobe Acrobat to make sure that when the document's opened, it opens at 100% size, like down here, not the full size where it goes Fit Visible, looks weird. Can't remember off the top of my head where it is. I'll have to find it in Acrobat, but know it can be done. Let's look at the other option.
So in Photoshop we're going to go to 'Export', 'Artboards to PDF'. Go to 'Browse', stick it on my 'Desktop'. Give it the same name as before. This one's going to be 'A'. Can I start with B? I did, it's kind of weird. Was the other one B? Oh man, it's late, it's 10:30 at night. I'll call this one Z, I turn off that, turns back on every time. Multi Page, I'm just going to turn Include Artboard Name 'on', hit 'Run'. Kick back, relax, and we have a slightly different PDF. You might find it useful because it describes it. Because the other PDF just has a big, kind of pile of shapes that all look very similar, especially these profile images. I did, I started with B, so Z has this. It's extended the Artboard out, and we have just text around the edges now. Just to help, whether proofing it or checking, we just know what we're talking about.
All right, my friends, we have come to the end of Artboards. It's everything I know about them. Let's move into some more exciting Photoshop tutorials. I'll see you tomorrow morning when I'm fresh, and we start retouching. Bye now.