4 Critical File Formats - jpg, png, pdf, psd in Adobe Photoshop - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. 4 most important File Formats in Photoshop Introduction: Hello. I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, Four Critical File Formats to use in Adobe Photoshop. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're looking at the four most useful file formats that you can use in Photoshop. The four file formats that are going to cover practically any use that you have for working in Photoshop. We're going to start by looking at the go-to file format, JPG. Then we'll look Photoshop's own PSD file format. We'll look at PNG or PNG files. Finally, we'll finish up by creating single and multi-page PDFs. As you're working through these videos, you might see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, give it a thumbs up. These recommendations help me get my classes in front of more people just like you who want to learn more about Photoshop. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now let's get started looking at the four most useful file formats that you can use in Photoshop. 2. 4 Most Important File Formats in Photoshop - Part 1: When it comes to saving your files, what you choose to save your file in so far as formats is concerned, is really going to depend on what you want to do with those files. But in brief you can choose between one or four formats. If you know these four formats and when to use them and how to save in them, then they're going to work for pretty much all of the situations you are likely to encounter. We're going to look at PDF. We're going to look at ping or PNG. We're going to look at JPEG, and we're going to look at PSD because these are the four formats that if you're working on files in Photoshop, for example, and looking to share them, and print them and save them then if you know these four formats are going to be able to cope with pretty much any situation that you might encounter. We're going to start with JPEG. JPEG is the go to format. If you're ever confused about what format to use, JPEG is a really good choice. It's ideal for the web. If you want to put photos up on Facebook, or if you want to e-mail them to friends or send them to an online printing service, generally, JPEG is the format to use. JPEG however, is what's called a lossy and compressed format. Let's look in what those things mean. Well compressed means that the file size is shrunk down. Anytime you save an image as a JPEG file some off the quality in that file, some of the detail is thrown out. The reason is thrown out is it that allows the file format to produce smaller file sizes, the file sizes that's then convenient to email to friends or to upload to Facebook. This detail that is lost from the images as you save them is permanently lost so you can never get that back. When you save an image as a JPEG format image, you're going to be asked to choose how much of the quality you're willing to give up to get a smaller file size. It's always going to be a compromise between quality and file size. Higher quality, bigger files, lower quality, smaller files. JPEG is basically the only format that you would ever use for photos on the web, for example. Now we are going to look at this image and we're going to save it for the web. But when we go to do that, we're going to encounter a problem of color space. Just let's look and say what we're going to see when we choose "File", and then "Save As". Now from here I want to select JPEG is my file format. There's a save as type list here, and we get to choose the type of file we want to save. Well, we want JPEG, we don't want JPEG 2000, we don't want JPEG Stereo. You can't use either of those it's just plain standard JPEG that we're looking at. But down here, Photoshop is giving us some information about the color profile of this image. Now this image came from Lightroom. It's got a really strange color profile that's called ProPhoto RGB. What you want to see in here for the web is sRGB. This is not going to cut it for us. If I put this image up on the web, it could well change color, might turn blues and greens and things. I'm going cancel out of here first and we're going to make sure that we're in the right color space for the web. To do this, we'll choose "Edit" and then we're going to choose "Convert to Profile". From here, I want to select sRGB. In fact, it's already set up as my default destination color space because it is the sensible one to use. If you open this list up as really enormous but sRGB is just up here, so just go and select it so that it's the option you choose and only have to do is just click "Okay". The image is not really changing at all. But when I got back to save it, "File" "Save As" you'll see now we have the ICC profile sRGB. This is the ideal one for the web. If you find that your photos are changing color when you put them up on the web, chances are that the profile is incorrect. It's going to make sure we have ICC Profile selected. We have JPEG is the file format, and I'm going to call this cornwall-view. Just so I know what it is when I go to put it up on the web. Now I'll click "Save". Here are the JPEG options. We can ignore the format options because you generally don't change those. It's this that's important. This is where you make the choice between quality and file size. You can say this is a large file, this is a small file. When we go to small file, you can say that the quality is decreased, when we go to a large fall, the quality is increased. Now, Photoshop works on a scale of 0-12. Other programs use different scales. Basically, you're just making the same decision. How much quality am I prepared to give up? If you don't want to give up any quality, for example, if you sending this for online printing, you could go maximum. But if you're uploading it to Facebook, probably something like high is quite sufficient. You probably don't want to go much below medium, or you'll start to see some degradation of quality. I'm just going to choose "High" here, and I'll click "Okay". This image is now saved as a JPEG image. It's all ready for me to go and put it on the web. The next file format we're going to look at is Photoshop's own PSD file format. This is an image that I have created and it has a photo in the background. Then I've got a hue saturation adjustment layer. I've got a curves adjustment layer here and I have a texture on top. All of these are in removable adjustments or a removable layers. What I want to do is save this file so that anytime I can come back in and make changes to it, for example, I may decide I don't want this texture, so I can remove the texture and everything else is intact. While the file format to use for that is Photoshop's own PSD format. To do that, you'll choose "File" and then "Save As", and you're going to choose PSD as your file format. That's Photoshop's own file format. You'll also want to select layers because you want to keep the layers in the document. This file format is going to save layers. It's going to save any saved paths, any channels. It's really a rich file format for saving documents as you're working on them. I'm just going to click "Save". I'm just going to save it over the top of the original. This is a file format that I would use anytime I'm creating something like a collage or working with images I'll always save a PSD version. Then if I want to put this up on the web, I would go ahead and save a second version this time as a JPEG file. It would be in a file format that's acceptable for putting on the web. But PSD is a really good work in progress file format. The nice thing about it is that it doesn't lose and quality. You're not compromising quality. It's not a compressed format. It doesn't have any of the problems of JPEG, so it makes it a good working file format. 3. 4 Most Important File Formats in Photoshop - Part 2: The next file format that we're going to look at is PNG. Now, this is a glossy orb that I've created inside Photoshop, and I've saved it as a PSD file as you would because this is a work in progress. I've got all the things together here that I need to make this glossy orb. But I also have the ability to come back later and, for example, remove some of the detail from this. I could remove some of the shine and I can remove an element down here. All of this is fully editable still because it's saved as a PSD file. But when I want to send it somewhere or do something else with it, then I'm forced to make a choice. If I wanted to, for example, save this in a format that could be used for scrapbooking or on the web where I want the glossy orb but I don't want the background. Because if I put this glossy orb on a striped background, I don't want it to have a white box around it, I want the striped background to come right up to the edge of this glossy orb, so basically what I want is, I want transparency around the edges. The file has to be rectangular in shape. You can't have circular files. But what you can have is transparency that makes it look like this image is just a circle even though it's a square or rectangle, but part of this is transparent. Now, we can't save this as a JPEG file because one of the things about JPEG files is it does not support transparency. This means if I save this glossy orb as a JPEG file, even though I've got transparency showing here, it's going to have a white background. Let's just test that file. Save as. We're going to save it as a JPEG. I'm going to call it glossy orb JPEG, and we're just going to click "Save." We're going to choose a quality, doesn't really matter too much what. I'll click "Okay. " Now, let's go back and reopen this. Here is our glossy orb JPEG file. Look at it inside Photoshop. It has a white background. It's always going to have a white background. JPEGs have to have completely opaque backgrounds. If there's nothing there, if there's transparency there, then a JPEG format just fills it with white. This is no good for web use. It's no good as a file format, for example, for scrapbooking. Let's go back to our PSD file and let's look at PNG. PNG is going to flatten this image to a single layer. There's nothing we can do about that. If we wanted to be able to edit this, were still going to need a PSD version. But for the web and for sharing, PNG file format is going to give us this glossy orb and the transparent background. Let's go and save it as a PNG. File, Save As. From this list we're going to select PNG. Here it is P-N-G. I'm going to click on it, and I'm going to click "Save." Now, with PNG you'll always get these options. You can select compression none or also fast, or smallest and slow. You can choose interlacing. But you know what, the simplest thing to do is just to click "Okay." Because unless you really specifically need some of these options, Okay, is just a really good option to use. Let's just call it a PSD folder, and let's go and open the PNG file up and see what it looks like. Well, here is the glossy orb PNG file. It looks like it's got white around it. It looks like we've failed in our attempt to get an orb with a transparent background. But let's just see what happens when we open it. Well, as you can see, it was Windows that was dropping that white background around it. In actual fact, this image is a single layer, there's only one layer in the document and that layer has on it a glossy orb and a transparent background. If we put something behind this, for example, I'm just going to fill it with black, you can see that the transparency is now filled. You can see that this really is a transparent background in this shape, and that's the beauty of PNG. Really good for scrapbooking elements, really good for buttons, for websites, for example, anywhere where you want that transparency in the image. The final file format we're going to look at is PDF. PDF is a portable document file format. It's used a lot for multi-page documents although you can use it for single-page documents. If I'm using PDF, generally, it's because I want to put up a pattern for something on the web. For example, if you were selling patterns on Etsy, you might save them as PDF files. It's a file format that people expect things to appear in, and it does have the benefit of allowing you to create multi-page documents. But let's first see how we would save this particular image which is an illustration for creating a bike embroidery as a PDF image. I'm going to choose File and then Save As, as usual. From the Save As type drop-down list here, I'm going to choose PDF. Here it is, here. Photoshop PDF. I'll click on it. I'm going to click "Save." Now, I'm getting a warning here that the settings that I choose in the Save Adobe PDF dialog can override current settings in the Save As dialogue. It's just a warning, I just need to make my choices in the next box. Now, here are the Save Adobe PDF options. From the dropdown list here you have all options. For example, high quality print, press quality, smallest file size, high quality print. I have a couple that I created for myself that I needed for a particular project, but I'm just going to select here high quality print. We can also select to preserve Photoshop editing capabilities. I don't actually want to do this because I want to sell this image, if you like, as an embroidery pattern, and so I don't want people necessarily to be able to edit it. But I would like it to be optimized for fast web preview because they're going to buy it online. Now, there are other options that you can select here and you can have a look through them. You can also set everything up and save this as a preset, but we're working a little bit faster today. Basically, at this point, all you need to do, and this is all I would do, is just click on "Save PDF." I'm just going to close this and let's go to Windows Explorer for a minute. Here is the original image that I had opened and here is the PDF file that we have created from this. When I double-click on it, it's going to open in my default PDF viewing application which just happens to be Foxit Reader. But here it is created as a standard PDF document. I'm just going to close that down for now and let's just talk this away. I'm going to go back though and get my bike image. We're going to look at creating a multi-page PDF. I have a bike embroidery pattern here, and I also have one for a retro caravan and an umbrella. Say, I want to put these both together in one package. Well, then I would choose File and then Automate, and I'll choose PDF Presentation. Here, I get to choose what I want to happen. Now, I want to add the open files because I already have these two files open. If I want them to be in a different order, for example, if I want the pattern to be first and the bike to be second, I can just drag this here in this box to rearrange them. I can sort things in the order that I want them to appear. I can also click here to browse and I can go into my folder structure and select other images to add to my PDF should I want to. I don't need to at this stage. Now, over here we have the output options and what we want to do is to just save it as a multi-page document, just a standard multi-page PDF file. Now, I'm ready to just go ahead and click the Save button. The Save As dialog appears and the document's already set up as a multi-page PDF. I'm just going to call this two embroidery patterns and click "Save." This reopens the dialogue that we had access to before. Again, I can just choose the type of quality I want so I'm just going to settle for high quality print. Then I'll go ahead and click "Save PDF." The patterns are now saved as a PDF file and it's a multi-page PDF file. Let's go and have a look and see what it looks like in Windows Explorer. Here, we are in Windows Explorer, and here our two embroidery patterns PDF file. I just double-clicked it to open it in my default viewer. Here it is, it's a single file, and it has two pages in it. We're able to create multi-page PDF files very easily from inside Photoshop, either using images that we have open already in Photoshop or using a combination of images that we have open and some on disk or just images that we have stored on disk. There are the four basic file formats. If you can use create and understand, PDF, PNG, JPEG, and PSD, then they are really the only file formats that you really need to know to work successfully between Photoshop, and online printing, social media sites, and distributing content to other people. Your project for this class is to save four images. Save a photograph using the sRGB color space or at least checking to make sure that your image is using the sRGB color space as a JPEG so that you could share it online. Create a document in Photoshop that has multiple layers and save it as a PSD file. Reopen that file once you've closed it to prove to yourself that all those layers are stored in the file. Then create a simple file that has some transparency. At the very simplest, you could just put a circle inside a square document, leave the outside transparent. Save it as a PNG image, and then reopen it to prove to yourself that the transparency is being saved in this format. Finally, take one or more images and group them together into a single or multi-page PDF file. When you're done with that, open it up in your favorite PDF reader and just prove to yourself that you can now create multi-page PDFs from inside Photoshop. As your class project, just post one or more of those images into the class project and just let me know how you went saving these files, and please tell me if you had any problems so that I can help you solve them. My name is Helen Bradley, thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.