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Adobe Photoshop CC - Advanced Training

How to - tidying up your Photoshop files before sending them out

Daniel Walter Scott

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Hi there, this video is all about how to clean up your Photoshop files before sending them to a client or a colleague. Getting the PSD ready, just to go out. It's a couple of things we need to do. We need to make sure the file size is as small as it can be. We need to look professional. We need to make sure that it will actually open on other people's computers. And I'll show you a way of sharing it with them as well. 


So in your 'Exporting' folder, open up 'Clean Up Files.psd'. This one here is 32 Megabytes at the moment. Now this is not even that big for a Photoshop file, but because you have to download these exercise files, I'd love to put a Gigabyte file in there and show you how big it is, how much savings we could do, but you'd kill me because you'd have to download a Gigabyte's worth of file. So over here I'm going to kind of raise this up and move this up, so we can see our Layers Panel. So it's a Missio file, the cool thing about it, well, not the cool thing, I just opened a file that I had that I was working on recently, and didn't change a single thing. So what you'll notice is that this is what my files look like. There are things that are turned off that I don't need anymore, that are sitting in there, it's a big old mess. No names on layers. So while I'm working, I work by myself, with myself, but if I'm working with a colleague, I totally go through and make this a lot nicer before I'm sending this to a client, so let's work through now how I do that. 


The two biggest things we're going to do first is getting rid of any layers that are hidden. So just the Eyeball's turned off, just stuff I don't need. I've turned it off for a reason and I just want to clean it up. Also any layers that are just empty, there are some empty layers in here. I know layer 16 is empty, it's got nothing on it. I actually added that one but there's nothing on it. So let's work out how to do that, there's kind of two places, there's one that says 'File', and goes to 'Scripts', and there's this option here, it says ‘Delete all empty layers'. It just goes and looks at what potentially could be a really long document, just removes any empty layers. The next one is removing the hidden layers, and it's in a slightly different place. It's under 'Layer', 'Delete any hidden layers'. Nice. Tidied up a bit. 


What I'll do is, we'll do a 'File', 'Save As', so we can compare the file sizes and just see what file savings these things have. So 'Clean up files', I'm going to put one on my desktop. It's going to be called 'Tidied'. I doubt that's even how you spell it, but that's as close as I can get. Let's hit 'Save', and let's see what we're at. 


Another thing before we go off is, make sure this is turned on. It makes the file size slightly bigger, but it means that when we send it to our colleague, if they've got an earlier version of Photoshop, it means that it's more likely to open in that version with that on. With it off, the file size is smaller, but, not as cross version-ey. So let's click 'OK'. Remember, it was 37.2, now let's have a look. Desktop, and there it is there, we're now at 30. So on those layers there were a couple of things that we just didn't need, it's pixels. Awesome. That's the first chunk. Now the next bit is, it really depends on what you need from this file. Let's say that we don't need-- because there's a lot of working extra stuff. Let's have a look at some of these files. So some of these files here just have stuff that we don't need. See all the stuff up on the top right? It gets cropped off, so it doesn't need to be in this file. 


If I was sending it to maybe a colleague who I wanted to have access to all these kind of extra bits, I might leave it. So let's have a look, so this one here in particular, these top two here, they're just junk that we don't need, that can't be seen. So what we can do to get rid of it all to trim it all up, just grab the 'Crop Tool'. Make sure Deleted Cropped Pixels is on, it's off by default. I'm pretty sure, so turn it on, it just means that anything that's cropped is going to be deleted. Hit 'Return' on your keyboard, kind of gives you a preview of what's going. So this stuff along the top here, hit 'Return' again. Now on that same layer-- let's have a look at this guy here. Can you see, there's just nothing there. I'll turn that off as well. There's just like a corner there now, so we've just deleted those. And that works to a point, but if I go back to my Crop Tool, click enter again, you'll see that there's all this junk down the bottom, and you're like, "Why don't he get deleted?" 


It won't work if these things are Smart Objects. So now you got to decide whether you need to retain Smart Objects or not, or whether like me, right now I just want to crop everything off so it's nice and kind of just compacted in here. So we're going to use a little trick from earlier, I want to find, here it says Kind, it should be there by default. I want to find this last option here that says, just show me all the Smart Objects, please. Now I'm going to select all of these guys. I'm going to leave this one because I want the text to remain vector inside the Smart Object, but these guys here are just pixels, I'm just going to right click them, any of the gray area here, and this option here that says Rasterize Layers. 


That just gets rid of the Smart Objects. And they just disappeared from this list because they're no longer Smart Objects. I turn this off, they're still there, there they are, but they're not going to kind of defy my cropping technique now. So 'Crop Tool', hit 'Return' on your keyboard, or 'Enter', then 'Enter' again. Hopefully now, if I click it one more time, it's all gone. So 'Esc', let's hit 'Save', let's see how big it is now. So we're down to like 3 Megabytes now. So you can see those Smart Objects can hold a lot of data. And now of course we don't need them. 


Next thing is to talk about compatibility. So what I did for you guys in the course is this font here, I don't really like, it's Arial, but I'm hoping that everyone's got it, otherwise Photoshop is going to open, and say, "Hey, you're missing a font." Well I set at it to Arial. What you might have to do is, say you're using your corporate font, or just that font that's a bit strange, and you know whoever you're sending it to is not going to have it. And they're not going to need to change the text, but you want to remain vector. By vector, I mean this thing is scalable, and because it's a font it will keep its nice quality. So there's a trick around that. So this file here is the Smart Object. You'll see there's no actual text here but it's a Smart Object, so I can double click the thumbnail to go into the Smart Object. So there's my original, I've dived into the Smart Object, it's this psd file, just like a temporary file, the Smart Object and all of its layers. You can see here, all sorts of Arial. 


Let's say I know my clients or my colleague doesn't have Arial. Whatever fancy font I'm using. You can select all these text layers, you could hit this, remember, it's kind of handy to show me all the text. I've clicked once at the top, held 'Shift' for the last ones, they're all selected. Right click any one of them, not in the icon here, over here in this gray area. Then there's this option, it says Convert to Shape. Often people rasterize type, and that's going to turn into tiny little pixels, and it's not scalable, and it's just as easy to do this, which remains vector. Scalable points and paths, essentially just better quality. Click on this. The only trouble with it - I'm going to turn that Type 'off' now. - is that these guys aren't editable text. That's one of the problems using this method, not editable text. You've got to decide whether that works for your situation. 


I guess I just want to show you all the ways you can do it to make it indestructible. It may be that you're doing stuff that's going out to a really vast audience, say it's going out to a marketing channel, where you want to give people the file, but you don't want to have them emailing you every five seconds saying, "Hey, I don't have this, or this isn't included, or won't open on my machine," that sort of stuff. Let's save this, and let's close this tab, and this thing's updated perfect. And save it again, and let's check how big it is now, so 3.7. It's a little bit bigger than what it was because now it's not using a font. It's actually collected all that data, and is now shapes. I'm assuming that's what it is anyway. It's a tiny bit bigger. 


Next thing to do is, how do you share this thing? We showed you how to package it in the last video. I'll show you a little other trick we can do in this particular one. So we want to share this PSD, right? Now let's go 'File', 'Save As' again. And what you'll find is, on your computer you will have a folder, on my Mac it's just, here it is here, Creative Cloud Files. It's under my-- that structure, if you're on a Mac. If you're on a PC, have a little look to find this folder called Creative Cloud Files. So think of this as just like Dropbox if you've never used it. And it's part of your license. And if I save it in there, click 'OK', nothing really fancy happens, except that my Creative Cloud app up here, you can see the little double arrow here, it's saying, "I'm syncing," you can see, syncing down here. So it's uploading it to your online storage. 


The cool thing about that is, if you go to your Creative Cloud app, if you're on a PC it's in the bottom right, look for the same little icon. Go to 'Assets' and go to 'Files', and go to 'View on Web'. Other thing you can do is, if you still can't find, say you're on a PC, and you can't find where that Creative Cloud folder is, just come down to that little icon, go to 'Assets', 'Files', If you click 'Open Folder', it will show you where it is on your computer. So I've saved it to there, it’s syncing. What I want to do is go to this one that says View on Web. And here we are here, it takes me to, basically it's just this place, assets.adobe.com. You can actually just type that in, login with your Adobe ID, and once it's finished syncing, this file appears, and it's a PSD. 


So there's no real difference here other than using Dropbox or Creative Cloud. I say this because I use Dropbox quite a bit. So I use this kind of assets.adobe.com less. But what's really cool about it is you can click on it and you can say, actually I'd like to share this one, and you can wait for it to give you a little option, but you can send it to people, copy and paste the link, and they'll have access to it. But what's really cool about it is if you edit this file and hit 'Save', it will update, so if the client comes back and says, "I can't open it", you don't have to send them a relink, you just send them this link here, right? You copy it, send it to them in an email, decide on what kind of settings are allowed, and then if they need to do changes, you just change it here in Photoshop, and hit 'Save', it will update here online. 


The last thing we'll do before we finish is the naming. We did this in an earlier video, but I'm going to call this one-- I'm going to kind of revisit our tricks. Remember, we can type in here and hit 'Tab'. I'm just going to work my way through. Just naming everything. You get the idea, right? So you can just hit tab, and tab, and tab. And name them all really good, so you look like a pro when you send it to somebody else. File size is nice and small, and you shouldn't have any problems with them not being able to open it. That is it for this video, let's get into the next one.