PRESENTING DESIGN ITERATIONS WITH PHOTOSHOP
ANIMAL LOGIC CONCEPT ARTIST AND ART DIRECTOR FIONA DARWIN SHARES HER PHOTOSHOP TIPS FOR CREATING AND EXPORTING DESIGN ITERATIONS FOR PRESENTATION
1. GET TO KNOW LAYER COMPS
Layer Comps let you take ‘snapshots’ of your setups in a single Photoshop file. It means you can cycle through your Layer Comps to show multiple iterations of a character or composition without having to consider folders and turn their visibility on and off manually. In the example here I have used Layer Comps to organise iterations of the Lady Iron Dragon character designs for The LEGO Ninjago Movie. The folders are colour coded so you can see how each is turned on and off as a different Layer Comp is selected.
2. LAYER COMPS AND ACTIONS
You can utilise Layer Comps in actions to export your designs in specific ways. For example, when I am presenting character options in a lineup I need each of the character designs on their own transparent layer in order to quickly compile them in a presentation file for review. It can take a long time to manually duplicate, merge and tally iterations when you have a lot of them. To speed up the process I created an action that selects a specifically named folder, duplicates it, merges it and then selects the next Layer Comp.
3. READY FOR REVIEW
Hit play on the action and a new layer is created for that iteration of the character after which the next Layer Comp is selected. Every time the action is played it results in a new layer made of the design in the active Layer Comp, and as the next Layer Comp is selected at the end of the action it can be played over and over again to create merged layers of every character design very quickly. Activating the action over and over again creates a flattened version of each design as a new layer. Each character iteration is now merged in its own layer and the unmerged artwork used to build each of them remains intact under the ‘01_Merge_all’ folder. Once all the designs are ready they can be easily compiled and aligned in a presentation file for review.