From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Saving and exporting documents - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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Saving and exporting documents

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- [Instructor] As we work through the exercises in this training course, we need to learn how to save our images to maintain flexibility, especially when we start working with layers. Now, I want to add a color tint to this image, and I'll do so by choosing the Layer menu and then New Fill Layer and Gradient. Now, gradient fill layers are covered more in depth later in the course, but what's important now is that we have multiple layers in the document so that I can show you the different options when saving. I'm going to change the blend mode here to Color. And while we haven't talked about blend modes, this is going to enable me to see the color from the gradient, but still see the grayscale values underneath of the succulents. I'll click OK and then we can use the Preset Picker by clicking on the small arrow here, and we can just navigate to the different blue presets and maybe pick one that's quite vibrant like this. Alright, I'll apply that. And in the Layers panel, we can now see that I have a gradient fill layer, as well as my background layer, and that gradient fill is set to the Color blend mode. Now, if we choose File and Save, well, I'm always wary because it could save over the original. In this case, it wouldn't because the original was a jpeg and jpegs can't have multiple layers, so it would automatically change to saving as a PSD file. But just in case, you just might want to choose Save As. So when I select a format here, well, we can see the Photoshop format has an option to save to cloud documents. So if I was using Photoshop on the iPad, for example, and I wanted to share this image across the devices, I could choose to save to my cloud documents and I get this dialog. Instead, we're going to save it to our computer today. Now, because I'm doing a Save As, I only have these four options because these are the only four formats that are going to support multiple layers. If I choose Save a Copy, I'll have additional options, but I don't need to do that because I want to save this as a PSD file. I'm going to append the name of the file to underscore and then ME. This way, I know that this is my master-edited PSD file. Let's go ahead and save that. And we should maximize compatibility. In fact, we always want to do this, so I'm going to choose Don't show again. And then if we look at the name of the file, we can see we're no longer working with the jpeg, but with the succulents_ME.psd file. And if I move to Bridge, we can see here is the document that we just created. Okay, let's return to Photoshop and make another edit. Let's say that the client wants this a different color. So I'll double click on the thumbnail in the Layers panel for the gradient fill. That'll bring up the Gradient fill editor. I can then choose a different color, maybe down here in the greens. All right, I'll apply that and I'll return to the File menu and choose Save As. And then I would start appending this to _01. This way, I will always know what my most recent document is. We'll go ahead and click Save. And again, if we go to Bridge, we can see that that document has been created. All right, for the most amount of flexibility, you'll want to keep your layered Photoshop files, but most likely, you'll also need to send them to clients or share them with others in different file formats that are smaller and easier to transfer. And most often, this is going to be the jpeg file format. So you can choose File and then Save a Copy, and Photoshop will save off a copy, and you could choose the jpeg format. However, you have limited options when you are saving this way. So instead, if you want to save a jpeg, I would recommend that you go to File and then Export, and then Export As. Here we have the options to export the file as a png file, a jpeg, or a gif file. I'll choose jpeg and set the quality to seven, which is the highest quality. Now, this jpeg compression has been updated and it's actually faster and it creates a higher quality image than when you use the Save As dialog to save a jpeg. Plus, we could change the image size if we needed to. We could add canvas size around our image. We can also include metadata like copyright and contact information and decide whether we want to convert this to sRGB and whether or not we're going to embed a color profile. In this case, I would, because I'm going to send it to someone who's going to be looking at it on online. Alright, I'll click Export. Then I'll navigate to that same 04 Digital Imaging Essentials. We can see that Photoshop has changed or appended the file name to .jpg, and I'll go ahead and save this. It's important to notice that I'm still working on that ME_01.psd file. So when you choose to Export As, Photoshop kind of exports off the jpeg file, but you continue to be working in the document that was open. All right, before we wrap up, I typically save my edited Photoshop and TIF files back to the same folder as the original, but there might be times when you want to save all of your edited files into a separate folder. It just depends on the project, but if you do want to do this, you can go underneath the Preferences and then go to File Handling and uncheck the option to Save as to original folder. Alright, for now, I will leave that on and then we can close this file without saving changes. So there you go. You can choose to save your layered documents to your computer or to the cloud and export files as smaller, flatter jpeg files to quickly share with others or to post online.

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