Artboards

There are certainly many ways to work, present, and even your images in photoshop. In many cases though we are working with a single image displayed on the canvas at a moment in time. Have you ever considered working with one or multiple images on an artboard?

The easiest way to think of an artboard in the physical world is taking several images and laying them side by side on a plain background. It may be different versions of the same image, or it could easily be several different images. From that point you could select which image(s) you like and even copy the board to send to a client.

The digital world has added advantages. You make a duplicate of the first image and then any various edits to the copy while comparing results to the original in real time. Perhaps you want to send a series of images to a client as a mood board and the client may wish to print the images for any number of reasons. An art board could be valuable.

To create an artboard in photoshop

Create a document in any size that you wish but click the ARTBOARD checkbox near the orientation icons. This will create your base document. Next:

• Open the image that you wish to work with
• Drag and drop (or paste) the image onto your artboard (resize if necessary) 

Now hold down on the move tool (looks like a +) to get the 'artboard' tool (looks like a square).

If we move our artboard move tool over the corner of an image and click we will see (+) symbols appear. If we click on a plus symbol, we will create a new white square (artboard) next to our first image. If we want to duplicate the first image (Control -J) will create an exact duplicate.

From here we have several options:

• Continue to add new images by opening up an image and dragging it on top of the new artboard
• Editing a copy of the original image and comparing it real time.

Notice on the second board I simply darkened the image, while in the third board I added a new image. Now suppose I wanted to send these images to a client (or anyone else) who may wish to save a physical copy. Not too difficult.

Choose

• File
• Export
• Artboard to files (or to PDF)

If you wish to save to pdf, each artboard will appear on a separate sheet. The following link, although using a different example, will take you through this process in a Video. 

An additional feature of Artboards is that you can resize each individual board to meet the requirements of where you wish to post.  For example, in the example of the dancer above I easily could have resized one of the artboards to post on Facebook and the other on Instagram. Give Artboards a try, you may like this as another tool in your editing and workflow toolkit.