Planet Photoshop

Pre-pro prep

July 21, 2010 by Corey Barker Tip of the Day 1 Comment

If my experience with develop-ing rich media in a collaborative environment has taught me anything, it’s to keep project assets as organized as possible. Even though the layers’ paradigm in Photoshop provides an inherent organizational approach, it can quickly become unwieldy and bloated. A well-structured file folder hierarchy allows for easy access to core project assets like source and reference imagery as well as Photoshop-centric elements such as presets, masks, and displacement maps.Here’s a Photoshop CS4 tip for the road:

Posted by Corey Barker

Corey is the newest education and curriculum developer for the National Association of Photoshop Professionals. He is a graduate of the Ringling School of Art & Design in Sarasota, Fl, with a degree in Illustration. Over the years, Corey has worked as a graphic artist in a variety of disciplines such as illustration, commercial design, large format printing, motion graphics, web design and photography. His expertise in Photoshop and Illustrator have earned him numerous awards in illustration, graphic design and photography. Using Photoshop since Version 2, his expertise and creativity have evolved exponentially with every new version, which makes Corey an invaluable addition to the NAPP team.

One comment on “Pre-pro prep”

  1. Has anyone seen a good archiving system (or what Cory called a file folder hierarchy) FOR SALE, instead of Bridge?

    I have split my folders up by geography of client, type of client, type of output (like screenprint, decal, vehicle graphics, etc.).

    Then my file names have been very long and descriptive. For example: FIRE 01-04-09 – Hydrant and split hose icons – symbols.plt . This file was for the Fire Department. For my names, I add the date in the order of year-month-day, because then they will end up being in order when the files are viewed by file name. So this file was actually from 2001.

    I recommend against putting employees names in file names, because over the upcoming decades, people’s jobs will inevitably shift around. If you need to identify people, just do that by job title, such as “foreman” or “electrician.”

    Any help would be appreciated.

    david@connectionsigns.com
    Seattle

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