From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Library panel essentials - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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Library panel essentials

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- [Instructor] If you often use these same assets like layer styles and fonts or colors and graphics, then the library's panel can be a powerful way to store these different design elements so that you can quickly apply them across multiple documents. The other advantage of using the library's panel to store your assets is that they're automatically saved in the cloud and you can access them from any machine where you sign in with your Adobe ID. In addition, you can share them with other people. We're going to start by creating a library from a document, then we'll see how easy it is to customize the contents of the library. So I just want to point out that this image has multiple layers. We have some shape layers that are different colors, as well as an inner shadow layer effect, and we've got this gradient layer and then some additional assets. So on the library's panel, instead of just creating a new library, I'll use the flyout menu and choose to create a new library from document. This tells Photoshop to look at all of the layers in the document, and if it finds any character styles or colors, layer styles, smart objects or gradients, it will automatically bring them into the library. Now, there are a number of different ways that we can view the library. We can choose to filter by different items. We can also change the group or the sort by options, and we can view either as this thumbnail or this thumbnail view. If you need to rename any of your assets, you can do so by just double-clicking on the name. Here, I'll call this Inner Shadow. But you'll notice that when I selected it, it also added it to my active layer. So I'm just going to delete that by dragging it in the trash. Instead, you might want to rename in this view, and then just make sure that you click on the name instead of the actual asset so that it doesn't add it. Now let's see how we can add additional assets to the library. I'm going to tap the T key in order to select the type tool, and I've selected a font as well as a size. It's going to be center aligned in white. So I'll just click in the image and type in Canyonlands and then click away from the text in order to commit to that. Then in order to add this to the library, I'll click the plus icon and choose character style. Now we have the font, the type style, the color, the size, the tracking, and the letting all stored in the library. Let's imagine now I open a new document and I'll hide the Canyonlands type layer and I'll target the rock layer, and then I will right-click on the text layer and reset the tool. If I still had that Canyonlands type layer targeted, it wouldn't reset the tool to the defaults, it would reset the tool to whatever I had set to that Canyonlands layer. But now we can see it's changed the font as well as the size and the justification and the color. So I'm going to just click in the image area, and let's say I had to add the text National Parks, and now I want to quickly change the character styles to the same style that I had on the Canyonlands layer. Well, that's as easy as just clicking on the character style. I'll tap the V key to select the move tool, and then just reposition that. All right, now let's talk about adding assets. I've got this rock layer, I'll go ahead and make it visible, and then I'll want to change the blend mode to soft light. Now, if I want to add this asset to my library because I'm going to use this texture again and again, I can click on the plus icon and then choose graphic. Let's also add the bird layer as a graphic. Again, I'll click the plus and choose graphic. Now we need to talk a little bit about the two ways that we can place graphics from the library's panel into an image. So I'm going to delete this bird layer by tapping the delete key, and then I'm going to add it to my image by using the library's panel. So I'll just drag and drop in one copy, click done, and let's drag and drop in another one. We can make this one a little bit bigger and then choose done. So if we look at the layers panel, both of these layers have this cloud icon, so they are connected back to the contents of the library. And this means that if I were to say double-click on one of these layers, that would open the contents of that cloud-linked smart object in its own window. Then I could change the color of this, and if I select file and then save, and then we close this, we can see that not only is the other instance of the bird updated, but the graphic in the library is updated. Likewise, if I were to double-click on the graphic in the library and then choose a different color and then choose file save and close this, the graphic as well as the layers in this document would be updated. All right, I'm going to do a quick file and then save as. And let's append this with an underscore O-1 and I'm going to save it back to the Working With Libraries folder as a layered Photoshop document. And then I'm going to close this. Then I'm going to hide the home screen by clicking on the Photoshop icon and I'm going to make an edit to the graphic that is in this library and in the cloud. So I'll double-click on it again, and this time let's choose this gray for the color. I'll choose file and save that change, and then we can close that. So I'm going to return to Bridge, and we can see that that Canyonland document has a link icon that tells me that there are links to assets that are not within the document. But even though I changed the bird in the library to gray, we don't see it updated here. So let's open this document into Photoshop. And while it doesn't automatically update them, we can see in the layers panel that there are warning icons on both of those clouds. So in order to update them, I'll choose the layer menu and then choose smart objects and then update all of the modified content. Now, if you don't want the asset in the library to be linked to the document, you can hold down the option key on Mac or the Alt key on windows and drag and drop the graphic in. You'll notice in the layers panel that it does not have the cloud icon, it's just a shape layer. And if I were to double-click on that and then change the color of the bird, that is the only instance of the bird that's going to be changed. Okay, before we wrap up, at any time we could delete an asset by just right-clicking on it and then choosing to delete, to remove it from our library. We can also use the flyout menu if we wanted to rename the library or delete the library. And one last thing I want to point out, with the exception of the graphics that are added as the Creative Cloud-linked smart objects, it's important to point out that if I make changes to the assets in the library or if I make changes, for example, to the color of this shape that's included in the library, while it will change the color in this layered document, it's not going to change the color in the library. So there you go. The next time that you know that you're going to want to reuse the same assets, store them in the libraries panel in order to have them accessible across all of your documents and devices.

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