[music] [Bart Van de Wiele] Hello everyone, and thank you so much for joining my session here today at Adobe MAX. This is the Powerhouse Trio, Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator. So if you're using at least two of these three applications, then this is the right session for you. My name is Bart Van de Wiele. I'm a senior head of solution consulting. I've been with Adobe for about nine years now. My background is in design, and so I specialize InDesign workflows using Adobe Creative Cloud. Now, the purpose of today's session is to look at workflows, which means that how can you take a very specific asset or asset type in one application and bring that into the other application, but in a way that's flexible because we want to build in these little backdoors that allow you to place an element, change your mind, or execute on the customer changing their mind, make those changes, and then see those changes being reflected back into the document in which it was placed. And that's kind of what we're looking for because we're all the victim of habits. So we build in these habits where we always paste as a smart object from Illustrator or we always place files in a very specific way instead of Adobe InDesign. But I'm here to tell you that there's more, there's more out there. So I'm going to be showing off very specific techniques, and some of them are actually very old, even dating back even 13, 15 years that still remain undiscovered by a lot of individuals. But I'm also going to be looking at newer techniques that are available only in the last couple of years, for example, just hoping to teach you guys something new. So I'm going to be looking at these different workflows, and hopefully we're teaching you a couple of things that you have not tried out before or you saw them or you tried them out and you weren't quite sure how that really worked because you didn't quite understand how this process really worked. And obviously, I always try to have fun along the way. I'll do the exact same thing. Just so you know, I do like to pick up the pace sometimes with these type of sessions because I want to put in as much content as I want. Know that this session is part of a larger session here at Adobe MAX, where I have a full hour with hopefully a lot of people in a room just to talk about these things specifically. Now, if you are hungry for a lot more, I have also documented a lot of these things in different ways. For example, there is a book which is now Adobe's official curriculum on Creative Cloud workflows, which is published by Peachpit Press and Adobe Press, which you can check out. And then I also have LinkedIn learning courses which covers similar looking workflows, but also a lot of stuff on AI and Firefly. So if you're hungry for more, please go ahead and check these out. And with that, it's time just to kind of break away from my PowerPoint presentation and just look at a couple of these individual projects. I'm going to start out here by making my first combination of apps. And I'm going to pick Illustrator. I'm going to pick Adobe Photoshop. So let's say, for example, here inside of Adobe Illustrator that I have a file open, which is this one where I'm just looking to place some art. I'm just looking to place a couple of images that have to come from Adobe Photoshop. And so let me show you what I have prepared here. So here in Photoshop, I have this file opened, which is called branches.psd. Now this is a very simple document. It simply has a background layer. It has branch1, it has branch2. So it doesn't even get any simpler than that at the moment. Now, what I would like to do is I would like to place these branches individually inside of that Illustrator document. And I have like four or five different ways to achieve that. Now, I could potentially just make a selection of the canvas and I can then paste that copy into Photoshop, paste that into Illustrator. But because this file is really big, you might sometimes encounter this error that says "could not export clipboard content" because the clipboard content is too large. So you're always going to hit some type of a limitation. And I'm here to tell you there are other ways around this. Now, potentially, I could just go ahead and just drag and drop this here directly into Adobe Illustrator. That's going to place the entire thing. So I don't have the flexibility of actually just looking at individual layers. What I can also do is just choose the place command from where I can just go ahead and I can just take a look here at the card, look at branches.psd, and it says Show Import Options. I'm going to keep that on and I'm also going to activate the Link option. I'm going to choose Place. And the first thing you notice is I don't get to see any import option. This is a bit weird, but this is the thing that happens. I'm going to quickly hit delete here. So what happens is if you choose the place command instead of Illustrator, and if you unlink everything, which means that you embed the actual file, only then will the Show Import Options populate, which is a bit odd, but just unfortunately the way it is today. And so from here I can potentially just come in and I can either choose to flatten all the layers or I can convert the layers to objects. But the problem with that is if I were to go ahead and choose OK, that is going to embed the assets within my file. If I choose OK now, it's going to go ahead and now just place these assets. So now you can see that I've got these assets in here. I can ungroup and I can play around with them individually. But if I look at the Links panel for a second here, you're going to see that all these files are actually directly embedded into the file. They're not linked, which means I'd have to unlink them first and go back to Photoshop whenever I need to make a change, which is not extremely productive. Now let's quickly delete all of this here because this is not headed in the right direction, let me tell you. So let's try something else instead. I mean, what else is there? So let's go to the Photoshop. So here in Photoshop, I have my Libraries panel open. And you have to know that libraries are like the ultimate window where you put something in and on the other end something else comes out and you can make crazy combinations. You can even take InDesign content in the Library, and use it in Photoshop if you want to. And it's all going to be linked. Now let me show you what you can do. So if I take branch1 and I simply add that as a graphic, and then add branch2 and add that as a graphic, it's going to basically make a copy of these individual layers and it's going to place that into the Library, which then gets synchronized to the cloud. So this means that if I were to simply take branch1 and simply double click that, it's going to open this up as a separate Photoshop document, that I can go ahead and add layers to like adjustment layers and other changes. I'm going to close that again. Let's take a look here inside of Illustrator. So what I can do now is I can just go ahead and I'll place these graphics here in my design. Now these graphics are hidden the moment it goes beyond the boundaries of my Artboard. And that's because I went up to the View menu and I chose Trim View. So this is what you usually get. But if you choose view, Trim View, it kind of cuts that off. I like using this because it gives me more visibility as to what that is actually going to look like. So I'm going to basically place this one here and I might actually just take that branch and move that behind the text. I'm going to go ahead and maybe going to blur this a little bit. I'm going to choose Effect, Blur. I'm going to choose Gaussian Blur for a second. Whatever. This is fine. And I'm going to take that second branch like so. And I'm going to place that here. And you know what, I might actually just add a drop shadow effect as well. I'm going to choose Stylize, Drop Shadow. Here it is. It's a bit much. So maybe let's lower the opacity. Let's move this a little bit. Let's do this. Let's add some drama here. There we go. So again, so there's a lot of depth to this card now. And this is all linking, as you can see here in the Links panel, directly to the cloud. Now this means that if I were to go ahead here and I just double click branch number two, open this up separately and rearrange the branches or make any adjustment, for example by choosing Edit and then choosing the Puppet Warp tool. There we go. I'm going to go ahead and just hide the mesh. I'm going to click a couple of points here. I love the Puppet Warp tool. And just move the branches like as you want. Like this for example. Actually, I have to add more pins just to make this work a bit better. So let's kind of move a couple. Let's pin this one back here. So now I can actually play around with everything. So if you make any specific changes and if you then commit to that and then save it, it is going to overwrite the one that you had here in branch2. It's going to overwrite that Photoshop document, which means that after a couple of seconds, when we go back to Illustrator, you're going to see that update has already happened with all my effects applied live to this. So libraries are the most flexible way for you to actually go ahead and do these things. Now let's take a look at another example. So let's go to InDesign. Let's go to an InDesign thing here. So this is InDesign. I'm currently working on a cover for a magazine. And imagine for a second that here inside of Adobe Illustrator that I would like to use the magazine logo header. So I've got three different logos. I need to place that inside of Adobe InDesign. I am not a big fan of copying and pasting artwork that you do not intend to edit yourself inside of Adobe InDesign, especially if it's a logo. And the reason why is because you can change the colors. Black might overprint or it might knock out depending on your settings. So I like to place things instead. Now this is called Magazine Logos.AI. And so what happens is if I go to InDesign, if I place that now, like if I were to go ahead here and then choose to place that specific AI file and then choose to show import options, so what we do by default is we do this. We don't even look at this. Like we just place it the way it is, which means that's the way it is. We can choose which version we want. The red one, the green one. I'll go for the yellow one for now. And we don't really change any of these options. I'm gonna choose OK. And I'm gonna go ahead and just place this graphic. And this is what I basically want. Now, what we do like to do with icons and with logos is we do want to be mindful of how much spacing we want, how much padding we want around logos. This is all part of the style guide. And so what we tend to do, especially in InDesign, is we like to do this. So I like to say, actually, according to the style guide, you have to take the height of the letter M and then you have to have this as the height here. And again, I'm making this up as I go along. And then we've got to have a different one which is rotated and it's like, so, and then we just group everything together because that's what we do. And then we just have this horrible construction where we think that we can just go ahead and place this anywhere we want. It's going to respect the space. And we're like, actually, this is a good decision. It's not, it's not a good decision. This is just over complicating how you work. And the thing is that what you're doing is the padding that you have, you have ways of respecting that padding in the logo itself, because the problem now is that you have just added extra rectangles, graphic frames that can hold images and everything else, which means that this can be changed. If you want to come in here and change object frames, like graphic frames, this is going to change, for example. So you're creating a very specific risk to this and it's just a lot more work. So what you can do is the following. So if you were to say that you have to use this graphic instead of Photoshop, but also instead of InDesign, again, you would have to replicate that same behavior. This works in InDesign because I have these boxes in InDesign, but if I go to Photoshop, I don't have those boxes. So you have to find a different way to get the same padding in Photoshop. So it doesn't really make any sense. So plan B, let's just delete this. Instead, let's go to Illustrator and let's just take the Artboard tool and let's just take, let's say the yellow one and simply change the artboards to whatever padding you have to use according to your style. Again, I'm just going to eyeball this for now. Let's say this is the padding that we need around the logo and simply make that a part of the file by just changing the Artboard itself. Now when you save that, remember, when you place this inside of Adobe InDesign, or if you go in here, we choose place, Show Import Options. The one thing we're asking InDesign here in the crop options is please remove all the padding, which doesn't make any sense. So you're removing the padding as you're placing it. So you can add the padding yourself afterwards in InDesign. It doesn't make any sense. So what we're going to do is we're going to come in here and we're going to come in here, and we're going to choose the Crop option here, and that's going to respect the actual boundaries of that specific Artboard. And now with that, I'm just going to go ahead and just place this one. I'm going to click to place it. And now the padding comes with it and I just have to place it wherever I want, which is really, really cool. And if you're in Photoshop again, I'm just going to use that same file. Let's just say, for example here that I have to place the same one here. If you go in here and you choose File, Place Linked just like InDesign. And if you were to come in here and then choose that exact same file and you're going to choose that yellow one. You can switch to Crop mode and it's going to do the exact same thing. It's going to place that with the exact same padding. You hit Return and looks like this. Has the padding disappeared? No, it has not. Command+T or Control+T to transform. Look, there it is again. So you never really have to add those extra guides and boundary lines yourself. Make it part of the Illustrator document because you have these options. So I'm hoping it's going to improve your workflow when you're building icons and logos and other things as well. Let's move on to the next one. So, and again, I'm just cherry picking the ones I really want to show off in this session because obviously if you're in the big one, then you're going to see a lot more of this stuff here. Now let's take a look here at how to combine, let's say Photoshop and InDesign for a second here. So what you can do is the following. So if I take a look at this particular file, let's go back into Photoshop. Let's take this one. So here I have a can. So the can is a mock up. I'm going to double click that. And this is just, again, it's just a bunch of layers and smart object and stuff. This just wraps around the can. It's a smart object. This is an Adobe Stock template, by the way, and it works beautifully. Now the thing is, I have to take this can and I have to put this here inside of this InDesign document. Now, I don't have one flavor. I have two flavors of my particular drink. So what I need to do is I need to basically look at a way of having two versions of the same can. So this is one version. And let me take a look at the other one. This is the other version I have, which is again, a different flavor, it's a different style. And I also want to change the overlay here of the top of this can. Now it's gray, now it's green. We can make it orange. And I simply have to create two different versions of that. Now this is the point where a lot of users would say, Stop, let me make a copy of the file and I'll have version A, and I'll have version B. It's either that or showing and hiding a lot of layers. Now the problem with that is that if you have two separate versions, keep in mind that these cans have elements in common, for example, the drop shadow effect. So if somebody says, Hey, we might want to change the drop shadow effect, then you have to change that in file A and then replicate that in file B. So that's just going to give you a lot more trouble. Now you can actually make multiple versions of the same design in the same Photoshop document and then place all versions in applications like InDesign. Let me show you how you can do this. So this is the first version. So this is the first can. So it has more of a green tone with like a green edge at the top. If you go into the Window menu and then you go ahead and you choose Layer Comps, you're going to see that this is the layer comp window, like layer compositions. And this is a very, very cool feature. It's been around for a very, very long time and I don't see a lot of people actually use that too often. But this is, I absolutely love using layer comp. Let me show you how it works. So the idea is that you simply take any combination of layers you have and you save that as a setting, as a preset. And it's kind of cool because let's be honest, if you have a version of your can that looks like this, and let's say you have a version of the can where you simply want to move a layer like so, like you can't really save that as a setting. But you can save something like that as part of a layer comp. So what you can do is the following. Let's say this is version one. I'm going to click the New Layer Comp window and I'm going to type in, this is version1. And you can type in things, for example, green version with green edge, and you can set additional settings. For example, you get to choose which parameters you would like to capture as part of that layer comp. In this case, it is the layer of Visibility, as in which layers you want to switch on and off. There's the layer of position, as in where is every layer located in the X and Y coordinates. So this means that you can create a version where you say to your customer, Well, I've got a version with the product in the top left corner, I have another version where the same product is on the bottom right corner. And you can just show that by clicking those presets. And you don't have to manually move it to show the customer which versions you basically have. And then there's another option which is called Layer Comp Selection. That goes a little bit beyond what we're doing today, so I'm just going to uncheck that for now. Just ignore this one for now and then choose OK. And now I've got this first version. Now let's make changes here. So I'm going to go ahead and just change this here and I'm just going to come in and I am going to change the color overlay and I'm going to choose something that's a bit more orangey. So I have an orange edge here at the top and I'm going to save that as my version2, which is the pink version with orange edge. Let's go ahead and click OK. And now if you hit the play button you can actually swap between different versions. So it is retaining the layer style and the layers that are currently visible. And that's because if I double click Layer Style and Appearance is checked and so is the Visibility. I didn't really change the position but I just checked it just to be sure. So if I do want to make any changes it will be retained as well. And the idea is just to save this now. So I'm going to save this file. I'm going to call this one my new campaign. I'm going to go ahead and just save this here. There we go. And now with that saved, I'm going to go back to InDesign, I'm going to choose File, Place and I'm going to go ahead here. I'm going to go and navigate to that specific drink and my new campaign. Make sure Show Import Options is on, which is something that obviously you just click here, or if it's off, you can also hold down the shift key and then click Open just to see it, just once. And then from there, you can see all these input options. Now I'm pretty sure you've seen these options before in the past, but there's one thing here that's probably been staring you in the face for I believe ever since CS 3, which is about 16 years ago now, which is Layer Comp. And this is exactly where you can choose between version1 and you can choose between version2. And that's simply what you're going to get here. So now I get to choose version1. I'm going to go ahead and click and drag and that version is going to be placed here. There we go. And then, if you want, you can actually right click any of these assets and you can choose Object Layer Options and you get to switch versions to version2. There we go. This is now version2. So I can even duplicate this and then change that and let's just do that. Now I've got these two versions here and this is all going back to the exact same file. So this means that if I were to look at the design itself, change the up shadow, which is a shared layer, it will change for all of these together. And layer comps are actually quite cool because this really allows you just to make different versions as you go along. Now, also interesting, just so you know, is that if you do have multiple versions and when your coworker says, Hey, can you send me like, just send me this version you see on screen? Like you can always just choose File and you can choose to export and here you can choose Layer Coms to Files, which means that it's going to split the file up into two separate Photoshop documents. And that's kind of a great way just to say, Look, this can is headed in this direction and this can is headed into the other direction. So that's a great way. You cannot do the opposite. You cannot say, I'm going to take PSD files and merge them together. That that's not how it works. But this is just a great workflow method. And just so you know, if you go to Illustrator and if you were to say file place and then go ahead and basically try and find that exact same file here in the Drink Ads like this one, I'm just going to go ahead and Show The Import Options here. You can also choose which layer comp you want. So it does really travel across the both versions here. So I'm going to choose this here. And you can see that it does come in with these files. Now obviously this one is currently embedded, it's not linked. This is again where I would probably use libraries if I do want to retain that link between these two individual documents here. Now let's, let's keep going here. I'm not going to save this. Let's take a look at another file just for the heck of it. Let's try this one. Now this one is very basic, I have to admit it's very basic, but I still don't see a lot of people using it, which leads me to believe that not all people have really mastered this. So let's take a look at this particular document. So this document is just a normal PSD document and the document has one flat layer, but it has four cups of coffee and I need to filter or isolate a very specific cup of coffee. So I've done the pre work and I could have potentially removed the background and created four different layers and do a lot of work. But what I did was I simply just took the path tool using the pen, and I simply just drew a couple of paths around this and I actually got to reuse the same path just by duplicating that. Because that's going to give me the sharpest edge I can potentially get. So clipping paths, or actually this is just a regular path, it's not even a clipping path yet. So these paths are something that is just core to Photoshop. And this is like omnipresent if you're working on catalogs or different other types of images. And very often using something as rudimentary as the pen tool to go around the very specific objects you would like to extract is just far superior to sometimes just using auto settings just to kick out the background. This can get quite complex. Some areas might be good, some areas might be a bit more difficult. The pen tool for these type of images, that works really well all of the time. Now, I did not really specify that any of these paths should be clipping paths, which is something you do by simply selecting a path, clicking here, and then choosing Clipping Path. Clipping path basically means that if you were to place that specific file, it would clip only that cup, so you would only see that. So that's something I am not going to do. The main reason is that I have four cups of coffee and you can only set one clipping path in Photoshop. So leave the paths the way they are, then go to InDesign, place the file as you would normally would. Just place it here. And then you can always select it. Choose Object, and you can choose Clipping Path, and you can choose Options. And then from here you can actually drill down the options and you can choose Photoshop Path. And now you've got all four paths here. So it's now hiding everything except for the first one. Now it's doing everything for the second one, third one, and fourth one. And you get to choose which one you like. And as you can see, everything is perfectly transparent, and it's only showing me everything within that path. And this allows me to reuse the same file and not have multiple copies or play around with layer visibility all of the time. Now, one thing that you also notice is that the bounding box around it is not really optimized, which means I would have to kind of close this a little bit like so. But now it's not really proportional. So what you can do, and that's actually quite interesting, is you can just take that and then go to Object again, choose Clipping Path, and then choose Convert Clipping Path to Frame. Now when you do so, it is going to convert the clipping path to a graphic frame. Can you see this? Now the graphic frame itself is actually shaped exactly like the clipping path is. And now you do have a more compact version of this. I'm just going to go ahead and just apply a drop shadow. There we go. And so what you can do afterwards is the following. If you want to change your mind and choose Object, Clipping Path, Options again, if you go back to Photoshop Path and then switch to a different cup, let's say cup number 2, that cup is over here, but it's excluded because the graphic frame path is mimicking the one that we had before. So it's kind of off, like behind the scenes. Now, if I choose OK, you can go like, Oh boy, how do I fix this now? And a lot of people would just simply delete the whole thing and place it from scratch. Don't do that. What you do in this scenario is very simple. Simply select the object, go back to Object, Clipping Path, and just reuse Convert Clipping Path to Frame. It will do exactly that. So you always have a way back just to choose whatever section of that image that you want to get. Let's go back, let's choose number three for a second. Choose, OK, and then go back here and then choose this option. And this is going to just save you a lot of time if you do want to go ahead here and make changes. Plus if you go back to Photoshop, if you make a change, for example, if you simply say that you want to go ahead here and add a curves layer simply because you want to change say the exposure of what you see here and the contrast specifically. Oops, I'll just undo this here for a second. Let's just deselect these paths. There we go. So if you want to go ahead here and just change the contrast overall of the porcelain simply because it might be too light in print, it will do that for everything. Because these paths are assigned and applied to the entire Photoshop document, it doesn't matter which layers you have in them. It is the file boundary that is being edited, which is actually quite cool. Let's close this. Let's try and squeeze in one more and then we're going to have to call the day. So let's do this here. So let's look at this file for a second here. So this is a file, it's called banners-start and this is my Finder window. Let's move Photoshop to the side for a second. Let me show you a quick tip here. So if you look at some of the files I currently have inside this document here. So this is just a web graphic. And one of the web graphics I have is something called Greenbutton. Now, Greenbutton is a Photoshop document that is nested inside of this Photoshop document. So I basically went up to File and I chose Place Linked. Let me show you what the original file looks like. The original file, double click, looks like this. It simply has a couple of vector shapes and some graphic styles. See, it has effects and bevel and emboss and all that kind of stuff. That's all there is. And this is placed inside the Photoshop document. Now imagine that you have to extract just the button. So just this layer and you want to export that for a web project. Let me show how you can do this. Now you can right click and you can choose that you want to have a quick export as a PNG image. But there's a fun way to do this. What you do is the following. You go up to the File menu, you choose Automate, you choose Generator Plugins, and then you choose Image Assets. And you click that and it looks like nothing happens. Let me show you what happens. If you choose File, Automate, Generator Plugins, and you go back, you can see you actually switched something on. So it's more of a tick box than it is a command. It's on but nothing's happening. Let me show you what's going to happen. If I were to now change the name of this layer and I call this greenbutton.jpeg and I hit return. Look at my finder window. All of a sudden there's a folder that lists greenbutton.jpeg. It has auto exported the whole thing. I'm going to choose icons here. This is the file that was exported, but it's supposed to be transparent. So let's move this to the side here. Let's do this, so you can see the finder window on this side, Photoshop on this side. If I change that to png, wait and do nothing, it's now a png image, which is kind of fun. I can take the background, I can call that one backgrounds.jpeg. It's going to do the exact same thing. And now I've got backgrounds.jpeg. Now if you think that this is too small, because let's assume this is a web graphic, and I want to have a higher resolution equivalent for InDesign, for print resolution, you might say there's no way to scale this up. But look at this. If I simply add 300% space and hit return, I now have a button that's three times the size. And you might be thinking, Yes, but it's just scaling it up. It's not, it's actually re-rendering it at 300%. And you know why it's re-rendering it? Remember the origin, everything is a vector. In the origin everything is vector and scalable. The effects are live, the artwork is a vector, and this allows you to just export anything you want. Last tip, let's go even crazier. I'm doing the exact same thing. I'm going to say I want to have greenbutton.png + 300% InDesign.
I just added a very big command. I did the following, give me greenbutton.png, normal resolution plus second version, give me a 300% version, put that in a folder called InDesign and call it buttonlarge.png. And now I've got one normal png, and I have a folder for my InDesign graphics that has a 300% version of that as well. And the cool thing is, whatever change you make. For example, I want to have an orange one. It's just going to re export the whole thing. And you can use these graphics in InDesign. And this is how you can take a Photoshop file and feed both web graphics and print graphics depending on how the file was set up. And with that, I am out of time. I hope this was eye opening. Give me a shout out online if you have the chance, come and say hi if we see each other at a conference and if you want more of this, then look at some of the resources available to you. I'm hoping to see you again in the near future. Thank you and bye, bye.