Speed Up Your Photoshop Work

sjim
05-06-09

As a webdesigner, one spends a lot of time using photoshop. If you work with several documents in one project, most of that time is spent on re-creating the same elements in all the documents. It can be a LOAD of work getting everying consistent. using copy-paste or imported/exported images of elements.

The best way to speed up this kind of photoshop work is to use PSB-files that you can import in, or export from smart objects. It works as following:

convert layers to a smart object
Convert a group or selection of layers to a Smart Object

export the contents of a smart object
Export the content of the Smart Object

save as a PSB file
Save the Smart Object as a PSB file

now you can select a smart object in one of your documents, right click on the layer and choose “Replace contents” to import the template file and replace it with the selected object or use the ‘place’ functionality.

The only down-side is that you have to keep updating the templated elements in each PSD file each time you change a template.
But this way it is less trouble and faster to get your documents consistent.