Taking back control of Adobe Photoshop

Having spawned a constantly growing army of digital designers who have cast away the physical paintbrush, countless individuals such as myself have turned to Photoshop to sculpt a career out of arranging on-screen shapes.

Luckily enough for us, each and every release of Adobe’s graphics editing suite has further simplified its graphical interface thus making our graphical wizardry an easier task. That said, this providing of simplicity which allows us to focus on our tasks at hand has left us lazy and unwilling to explore the expanses of new features and power tools at our disposal. With this in mind, sit back and relax as I take you through several features and workflow techniques you may have missed or be yet to adopt.

Layer Comps

You’ve all seen this combination of two words on your Photoshop travels while navigating its GUI, but how many of you can admit to even making the most of them? Arriving as one of the most criminally overlooked features in Photoshop, Layer Comps are without a doubt one of the most useful additions to our pixel-pushing-package.

When creating multiple page designs for websites in Photoshop, many are hit with the issue of organisation and how to access other pre-designed templates. This troublesome affair is only worsened once another designer is tasked with picking up where the last left off - how can the next be sure they have hidden/shown every mandatory layer to make up each individual design? Needless to say Layer Comps address all of these issues in one fell swoop with a single click on our - now hairless and often tail-free - mouse.

Layer Comps are effectively a snapshot of whatever is visible on your screen at any point in time. By creating several of these and naming them as you wish, you’ll be able to click through each one and see everything in front of you change without even needing to hide and show countless layers. The days of excessively clicking our iconified eyeballs in the Layers panel are over - but that’s not where our story ends.

Layer Comps also harbour one more time crucial saving feature, which once used, you’ll have trouble going back to your old fashioned ways. Hidden within Photoshop’s “File > Scripts” lies a little automated action known as “Layer Comps to Files...”. This godsend will simply go through each and every Layer Comp you have created (or the ones selected) and export a JPG/PNG/PDF of your design to a location on your hard drive of your choosing, using its name as the filename with a prefixed number of the Layer Comp’s ordering. Like before we can wave goodbye to another time consuming pastime, as exporting each page design manually through the save dialog is a practice of yesteryear.

Just remember though, should any changes be made to an individual Layer Comp during the design process, don’t forget to update it.

Smart Objects

As we verge upon 2014, any designer caught today not making the most of Smart Objects would be better off moving over to the delightfully simple MS Paint. These PSDs-in-a-PSD are the swiss army knife of a designer’s toolbox and to even sculpt websites without them is akin to carving a wood statue with a toothbrush.

To bring you up to date, upon right clicking on any layer (or collection of) in Photoshop’s layer panel will present a number of options with one being “Convert to Smart Object”. Selecting this action will capture all of the data present within your selection and replace it with a nested Photoshop document.

This new creation will be identical to what was there previously, only with all of the selected layers now merged into one. This means that changes to individual assets can no longer be carried out directly on the canvas in front of you. To make amends from here on you’ll now need to open up this nested PSD by double clicking on the new icon which is now present in its layer thumbnail. A new window will open up containing your selected layers in the exact same arrangement they were previously, only this time round they are isolated in their own document.

So why on earth would you want to combine several perfectly good layers into their own self-enclosed pixel-prison? Take a look at this whole host of new features that were previously inaccessible and get ready to cage up your layers:

Non-destructive workflow

Non-destructive workflow might not be anything new, however, it’s still a practice I’m yet to see carried out on a more regular basis. The theory behind it is to ensure that any modifications to sensitive items such as photography are carried out on accompanying layers.

Not quite following? A good example here is working with photographic elements clients have supplied. If you have a photograph which needs brightening up and its background removing, the easiest way to go about this would be to edit the layer’s brightness/contrast and use the eraser tool to eradicate the unnecessary image data. While there is nothing wrong with this approach, it does leave us with the same old issue of what to do should amends come in for this area of our design. You can’t return erased pixels from a document you closed two days ago nor can you revive lost colour values that have been forgotten through adjusting levels.

Although a basic example above, ensure you’re using the following tricks of the trade within your creations to take control of your pixel’s past, present and future.

Use Layer Masks to remove unwanted data - Instead of resorting to the lazy eraser tool, any time you need to clear pixels from a layer you should make the most of masks. These grayscale-sidecars to our layers allow us to paint out any areas we no longer want to see without touching the original artwork. In order to use these, simply have the layer you want to edit selected and click the ‘Add Layer Mask’ button on the lower section of the layers panel - now paint away and pretend that you’re still holding that dirty eraser.

Organisation

Let’s face it. Nobody wants to be told their Photoshop documents (or anything for that matter) are messy collections of unnamed assets with next to no structure - but how many of you are willing to be honest about it? Unless you’re grouping up your layers, naming folders and arranging everything in a structured order, there’s room for improvement.

The importance here not only comes from ensuring the design process is a breeze, but also something mentioned previously... There’s always the chance that other designers will need to take over your creations at some point (whilst you soak up the sun or cough from your gripping illness), but that doesn’t mean they should have to also dive into your chaotic mind and decipher how you have supposedly ‘organised’ your work.

Before you throw obscenities in my direction and claim your documents are perfectly fine the way they are, take a deep breath and hold it as I prove to you how easy it is to stay in control of chaos.

Conclusion

While I do expect the majority of digital designers reading this to be aware of most of these shortcuts and sidesteps around Photoshop, nobody can refuse a refreshing course in Adobe’s toolkit.

Should you happen to adopt some of these tricks into your next Photoshop project or happen to know any more for the taking, be sure to let us know below. In the meantime I’ll be perfecting more tricks from the Ye Olde Photoshop Spellbook in preparation for this article’s follow up.