Photoshop Artboard productivity hacks

Questions

0
0
0

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. In this video it's tips  and tricks Without boards, I'm gonna make you a pro. I'm gonna make you not be as frustrated  as you have in the past without boards. They're real good. I love them. You are gonna love them too,  with the simple tricks and tips.

I can't really demo them here without uh,  actually showing you the tricks and tips. But trust me, watch the video. They're good. Alright, let's do it. Alright. First thing we're gonna do is we are going to convert this  to an art board.

Now, an art board is just multiple pages within a document. 'cause what we wanna do is transfer this  to a bigger document that I'm creating that has lots  of different art boards or lots  of different pages depending on how you wanna refer to them. Okay? So first of all,  we need to convert it to an art board. And that's a weird thing 'cause at the moment it's just a  pile of layers in a Photoshop document. But we wanna kind of group them together in this art board.

To do it, you gotta a layer new and you go to art board. It's in a strange place. So screenshot that,  check it out in your notes, scribble around it. Check. And I am now an art board. Now I'm gonna call my art board Facebook.

You should copy me if you're following along. Facebook banner A. Okay. And it's gonna be the same size as that. It is at the moment. It's 2000 pixels wide click.

Okay. And nothing really changes  except the name appears at the top. You can also see the layer structure changes. Okay? There's this new thing here. It's kind like a layer, but it's actually a group.

You can see all of these guys are indented. Can use a little chevron arrow thing there to kind  of show you that they're all inside of that. So that's how you make an outboard. What I'd like to do is transfer this to another document  that I'm working on that has lots  of like combining outboards. Now, before I open it up,  I wanna close down these other things I've been working on. So this is a new feature weirdly, um, and I love it.

And a vial. There's one called close others. It just means close everything. But this one that I've got in front of me, okay? And yours might ask you to save and you can say yes or no. It's just a tutorial, I guess.

If you wanna keep them, say yes and put them somewhere  and maybe in your documents. Um, but we won't need them again in this course. So you can say no. All right, so I've got this guy. I've closed everything out using my suite. New, uh, Photoshop 2020 feature.

Now what I wanna do is open up, um, my other document  that has got some extra pages in it. Okay, file open. We're gonna open this one called social media. So I've started making a document, okay? It has a few, you know, Instagram posts  and you can kind of get a sense for what we are doing here. We're trying to do bigger documents.

I've kept it small enough so  that we can handle it together in this class. Give everybody going. But you can imagine if you are doing  uh, social media banners  or ad banners, you can end up with like hundreds  of variants of these things. So, uh, art boards are super helpful  because they're all separate documents, okay? All exportable separately,  but they're all in the same thing. So you can see some visual consistency.

You can copy images from one art board to another. What we wanna do now is work out how  to get this one to this one. The first thing you need to do is convert it  to an art board, which we just did. Next way of doing it is it's up to you. Everyone's got their own technique. Probably everyone's  Gonna do this way is you grab the name, click hold,  drag drag, drag, drag, drag hover above this  for some random amount of time  and then kind of keep holding the mouse down.

Let go and then get it in line by grabbing the name again. Cutting, getting it down. Then you'd be like, yep, is there another way? There is, okay, do I prefer that way? I do half and half. I get, I don't know why.

But anyway,  let's say you want another way. 'cause that way is weird. Um, it is,  it's the way we all do it. Uh, but over here, just right click Facebook banner  and go to duplicate. The good thing about this is you can say, I would like it  to go to the destination is  'cause I've got this other file open. Okay, there it is.

The social media tab. There I can say, actually put it in that one for me. Where stick in the canvas. It's gonna randomly try  and put it somewhere, but that's okay. Let's go check it out. And randomly over there we go.

And I'm gonna drag the name up to you. You can do the drag, drag, drag method  or the duplicate method. Alright, so I've got them all together. Now I wanna show you some tricks  of just making art boards better to work with. 'cause they can be tricky, right? So one of the easiest ones  and I use the most is see these little chevrons.

'cause you can see the dark boxes here are the artboards. So I've named them all nicely, okay? Um, but if you want to kind of, they're a little bit hard  to work with and this one's not too big,  but it's big enough, right? It's confusing. What you can do is instead  of closing them down individually, okay,  what you can do is just hold down the command key on a Mac  or control key on a pc and they all fly together. So hold control down on a pc, click them, they all open  or closed it's command  and just click it once on a mac does the same thing.

Cool. Huh? One of the other really nice ways  of working is up here. There's this filters option. This thing here you've never clicked on, right? You have no idea what these all do.

There's are super helpful. Um, change it from kind to upward, okay? And what it's going to do is depending on  what you've got clicked, so I'm gonna click on this, uh,  t image here and you'll notice click on it. Okay? You'll notice it jumped to the pod, uh,  Instagram post A, which is the name of this art board. Okay?

If I click on this, uh, Instagram post B,  and I click on this black box, can you  see it jumps to that one? So it just keeps you a layers panel. Layers panel even really manageable, okay? By just switching it from kind to up upward  and it just doesn't matter where you are,  it just automatically jumps across. Okay? If you click on it, all the different ones handy.

Yeah. Now one thing with it though,  it can confuse you if you are like,  what the, where did everything go? Just when you're finished with, uh, some of these filters,  I'm gonna go back to kind for the moment, um, just  to help this tutorial run, okay? But, uh, another really helpful trick when using art  boards is the auto nests. So we've all probably done this, right? Where we've grabbed something, you're like,  I just wanna move it over here a little bit,  just a little bit, a little bit.

Ah, and it's jumped out  and it's, who knows where it's ended up. Oh, it's ended up back in there,  but it's ended up over here now and over here. You've all done it right? And you're like,  I just want it a little bit to the edge  and it flies all over the place. So how  Do you get around that? I'm gonna  undo it.

Okay, what you can do is you can say,  all right, Instagram post A. There he is there, okay, T okay, I would like you,  I'm click on this little icon here. Okay? It's called auto nesting. It's got a big long name, but it just says I,  I prevent auto nesting. Okay?

It's by default it tries to move around,  which is quite cool, but a lot of the time you're like,  just stay where you are please. So if I click on that, nothing really changes except  that looks, um, I wanna say depressed. It's a button pushed down, but he's not that sad. Uh, the little lock icon  appears here, but it's not actually lock. Well look, it still moves around, but look what happens. I can grab it and just go.

Actually you  can go anywhere you like. Okay, well, anywhere you like, you can go down here. It's still on that app board though,  which is really handy if you just wanna use like,  the slither of things, you know? Uh, anyway, I find that useful. Uh, you can do it for the whole app board. Okay?

You can say, uh, all of these guys, uh, don't move off. Okay? I've just done one last trick for making, uh,  boards more livable. Okay? Is, let's say I need a new one. Let's say I've kind of got this one to a good point  and I want another one kind of similar to it.

Um, you can use the art board tool, right? And click on this guy and say Plus,  and you're like, oh, then you gotta  copy all the bits across. It doesn't work if I undo that. If you hold down the option key on a Mac  or the alt key on a PC  and click the same button plus look duplicates,  it brings all these buddies along. Um, yeah, I'm not sure why we need  all these, but you get the idea. Hold down option on a Mac alt on a PC  and it will, um,  duplicate it plus bring all his buddies along.

We don't need any of that. That's a undoable, um, thing. I just wanted to show you it. And those are my tricks. Chevrons hold command or control. If your Mac or pc, you can filter by going up to kind  and select art boards  and it will only do the one you've selected  and you can click on things  and say, actually buddy, you do not auto nests.

Just stay where you are. Okay? I'm gonna turn it off. I'm gonna go back to Kind  and I will see you in the next video.
  • Powered by Marvin
  • Terms of use
  • Privacy policy
  • © Bring your Own Laptop Ltd 2025