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How to Use an Artboard in Adobe Photoshop CC

Hi there. Welcome to the video about art boards in Photoshop. A quick little run through of what they are basically. They are just different pages within Photoshop document. Up until now in this course, we've just been working on one image at a time in its own Photoshop document but there are times where it's handy to have multiple pages within one Photoshop document. This is the example we're gonna build, it's an ad banner that I have to make for google ads and the first one is the square shape. Okay, they're tile but they also need a leaderboard version and a skyscraper version. So it makes sense to have different pages within this one document. It's handy for us because we get to see a kind of our unity between all three plus. We get to copy and paste between these outboards really easily photoshops handy because what it does is it will export these is three separate files for us. Another good use case is safer web design or UI design. Now we're not covering web and Ui design a lot ...

in this course. So there is another Photoshop course for web that I've made. You can go check that out if you want to kind of move on to that kind of use case for Photoshop. But let's say in this case I've designed website for desktop, haven't finished the tablet version, but there's my mobile, you can see they have consistencies across the two. They're slightly different for the different screen sizes that allows me to just copy and paste graphics between the two and when I'm finished exporting them separately. Another good use case is I do this when I'm making my video courses, you're watching my video course. So my promotional images, they have to go in a bunch of different places and a bunch of different sizes. You can see all very similar kind of graphics, but there's there's more of a litter box design. There is this kind of just standard kind of video shape. There is a there is an overview version that has this grayed out but where I put some text on a website, there's some small versions, there's a small version with a green banner saying coming soon. Now these are just a couple of my use cases. You might be doing just it might just be concepts, you might have concept A, B and C. That might be the same size. They don't have to be different sizes but you can see them all side by side. So that's the super long intro for what an art board is. Let's go through, create them. Use them and find out some of their quirks. Now let's get started OK to create art boards. Let's go to file and we're going to make a new document and we are going to work over here. We're gonna be working in pixels because we're going to be making that banner ad like we saw at the beginning, it's going to be three sizes. Often there's 7, 10. It depends on what AD network you're going to, I have to do these kinds of jobs all the time. So outboards. Amazing. So that kind of standard tile for google ads are to 50 pixels by 2 50 pixels, 72 is the resolution and it's this little check box here, that's not normally on, that's the magic one that's going to create outboards. Let's click create awesome. So I've got a tiny square, that's my kind of google tile. And the big difference is, can you see my layer structure? This is what's a bit different from using outboards basically that groups everything inside of this little drop down here that says art board is associated with this panel here. Double click this to give it a name. And this one is going to be my scott shoes scott shoes And this is going to be my 250 x 250 pixels. This is just the name doesn't actually do anything. But if we name these now, it's going to make it easier when we export later on. You'll notice it changes up the top here as well. Great. So that's one page. I want to make another one. I'll show you both ways because they're both useful. Let's go to layer new and let's go to our board. That's the super long but super clear way of doing it. I'm going to call this one scotch shoes and this one is going to be the other kind of common leaderboard size, which is a terrible sizes that long thin one, they're calling leaderboards and I'm going to change it down here to match. So the top bit along the top is just me writing it just so I know what size it is. But this is the actual dimensions. Okay. Ended up in a strange place. This happens without boards that kind of new for Photoshop. So yeah, there's a few books. So to move art boards around. Okay. It's hiding underneath your move tool. There's like an art board move to join him and grab the name and just kind of drag it out. So it's in a nicer place. Now there are on this tool, you'll see that because we're on the outboard till we get a few extra features. This is one of them click on that and we get a duplicate. So that's really handy if you are just making, say it's just, you just want to make concepts. Okay. So you're doing a design for a website or for a brochure or flyer. You just want to make a bunch of different options. You can make them within here. Okay. And we'll show you how to export them at the end. So I'm gonna go back. So this guy here. Okay, I'm going to select them and what you'll notice is, can you see at the top here, this is where I can adjust my size, I can go back to any of these ones. So I can click on him, see the name says scott shoes to 50 to 50 there are out there. That's how I make my amendments and click on our board one. So you can either click on the layer name over here or just the word over here and I'm going to change this one to the other kind of common size. Just as ugly. It is 1 20 by 600. Super tough. This is the skyscraper, super tough kind of dimensions. It's double click it over here and let's call this one scott shoes. This was 1 20 by 600. Alright, so that's how you make your outboards. Let's work through a little projects so that you can see the kind of pros and cons for using it. So I'm going to bring in my graphic, I'm gonna file open, I've got a file ready for you in your exercise files under upwards. So 12 art boards, we're going to bring in shoe dot jpeg awesome. So I've got this guy here, I'm gonna go back to my move tool, click hold, drag, drag, drag, drag, drag, drag and we're going to drag it which outboard we're going to try for this one but it really is up to for Photoshop decides where it's going. So this is one of the fun things about using outboards. Where did it go? I can see it there, I can tell what layer it is on. Often just kind of clicking and dragging to see where it is and then try and dragging it on the right are bored, let go. So that's a fun game. It tries to automatically do it and sometimes it doesn't, sometimes you just need to say actually friend and double click him. He is called shoe and I want you to be on this first tile here, which is going to be their fellow. Okay, which is my 2 50 by 2 50. What you also might do to keep things a little bit easier to work with is use your art board tool and just keep these guys separate. I'm not going to, but when you're new, it's easy just to keep these guys far apart so they don't end up dragging into the wrong parts. I'm gonna keep them tight so that you can see what I'm doing. So back to my move tool. Okay, so I've got my giant shoe, I'm going to convert it into a smart object because we are professionals, then I'm going to transform it and I'm going to put my shoe in here just because that's the some of the graphics we've been working on. I want to add it in here, return, I want to have a copy on this version as well. So what we'll do is we'll right click it here and we'll duplicate it, shoe was going to call it, shoo, shoo copy even and I'm going to drag it to what's the name of this one? I'm gonna drag it into this guy areas over there. Cool, I'm going to transform it again, I'm going to rotate it around now. This isn't the best ad I've ever made, I'm going to duplicate it. Right click duplicate. I wanted to cheat. Okay, I've been trying not to use too many shortcuts, but hey, it's hard if you want to duplicate this si xu copy, just drag it down to the new little tab there and it makes a copy. It's a little automatic one. It's on the top. So I'm going to transform of it around. come on with seven videos, 70 videos in shortcuts are not that bad. Come on, we get to the advanced course will go super shortcuts. Okay, but for this one essentials will try and keep it good. So I've got a couple of versions of it there. I want another one down here, so which one do I want to duplicate? I'll use this one here, which is on the state here, duplicate. Put it on too. If you're like me, you can't see that top layer. I kind of dragged and held, but you might actually have to close some of these down or just move this up a little bit so you've got more room for your layers. I'm just dragging in between these layers eventually, you'll see that little double arrow. Cool. And there's that fellow you, my friend are going to go down here. Alright, so we're part of the way there. And before we go on too much further, I want to see the show you the perks of using outboards and smart objects. Now these two things tie together and make for a productivity. Amazing this. So when we first brought in this guy, we converted into a smart object because we are professionals. Why is that so good? In an earlier to Tora, we looked at smart objects and we looked at they've got this little icon here so to indicate that they're a smart object. But what happens when you duplicate a smart object is that they're actually copies of each other. So they're all linked in a fashion. We were able to rotate and scale them and the resolution is still locked in there. The perk of smart object, but they are all connected. Let's watch this. If I double click any of these guys double click the little icon here. Okay, we did this with vector art. What ends up happening is there's that shoe, I'm gonna close that down. Okay, so there's the one I'm working on and I'll close this down again just so you can see so just the guy I've got open unsaved back. Then put double click on this little icon. It opens up this weird file, the same name. It's called shoe. That's the name of the layer. But it's called this P. S. B. Don't worry about the name, what it is is it's the smart object. So we're kind of like dived inside of this guy here and he's opened in another tab. What I can do in here now though is I can make adjustments to one that adjusts them all. So shoelace selected adjustments panel, I'm just going to grab the human saturation slider and just drag this hue around to pick a different color shoe. Okay. Say that. I want this color shoe and I go file, I go to safe and then jump back into this first tab. And So that's a real big perk of using smart object, especially when you start using upwards because we've done three sizes here. I've got jobs that do have 10 or 15 different size, especially for things like these ads, it might be print ads, it might be web ads, it might be just concepts, lots of different concepts But when you can update one and they all update, man is a lifesaver, so I can go back into here again now and make my another adjustment. Hit save and then back into here and it adjusts when you finish this thing here is not really a file you want to save, it's just kind of, you can just close it down, it's done to get back in there again. Just double click the icon and it opens back up, you can see there my last structure is still there all very nondestructive, let's look at a couple of other things. Let's bring in a logo. So when you're bringing in a logo, especially if it's vector something is being made in something like adobe illustrator, you either copy and paste it from illustrator like we did earlier on or go file. Place embedded. It's instead of going file open logo. If I open it in Photoshop, it loses some of its adobe illustrator magic the victim nous of it. If that's really kind of unclear for you, you're not sure what factor is whenever it's a dot ai or dot E P s Okay. Instead of something like a jpeg, just go to the file and go to place embedded. Okay, retains a little bit of quality fireplace. Love it all click. Ok. Get it to the right size. And when you do it this way it will automatically be hit, return to kind of confirm it to say Yeah, that's the size. I want it to be okay. And you'll see it's automatically a smart object. So I'm going to make a duplicate, Drag it to this one. You'll notice before when I did a duplicate. So I duplicated here. I was dragging it to the specific layer, whichever way you work. It works well for you so I can drag it to here and I know it's on this layer or Okay, this duplicate here. I'm going to drag him over here, I'm gonna pop them in there. Either way. Works. Sometimes though. When you're dragging it like that second way I did Photoshop has a bit of a breakdown. So if you do find like our boys are like man, these go a bit crazy, sometimes they're new and they do go a little bit crazy if you also notice that the quality is not super amazing. It's mainly because I'm working with such small sizes, they should be about there. That's how we're going out to google for our air banners. Alright, so basically we're just gonna look at the same principles as before. Okay, so we went through and double clicked the icon for the show. We're gonna do the same thing for the logo. You can do any of these guys here. And the difference is if I double click on it, you need to have illustrator installed. It's gonna slowly open up in the background There it is there. We'll speed it up if this appears, just click Ok, and here we are an illustrator. Okay, If you are not good at illustrated and you want to have got a course on it, there's an essentials and an advanced illustrator course. But what we're gonna do is we are going to grab the white arrow, we're going to click on one of these little corners here and just click and drag it around. So click it once and then click and drag it were totally wrecking this. By the way, it's not looking good. But I guess what I want to do is show you that you can distort this. And if I hit save file, save some inside illustrator. I'm gonna jump back to Photoshop. You notice they're all update. So using upwards and smart objects, you can see it's updated across them all back to illustrator. And I'm going to say I want using my white arrow. I'm selecting all of these guys and I want to change the field color to a degree could save. Now I'm going to close it down back to Photoshop magic school. I want to go and create the buttons and stuff, but that's kind of not. I'm just going to draw a rectangle and put text on it. What I'll do now though is I'll show you how to export these guys as separate layers so that you can send them off to whoever needs them. So we're gonna do exporting in a greater detail. But I don't want to kind of leave this video without showing you how to get these out. So this is the short version, you go to file, you go to export and you go to this one that says export as the cool thing about it is because we named them. Can you see here I've got 123 images ready to go. I can decide on this first one here. Actually I want you to be a J Peg and I can play with the quality slider. You can see how big it's going to be the same with you actually might slip both of these do them at the same time. So I want you both to be J Pegs and I both want you to be about 60 and you can see nice small file sizes. Let's hit export all and where am I gonna stick them? I'm going to stick them on my desktop. I'm just gonna click open and off they go. Let's check my desktop. Here we are. There's my three little images. Okay, ready to go all kind of cropped out the right sizes with the right names so make sure you name your upwards. Just saves you time here because especially if you have to do an update something back in Photoshop when I decided actually this shoe is the wrong color. I'm going to go to a blue hit save, come back into here. You can see all updated, you can see now we're getting our flow on export export as it remembers all my settings. It's got all my names and this is where become super pro back to the desktop now there are a lot and that new kind of file format, the new image but the same with that new kind of color but they all have the new colored shoe all the new names. So we're starting to get nice and streamlined and work flowed. I'm going to go through now and finish off my ad with some buttons for no good reason just I feel like they need buttons so you can skip on but to wrap up it doesn't really matter what you're doing. Banner ads are a great example. Social media posts that might be an instagram facebook twitter using all the different shapes and sizes. You could create graphic, doing that with different art boards if our boards are freaking you out because there's smart objects and naming them and exporting there's a bit hard. Just have separate documents. There's no problem with that file. New make one, that's 2 50 by 2 50. Save it as a jpeg and then close it down. Open up the next one. Okay and do the same thing and do the different size. I'm not going to know and maybe where's your skills development Photoshop, You might revisit this video to get a better understanding of art boards but no, they are a little tricky, you can see them over here, you can tidy them all up by closing them down. Look how tiny that is for the outputs. Alright, so I'm going to draw my button now you can go, I'm going to pick a color. Hey that one. Okay, so I've picked my rectangle tool. Okay and I've picked this guy here, I'm going to zoom in. I'm gonna hit my button by now but I'm gonna put little rounded corners on the edges. I can't really see that now. Here we go. So how many pixels? Two pixels. Okay, so this is my little button. I'm going to add a tiny drop shadow to it Now. I probably mentioned this already. If you want to get into like full UI and web design at a Photoshop, we're going to use a lot of the same skills we've learned in this course but we'll use them specifically for that and I've got a course like 100% dedicated to app and web design. So we're not going to cover that all in this course. Okay. Time to type tool if you end up clicking on here, we've handed this problem before it tries to like join these two up which is problematic. Okay so I'm going to escape and I'm just going to click over here and not use my joint almost font 10 points. I'm going to make the color white and I'm going to type Bye now. All right now you've probably noticed already but I often don't use the font sizes. I'll just use the transform tool unless I know it has to be a perfect size but my final button a bit big ah the buying of one's never big enough. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to where are we working on this one here. Okay, so what is that layer and delete that some random text there I made. So I got my rectangle my by now so I'm gonna sleep both of these. So I click on the top one, Hold Shift, Click II one. I'm gonna drag them both down to my little turned up page. They're gonna grab both these guys and move them over here. You worked with me, Same with Youtube, make a new one, drag it over here. I'm going to transform both of these guys. If you've got them both selected, they'll transform together. I'm going to try and stick in the middle now finally save this document. Okay, stick it on my desktop as banner ads. This is for scott shoes better ed. And often I'll put the version number just so there's gonna be lots, lots of updates from the client especially because the ads not very good. I need some more graphics and going on but I'm trying to keep it simple for this tutorial. Last thing we do as well is I've added some adjustments. I'm going to go file export again export as I don't have to do anything. Just click on export. All open and hopefully we'll be able to go check my desktop and then they all are with my bin al buttons awesome. Huh Mark. That is the end of this video. Well let's move into the next one