Exporting .PSDs and such

[Walter Soyka]

[Spencer Tweed] “I have mostly been playing around with exporting layered .psd files – but they NEVER come out looking quite right. Adjustment layers and things just get demolished and 32bpc projects are downright unusable.”

Photoshop doesn’t have the concept of adjustment layers, and it only offers a handful of transfer modes in 32bpc.

[Spencer Tweed] “Does anybody have any good tips for me? Perhaps there is a plugin that will allow me to export usable .psd files or something similar”

I do a lot of this myself — I have to repurpose a lot of my work across multiple media — so I try to design with this in mind. That usually means either precomping more or less than I otherwise would, or using color labels creatively.

Sometimes, I can simply render to layered PSDs and spend a little time in Photoshop cleaning them up; other times, I try to think about the elements the way a print designer would and turn the visibility of various layers on and off and render out a series of flattened stills from AE, then re-composite them in Photoshop.

A couple scripts like Zorro the Layer Tagger [link] and rd:Statesman [link] can make these tasks a lot easier.

I know it’s not the neat and clean workflow you were hoping for, but I haven’t found a smoother one yet.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Spencer Tweed]

Hey Walter,

Shame there doesn’t seem to be a better way yet. I have been doing the “cleanup in Phothoshop” method too, but in some cases it comes out too garbled.

For example every time I export a 32bpc file all layers are washed out. This is something that I never quite understood about linear light; I know that it is a gamma issue (Windows runs at a gamma of 2.2, but linear runs at 1.0) but I’m not honestly sure how this relates to After Effects – which doesn’t seem to have gamma settings (?). I like to render 3DS Max as 32bit and then when I import it into AE I choose “Preserve RGB” in the interpretation settings and everything seems to be happy.

– Spencer

PS
Statesman seems like a cool plugin – I’ll use it for when the Director is breathing down my neck. Currently I take screenshots and then toggle between them, but then when I have to edit one of them slightly I need to remake it all again which sometimes takes too long.