How to use your CC Library like a pro

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Course info

15 lessons / 1 hours

Overview

This course is for designers & marketers who already understand the fundamentals of Photoshop but believe there is a more effective, faster way to work. Work through a multi format creative campaign and learn techniques which will ensure hyper-efficiency & consistency.  

Join Adobe certified instructor Daniel Scott to learn:
 • How to maintain a consistent look across social media, print and web touchpoints.
 • Fast and efficient selection & masking techniques.
 • Practical retouching techniques and time saver shortcuts using Photoshop.
 • Workflow hacks for nondestructive design using artboards, Smart Objects & libraries.
 • The many new Photoshop 2020 features   
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

Hey there. This video is for people  who have used CC Libraries in the past  and you're like, nah, they didn't work. They were more hassle than they worth. My goal in this video, or one of my goals is so  that you leave going, actually, they're real useful  and I'm gonna start using them thanks to Dan's video. Okay? 'cause we're gonna go from like plain, ordinary  to look at that.

The thing we used, and I'm pointing at the screen,  you can't see me pointing, but there's a logo down the  bottom there and the image that we put in  and that font change,  that's gonna be the big secret trick at the end. Uh, consistency is what CC Libraries allows us to do,  especially on big jobs working in big companies. Super handy. Alright, let's get going. Alright, first up, you need  to make sure you can see your libraries panel. Um, I can see mine.

If you can't go to window, go to libraries. And uh, from the top here where it says yours probably said  to my libraries, unless you've been using it. Okay? And you'll end up  where you probably only got my library,  you might have all these other ones like me if you're a a  CC library fend. Okay? What we want is right down the bottom here is  to create a new library.

And this one is gonna be called productivity. Call you is what you want. Click return  and you kind of see what it says to do. It says drag them over here. So what we can do is with our Move tool, okay? So top left, grab the move tool, click hold, drag, drag,  drag, drag, drag, drag, drag, drag, drag, let go.

And over here we've got our latte. It's got a name because we named it in our Layers folder. If you've called, if yours is called background copy,  that's what it's gonna be called over here. You can double click the word and just rename it. Okay, I'm happy with mine. Called Latte.

And that's our first library. Uh, let's go to, you can also see down here,  see there's a little swirly thing. It's because it is updating onto my cloud, okay? That's what it's crowd of cloud libraries. So it's uploading in the internet so  that I've got a backup copy, kind of like Dropbox,  but also so that I can use it  between the different applications. So I'm gonna go back to my original one here  and maybe we invented the new background, okay?

And we removed the stick. I'm gonna grab my Move tool, okay? Click hold and drag this one. Uh, I'll do it a different way. Uh, you can click hold and drag it  or just hit this little plus. So click on the layer you want click plus  and say not the foreground color.

I want the graphic and hopefully  background copy will come over. I'm gonna name this one T and hit Return. Cool. Got me some libraries. Okay, so we've got them in here. Why do we have them?

Why do we wanna use 'em? The backing up online, which is handy. Um, but what becomes really handy is when you start kind  of using across different Adobe products. So we're gonna use, uh, Adobe Illustrator. I've got open in the background here. Okay, so open up Illustrator and go to File Open.

And I've got a file for you to work with. So it's in your exercise files. There's one in there called menu.ai. Click open. Now it might ask you to sync some, uh, fonts. Okay, click on sync.

It doesn't really matter this whole thing  if they don't sync properly. Um, but if you can do it, uh,  it'll say, Hey, these fonts are missing. What would you like to do? And uh, hopefully  You can click on sync and they just magically,  if I've done my job right, they should appear like this. If they're kind of got a red box around them, it means  my job is done badly and they're the wrong fonts. And in that case, just pick your own fonts.

Just go through and switch you out and replace them. So where this becomes super handy  as I'm gonna zoom out a little bit, remember,  command minus on a Mac, control minus on a pc. Find our libraries panel. Mine's over here. If you can't see yours, get a window  and make sure you turn libraries on. And then from the drop down here, okay, we're gonna go down  and find productivity.

There he is and these are my guys and I want to add it. So I'm gonna click hold and drag it across and click once. It's very big. So I'm gonna undo, I'm gonna drag it across  and I'm gonna drag it out. It's just a different way. Click.

It once goes in full size. Clicking and dragging will make it a specific size. It doesn't really matter. What I want you to do is kind of put it in here, down  here a little bit, okay? Uh, so that's why libraries are good. You can drag them into, uh, from Photoshop into the library  and then out of any Adobe program.

Uh, so after Effects,  premiere InDesign, whatever you're using. Libraries connect to xd. They've all got libraries connected. Great for reusable objects. It gets better as we go along too. Now it's not a one-way street.

You don't have to drag out from um,  Photoshop into Illustrator. You can go back the other way. So I've got this  logo here, okay? It's in the kind of top right. Um, it is,  I'm just gonna click it with my black arrow. Click hold.

Drag, drag, drag and hover above. And you can see there's my logo slate. Okay? And I've got a logo down here, my vanilla one. Click hold and drag that into it. There you go.

You'd be like, how did it get its name? Uh, I named my layers, which nobody does  for this tutorial to make it look good. Uh, basically in your layers panel here,  you can find the graphic, okay, under elements. And you can see there it is there. Okay? Yours is probably gonna be called group or some bad name.

Let's say it's this thing, double click it  and you can name it something good. And then when you drag it in, it'll bring the name,  but you don't have to, nobody does just me in this tutorial. All right? So I've got my logos in here. Other things that I want are colors,  because often we'll have brand colors  in some other programs. Say we've got all our corporate colors laid out in a  brochure, maybe even from somebody else in InDesign.

Okay? It doesn't have to be Illustrator or Photoshop. Anything. You've got it in. Let's say it's this  blue here, this slate color. I want to click on it with my black arrow.

Select it once and then down here. 'cause if I drag it in, it's gonna drag like the rectangle. Can you see? I've got this like artwork rectangle. It's not what I want. I'm gonna hit the  little trash button down the bottom.

You can undo it. Uh, interesting top thing  that comes up quite a bit where people using libraries are  like what happens if you delete one? There is, uh, you can go into your libraries here  and say, uh, show me my undo somewhere. Uh, where is it? Uh, there is view deleted items. I'm hovering right over it, Dan.

Uh, there it is there. Um,  So if you do delete something  or somebody else deletes it from your library  that you share, don't worry, there's a backup of them. Okay? But, so we want that color but not the graphic. So with it selected, we had this little plus down the bottom  here and you can see, oh, just gimme the feel color please. Also me, I named my color Swatch.

Yes I did. Yours probably gonna be RGB and also some random numbers. Um, I, let's click on this kind of vanilla box  and go, same thing. Feel color, vanilla slate. Awesome, huh? You can see why this is super awesome  for like consistency across big jobs.

You know, like, uh, how many times have I opened a document  where it's kind, is it the same green? You've named it differently and you're like, oh,  are these connected or are they similar colors that are,  you know, slightly different variations  or at least you've got them in the library. You know, every time you drag it out,  it's gonna be the same color. Do the same things with fonts. This is probably the most handy. Say like this one here, this from Kyoto to Dublin  with it selected with my Black Arrow.

Same thing. If I drag it in, it's gonna give me like a,  a kind of group of letters. What I want is just the style from them. So I'm gonna hit the little plus. I'm gonna say, give me the character style, please. Okay?

And I've got it there. You can see how useful this might be. You know, we're not doing InDesign  or Illustrator really, we're doing Photoshop,  but I'm just kind of showing you the connection  and how useful that would be with say,  especially something like InDesign  where you may be working on some longer documents. Cool. Huh? Alright,  I'm gonna name mine by double clicking it.

And this is gonna be called my Heading one Terrible name. Uh, for, for the brand called Dante. Very creatively named Dan. Uh, so, um, I've got my character style, got some colors,  all match, everything's gonna work good. Got some logos that are Vector. So in there, let's look at applying them.

And I'm, I'm gonna try and impress you with like how  to apply libraries. 'cause if you're one of those people who are like, yeah,  I tried libraries a few years ago  and there were more hassle than there were. Today's the day. Okay, well as long  as you watch this whole video course  through today's the day, I'm gonna convince you that, hmm,  libraries have real good uses, especially for big jobs  or people working in bigger companies. Alright, so let's make it happen. Let's jump back into Photoshop.

Okay? And in Photoshop here, it's got a file, it's gotta open  and I've got a kind a partly made, um,  document called, uh, what is it called? Facebook banner. Okay, open that one up. Um, it might have some fonts that need to be,  uh, synced as well. Either syc them or just make them, uh, myriad  or pick any sort of font you like.

So what we wanna do is we wanna start applying some of this. Goodness. You can see my library's all  updated, all very nice. It'll update on any machine  that you've also got your creative cloud logged into. Okay? I think you're about two, um,  logged into two different machines.

Definitely if you've got the iPad version of Photoshop now,  it'll be updating on there. It's all very connected and cool. Uh, let's say, let's implement some of this stuff. Let's do character style. So let's make sure we've got this layer selected here. From Kyoto to Japan  To Dublin even.

Okay, with it selected, let's click on character style. Just click on it once and ready City. It picked the right font, the right size, the right color. Ah, so good. Super big time saver. One of the things that it doesn't work that,  that I ignore sometimes if I don't have time to explain it.

We've got a video, I've got loads of time. Uh, you notice I didn't put the paragraph style in paragraph  styles say from Illustrator, uh, will work  between Illustrator and InDesign  and anything else that's using paragraph styles. Uh, Photoshop doesn't work. Okay? You have to use character styles for it  to go from like say illustrator to uh, Photoshop. That if you are going from say, illustrated to InDesign  or just between InDesign documents, uh,  character styles work perfectly.

Can you see? I ignored that one for good reason  'cause it doesn't work in Photoshop at the moment. You might wanna tick check your version every time I do I'm  like, ooh, I wonder if that's been fixed. Nope, not at the moment. Alright, let's do a couple more. Let's add the T image.

Grab it, drag it in. It's telling me stuff like this action creates smart job. Just that link between blah blah, blah, blah, blah. You can read that. It just means they're connected. And we'll talk about a little bit later on.

Gives you just a one off. I need to turn that back off every time 'cause I'm a trainer  and I have to keep those around. All right, so drag that across. It's kind of put it in as a size kind of perfect. Actually hit enter on my keyboard  and I'm going to drag this to the bottom. Oop.

So it's underneath everything. Nice. You can size it anything you like. It's probably a little weird. Anyway, that looks good. Uh, next thing I want to do is I want to add the logo.

So I'm gonna grab the vanilla version of the logo. Okay. Click hold. Drag, drag it across. Yes. Okay.

Uh, I'm gonna resize this one. Don't hold shift. Just drag any of the corners  and when you get it to where you want it return,  I'm not too worried about, um, uh, yeah,  I'm not too worried about its, uh, size at the moment. Just kind of get it down here. Nice. You'll notice I don't like auto select.

That's just a personal preference. The years on isn't not gonna change this course. All right, so the powers of the library, we were able to,  I should have done the other way around. 'cause the, the font was the most exciting bit, right? Drag the in. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the logo.

Ah, cool. It's vector scalable, but the font  where it just picked the right size  and the right color, uh, that's some real time saving. And man for consistency across big documents. That is a real good time saver. I've said that already, but you get the idea. All right, if you are not sold on CC Libraries still,  I promise, later on in the course,  I'm gonna get back into it  and it's gonna get even better, I promise.

All right, next video.
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