Use Layer Comps in Photoshop to Improve Your InDesign Workflow
basixvideos

Use Layer Comps in Photoshop to Improve Your InDesign Workflow

on Feb 1st 2012 with 12 comments
Tutorial Details
  • Program: Adobe Photoshop CS5
  • Difficulty: Beginner
  • Estimated Completion Time: 10 Minutes

Final Product What You'll Be Creating

Layer comps are a great way to organize content inside Photoshop files. They allow you to save multiple design ideas in a single PSD while reducing the need to create duplicate layers. As you’ll see in this tutorial, layer comps can flow from Photoshop to InDesign making your workflow even more efficient. Let’s get started!

Tutorial Assets

 
Enjoyed this Post?

Subscribe to our RSS Feed, Follow us on Twitter or simply recommend us to friends and colleagues!

By

Rollover to read this author's bio or click through to see a full list of posts by this author.

A.J. Wood is an Adobe Community Professional & Adobe Certified Instructor based in Dallas, TX. The only thing he enjoys more than photography & teaching is spending time with his family. Chat with him on G+ or catch his blog.  

Plus Premium
 
 
  • http://www.ericvasquez.net Eric Vasquez

    This looks like a pretty nice flyer design! And Layer Comps are extremely helpful! I use them in my work a lot to jump around and see how different color schemes and things like that are looking.

    While I do like the typeface here I feel that the girl should be a bit brighter or maybe have a bit of blue on her to help blend her in with her surroundings a bit more? Other than that it’s pretty good!

    • http://psd.tutsplus.com/ Grant Friedman

      Hey Eric, this tutorial is not really about the design of the flyer. It’s actually a flyer that can be purchased on Graphic River. It was just used as an example to explain what layer comps do.

      • http://www.ericvasquez.net Eric Vasquez

        Makes sense…good stuff! Thanks for the reply.

  • Raymond Sullivan

    Very informative, I use Photoshop a lot but not with Indesign, I wasn’t even aware that Indesign had this feature. I am not really an Indesign kind of guy but I have used it a few times to make and write letters and presentation materiel for use in Adobe Acrobat to send to clients via email.

    Thanks to your tut I am now aware of this and I am actually going to look more carefully and see what other Adobe apps can cross platform update and process all this into changing and updating my workflow as I do use this workflow technique in After Effects and in other 3D software that kind of does the same thing with PSD files.

    I may even look again at Indesign and see if their is a way of taking advantage of that program and use it somehow with After Effects.

  • Geir B Nystad

    This is awesome, love it. Need to go more in depth on how to make one of those PSD files. Very smart indeed.

  • Chris

    I find it interesting you say “tuts” like “king Tut” and not “toots”, which sounds more like the work “tutorial” but without saying “orial”. Like “PSD TUT-orials”

    • Grant

      Yeah I was thinking the same thing. “Tuts” should be pronounced how “Tut” sounds in the word “Turorial”. Pronouncing it to rhyme with “but” is just silly.

      • jojo

        get over yourselves. it’s not a big deal – no one called the pronunciation police. comment on the work or quality of the tutorial and not those things that neither add to or take away from it.

  • Fabian

    First Tutorial for a long time that told me somethin totally new and stunning… really cool stuff…

  • http://n/a Derive7

    Hi A..J.

    I see this has a world of advantages! I constantly work with large PSD files, save them as JPEG’s and then place them into InDesign. I then export to a PDF file and print. These are usually very large prints (A2 and A0′s or sometimes even double A0′s, what we call “double spreads”).
    I’ve never linked PSD files into InDesign before as they tend to be huge, at around 150 or even +250 MB. The trouble that I see with this method is that when you place a large PSD file, it gives InDesign lots of trouble when exporting to PDF, if that’s the desired outcome.

    Have you found any solutions to solve this problem?

    Thanks for the great tutorial!

  • graphiclove12

    Thanks for the great tut! This will speed up my workflow a lot.
    There is just 1 question left:
    How can I define the grid when placing the 4 picture all together by pressing cmd+shift?
    Whenever I try, PS only gives me a grid of 3 by 3…

    Thanks for your help.
    And the tutorial!

  • Faizal Daud

    Really useful… It’s amazing!!