Updating Library graphics across multiple documents in Photoshop

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Course info

17 lessons / 1 hours

Overview

If you’ve ever struggled to maintain a consistent look and feel across all the touchpoints of your content marketing, this lab is for you. Beautiful design is only half the battle when you’re designing for an integrated campaign in which you have to deliver, repurpose, and repeat design elements consistently and efficiently. In this fun, fast-paced, hands-on lab with Adobe Certified Instructor Daniel Scott, learn how to professionally use Photoshop to repurpose your designs across multiple media and formats.

While becoming a design implementation wizard, you’ll learn:

  • How to structure content for multisize social imagery
  • The best workflows for social, print, ad banners, and video
  • The top tools for non-destructive design
  • How to master layers, artboards, Smart Objects, and libraries
  • How to become the master of productivity in your office

Course duration 1.5 hours
Daniel Scott

Daniel Scott

Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor

instructor

I 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.

Downloads & Exercise files

Transcript

Welcome to the video. This one is going to introduce art boards  and how to update across them all. Watch this, uh, graphics being used that we made earlier. Look, we update one. They all update at once. Super handy.

And before we get started, let's,  let me just quickly introduce what art boards are. All they are is a Photoshop document, so have a look. It's a Photoshop document that has more than one page,  and those pages within here don't have to be the same size. These are really handy for, I do them a lot for banner ads,  square one, uh, leaderboard skyscraper. Often there's another kind  of like 30 different sizes in here  and it just means they're all separate when I export them. But because they all hold such a visually similar style,  when I update one, it's so hard to go and try  and update, you know, 30 different Photoshop documents.

It's nice to just have them all in one place. And in this exercise we're using multiple  different shaped artboards. But you might just be using the artboards  for maybe just version A and B of a design. Same size, just slightly different graphics. I use a lot for social media posts  where Instagram needs a size,  but Facebook needs a slightly different size  and then dribble needs another one  and Twitter wants a different one. So often that can be very similar in terms of sizes,  but I just named them Facebook, Instagram,  and they're just using the same graphics  but following different dimensions  and potentially different call to actions.

Alright, let's jump in and make this all happen now. Alright, so to get started, let's go to file. Let's go to open to open up banner ads  from your exercise files. Now remember, I'm back in Photoshop now. Okay, so open up banner ads, stop PSD. And here's the kind of static banner ads  that I've mocked up.

I've done a bit of the mocking up to get started. We're all on separate art boards. Remember just like multiple pages. If you've not used art boards much before, don't worry. We'll, we'll get used to them as we go along. What I want you to do is we're gonna start  with this one called Square.

You don't have to select it. What you do have  to do is over here in your libraries,  make sure you can see instructor each queue. There's our Hawaii click hold and drag it. Just kinda let it go somewhere over here. Now what I wanna do is grab the center of it  and I'm gonna move it so it's in the top left  and I need to stretch it out. So it's covering all of the white area here.

Now remember in Photoshop you don't hold down the shift key  anymore, at least man, it's a hard uh, it's a hard shortcut  to get, uh, to get outta your system. I'm gonna position it like that. Hit enter on my keyboard and I wanna send it to the back. Okay? The long way is go to layer, go down  to arrange center back. I use these shortcuts kinda Mac, it's shift command  and that first square bracket next to your, it's kind  of next to your Peaky on your keyboard.

It's very similar on a pc. It's shift and control in that same square brackets. Cool, so I got it back there. Gonna do the same thing for the leaderboard. Drag it out rather than duplicating it,  just keep dragging it out from the libraries. Just humor me for the moment.

This  one's gonna have to scale up quite a bit. Don't hold shift. Okay,  I'm gonna get it roughly in the middle there. Hit return and use that shortcut. Command shift, square bracket  Or control shift square bracket. If you have to reposition it  afterwards, I've got mine a bit low.

You are gonna have to go into this leaderboard  and find our Hawaii layer. So leaderboard, just twirl this down  and there is the Hawaii one. And then you can kind of just move it around. That's mine. Skyscraper. Here we go.

This one's gonna get a lot bigger, a lot bigger head return. Move it around. Send it the back. Yeah, I am happy with it ish. Alright, why have we done this? Okay, use the CC libraries.

You might be avoiding the libraries. I wanna show you our first good reason why they're awesome  because what it's happened is all  of these guys are actually smart objects  and they're all linked to this one. So if I update the library option, all  of these are gonna update, but it gets even fancier. Let's have a look. So let's double click this guy. So I want to edit this image.

Now we don't wanna do it on this page  because if I do it on the leaderboard, that's fine,  it will adjust just this unique one, but not the other guys. So if I edit this in my library, they all update,  double click it, just double click it in the option. Now what you'll notice here is it's opened up this  Hawaii psd. It's not the same as that original one that we made. I think it was called Land. And see, I've renamed this one  but they're not connected.

Okay, so you kind of use this first one,  you drag it into here, but then it's a lone range. It's all by itself. And when you double click it, okay,  it opens in its own little tab here called Hawaii psd. Make sure you're on that one. What I'd like  to do is in this banner ads,  it's a bit light in the background. I want it dark.

So this white text is a little easier. I'm gonna zoom in. Why are we so far away in? Just so this white text is a little bit readable  against these clouds. So Hawaii psd  and all I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to adjustments  and this is the trick that I use to kind  of darken it without making it kind of black and white. So adjustments panel.

Let's click on this one called Levels  the second icon in at the top. And you've got two little white sliders here. Grab this bottom one and just drag it to the left. I'm gonna put mine down to about one 40. Okay, you can be anywhere, okay, just a nice way of yanking. Keeps a nice saturation in there,  but yanks down the light colors.

Next thing to do, file save. Let's go to file Close. So it's gone. Magic. Look at them. They all updated.

Cool. Huh? You ready for the finale? If we jump to our illustrator file, ah, it updated two. Are you feeling productive? I'm feeling productive and it doesn't have to stop  with just this, we're going across Illustrator to Photoshop.

This might be dived into InDesign and After Effects  and Premier all sorts of different files, all using  that same image. It's gonna get better later on when we start sharing these  libraries with colleagues in the same company  or across countries. Then we make updates on one. They update on all of them. Ah, it's awesome. Alright, so  that's a quick introduction to art boards.

And we've got one graphic link to the libraries across all  of them, across a couple of documents. And we can easily update them just  by double clicking it in the library. They all connect up magically. All right, let's jump into the next video.
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