25 QUICK FIXES FOR PRO DESIGNERS
- SAVE EVERYTHING!
If your computer can hack it, then don’t be afraid to
save all your work, even if you don’t think you’ll need
a particular layer – you never know when you might
change your mind. Designer and Illustrator Nicolas
Monin-Baroille (www.behance.net/unknownbeing)
is a fan of this method: “This requires a lot of space
and makes files insanely large sometimes, so be
aware this is not recommended for a low-end
computer. As I tend to change around a lot of things
or even go back to something I made 20-
minutes ago, I do not delete a lot of layers.
Especially for lightweight work, like my Fabrics
series, I am left with files in between 100-400MB.
It’s pretty simple: I put [unnecessary] layers into a
Group, even multiple Groups inside other Groups.
That way I have copies of nearly every stage of
development of the work and can revert or pick
out important layers that I may have lost.”© Nicolas Monin-Baroille- CREATE, MODIFY AND REUSE SMART OBJECTS
Some tools in Photoshop are there to simply make
your life easier, so it pays to know how to use them
in your workflow. One of these is Smart Objects,
which can be a real timesaver. Graphic designer
Michael Wood (www.mwcreativedesign.co.uk)
explains how to get the best out of Smart Objects:
“Smart Objects are a great way to create content
that is re-usable for future projects. Using masks
with Smart Objects can allow you to hide parts of
the editable area, without losing control of the Smart
functionality. This is a really effective way of showing
your work on a portfolio, or pitching to clients.
Ctrl/right-click the layer you want to edit and select
Convert to Smart Object. With this layer selected, go to
Layer>Layer Mask>Reveal All, then with the Brush tool
selected you can paint out parts of your layer with
black and bring parts back with white. After all the hard
work is done, you can double-click the Smart Objectlayer and replace it with whatever you want! Save
and return to original file to see the updated results.
“You can also get nice effects if you duplicate the
Smart Object layer and add layer effects such as blur,
then mask that layer to edit out the areas you want
blurred. Because you have used the same Smart
Object layer again, it will update both the original and
duplicate when you make edits inside the smart
layer! Magic.”