The Best-Kept Secret for Smaller PSDs | Adobe Photoshop File Optimization

1. Class Intro: Hey, I'm Paul, and I've been a graphic designer, illustrator, and other for the last two decades. The app that creative sphere most is Adobe Photoshop, and something it's famous for is generating insanely massive files. Now, PSDs or Photoshop documents have so much to remember to encapsulate it into one file that you can preview with a spacepr on your computer. All the work, overlays and effects that we've done is stored in that one single file. So some years ago, I tested a couple of different ways to get those big files into little ones, and I've been using it ever since. Now, the strangest thing is I came to realize this may be the best kept secret in all of Photoshop because nobody seems to know it. I figure it's easy enough to teach in about 5 minutes or less to take you from heavy lifting those giant folders into little ones that you can save easily and send quickly. So are you ready to learn the best kept secret in Adobe Photoshop for shrinking massive files into little ones? Let's go. 2. Clarify, Simplify and Save: A large contributor to this is how messy they can get in the scope of working on them. And often at the end of the project, there's not a lot of time to save that. But I'm going to demonstrate how we can cut that down vastly on an old project of mine. It's a big boy weighing and over 101 megabytes. Now, already, there's something obvious to me this textures folder we see here. If I click on the visibility by clicking this little I here, I can see it's kind of a big messy working file that's not really part of the final design. That is a giant file encapsulated in a smart object, and that is something that is going to add a lot of file size. By removing it entirely, we are whacking off megabytes on this thing by getting rid of anything that doesn't serve the current projects. This I hope is a typical file of a busy person, where some layers are named very nicely and others are called Layer 20. If I click on this, for example, and go Command T to transform or Control T on a PC, it's going to tell me the bounding rectangle is empty, which means it isn't even a layer. So if I backspace, that layer is gone. Now, because it was empty, it wouldn't really contribute file size, but it definitely adds to the feeling that this was made by a madman. I can say that because I made this. Anything that doesn't belong on this project that I can't account for, it's gone. Now, these seem to be most of the source images that were being used for generating the textures and things. I wouldn't mind keeping these, but I'm going to save a little bit of file size by switching them off. If I were to hand this off, I don't think that makes a whole lot of sense. I think I'd rather just call it building. I'd rather call these cranes. Animals, there's only one, so I'll just go bird. Okay, that's images taken care of. Now, let's look at this rogue typography thing. Oh, okay. Now, I see what this is. I left this in the original file so that I could roll back, say, let's change my city of Durban to London, and then I've got that. It's editable live text. The reason it doesn't change what's lying below is that's actually made on the texture side. So if I go over to this main big ring, you can see that's one huge texture for both this funny ring that's going around them and the text itself. And if I hold Option or Alt and click this thing on the side. This is a layer mosk which I'm becoming a bit of a cretin and a famous teacher, but I use them in every class. To get it to work with this texture, what I've done is actually got this stuff that we did for London and pasted it into the mosq. But that's a whole another story and I do teach specific classes about that. Because that would now in the context of this be considered something I don't need anymore. I'm not going to roll back because I've got approval in the text. I'm happy with everything there. I'm going to go ahead and delete that whole folder and another way I prefer to use. It's easy enough to teach in about 5 minutes or less. Later. All right. Now it's a case of the first part of the best kept secret Adobe Photoshop. This shouldn't work, but it just does. Check this out. We just switch off the visibility for everything, paying no heed to what we've done beneath the lay groups or anything like that. We've got a big looks like a brand new transparent Canvas in Photoshop. We're going to save on that and let's look at the file size. It's incredible how much we've shaved off by just simplifying layers that were inside of Photoshop. And by switching of that visibility further takes it down even further. Now in the next lesson, I'm going to teach you how to package that up and cut it down even more. 3. Hide, Squish and Shrink: So we've shaved off a little little bit of file size. I don't think it's spectacular, so I'm going to go and be a little bit more brutal in the original Photoshop file. I've talked myself into getting rid of any of those original images that aren't serving the thing. So palm trees that we didn't need, I'm going to get rid of those because that is another smart object, so that's going to add a lot of size. So let's go with the backspace. That industry, which was the cranes, as well, that's out. Then this hardly do with its effect. I was curious if I needed both these layers at all. Obviously, if I switch off the first one, it's losing a little bit of contrast there. But if I select both together and hold Command or Control E to merge them, the visibility didn't change in any way, and Photoshops got a little bit less to remember. Now, I decided to get rid of all the working typography because I'm not going to roll back. I'm happy with what it says. What I want to do is start, I don't think I'm going to move this bird or anything, so I'm going to get that one layer down and I'm going to hit Command E. To merge it with the underlying layer. Now saying the underlying layer has a layer mask. If this is preserved, then it'll mask the merge result. So that means it'll get rid of the bird. I don't want to do that. So if I go apply the mask, they are now one thing together. I'd like to do the same with the crayons and this big acrylic texture. I think the fairest thing is actually to group these blue splats with this acrylic texture, and remember, we're going to apply the layer mask there as well. We've got that blue acrylics. The palms over there, Trinket as well. It doesn't need to be bigger, so I'm going to rusterize the layer, which will remove that smart object. It is high resolution enough already, and I'm going to apply that selective color again with Command E, which just merges whatever's on top of one layer onto that layer. That's locking a lot cleaner now. Save again and see what file size we're getting. Now we're talking. Now we've shaved off roughly 10 megabytes or a third of the file size that we had, which wasn't bad to begin with. We've gone down from about 100 to 30, and now we're on the 20 mark. Let's see if we can get it down even further. Let's double click that and open it again in Photoshop. Now, we can see all the way we simplify the layers they're still preserved. I'm just going to switch off the visibility of everything again and say that let's have a look. And we don't get much of a preview, but it's down from just on 19, 20 megabytes down to 16 in some change. It's right click to compress that, and this is the same on MACOPC. Whatever compression you have is going to work fine. And it's down to 10.8 megabytes, from an original size of 100 megabytes. It's a tenth of its original size. We've lost no resolution, no quality. We made decisive choices about how far we want to roll back. And honestly, I think I explained to you, I've got most of those things saved elsewhere as original disble files if you wanted to make a London version, for example. But this file ready for sending, is ten megabats from 100 megabats. That is the exact formlea used in the introd to make that big folder shrink into the little one. And that, friends, is the best kip secret in Adobe Voto shop.