From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

868 Opening Fresco art in Photoshop

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

Start my 1-month free trial

868 Opening Fresco art in Photoshop

“

- [Instructor] In this movie, I'll show you what it looks like to open a Fresco created file inside Photoshop running on the Mac or the PC. And we'll also get a little bit of an assist from Illustrator. Now note that I am working in Photoshop 2020 or later, by the way. I happen to be on the Mac, and I'm looking at the Home screen, at which point I can see all three of those pieces of artwork that I created inside Adobe Fresco running on an iPad. If for some reason you're not seeing your files, then switch over to Cloud documents and you should see every single one of those files that you created. Now, in my case I created a bunch of iterations as I went along, and that's why I'm seeing so many variations on my various pieces of artwork. All right, but I'm going to switch back to Home so that you can see that every single one of these files is a PSDC file. That is a layered Photoshop Document Cloud File, by the way. And so I'm going to start things off by opening this guy right here, just by clicking on his thumbnail. That's all you have to do. And I'll just go ahead and zoom in a little bit as well. And I want you to notice what's going on over here inside the Layers panel. Notice that we have a few standard pixel base layers, and so if I was to opt + click on this eyeball icon here on the Mac or alt + click on it on the PC, then I would see this layer by itself, and it's just a standard pixel based layer that I painted inside Fresco. Then we've this Shadows layer right here. Here's the heart on its own layer. And then I have some crosshatching created with the Crosshatch brush, once again, inside Fresco. Now things work out differently if you paint with one of live brushes, such as the watercolors or oils. In which case, you're going to end up with a Smart object instead. So, here's that layer right there at the bottom that was created with watercolors and oils mixed together. This layer was created with watercolors alone, and they're both Smart objects, for whatever reason, by the way. And I say this because, notice if I double-click on one of the Smart object thumbnails in order to open the contents of the Smart object, it's nothing special. It's just pixels. However, if you end up modifying one of these layers inside Photoshop, then it's no longer going to be live editable paint back inside Fresco. All right, so I'll just go ahead and close that Smart object and turn the background back on. Notice this is not a traditional background item. This is in fact an independent fill layer, and so if I was to double click on it's thumbnail, then I would bring up the color picker which would allow me to switch to a different color if I so desire. At which point I'll just click OK to accept that change. Now this is going to be perfectly okay, by the way. If you make this modification inside Photoshop, you'll still be able to open the artwork inside Fresco. That's always going to be the case, and it will remain editable. And the same is true for all the pixel based layers. It's just the Smart objects that you can end up messing up. They'll still be there, but it's possible they'll come up with the little PS icon on them, a little PS badge, which tells you that they are now Photoshop objects, and Fresco no longer recognizes them. All right, so that takes care of the standard pixel based brushes and the live brushes. What about the vectors? Well, I'll go ahead and click on the Home icon up here in the top left corner of the screen, and then I'll open this vector based artwork just by clicking on it. Now if you were to zoom in on it past 100%, then you're going to see big giant pixels which might lead you to believe that these aren't truly vectors. This is actually just a function of how Photoshop displays things. Beyond 100% you get giant pixels no matter what. However these are vectors, and they are editable, however, inside of Adobe Illustrator. So notice over here we have a vector based Smart object, and we can tell it's a Smart object by the appearance of this tiny page icon right here, and so this thing that's called pixel layer right here that's the watercolor wash in the background, also a Smart object just as we saw with the robot a moment ago. But this guys is a vector based Smart object. Now if you double click on his thumbnail, in an ideal world, it's going to open inside Illustrator. If it opens inside some other application instead, then what you want to do is go ahead and find an SVG file, which I'm providing for you by the way with the exercise files, and then you want to right click on it, choose Open With, this is going to work for you on the PC as well, and then choose Other. It's the last command in the menu on the PC, forget what it's called, but you'll figure it out, and then go ahead and select the most recent version of Illustrator and makes sure to turn on whatever check box this is called on the PC. Here on the Mac it's called Always Open With just so that in the future you'll open SVG files with Illustrator. Then click Open, and you should see this file right here which by the way was first featured in Deke's Techniques 813 thru 819, and I didn't really know what to call it. Everybody thought it was a really cool effect so I went ahead and showed how I did it, but I gave the first movie a name of Drawing a cubical gobstopper in Illustrator just in case you want to check it out. All right, I'll go ahead and switch back over to Photoshop here, and I'll double click on the thumbnail for this vector layer right here in order to open it inside of Illustrator. I'm going to back out by pressing ctrl + 0, or cmd + 0 on the Mac, and I want you to see how the vectors extend beyond the edges of the canvas, that is the four walls of the rectangular canvas that we saw back in Photoshop. That cannot happen. Fresco can't do that with pixel based layers, but it can with vectors. The great thing here is that you can apply modifications that you can't inside Fresco. For example, if I wanted to grab this lip right here, notice I'm clicking on it with the black arrow tool, and that ends up selecting actually the face, as I can see by the fill right here, which is that shade of orange. So I'll go ahead and right click inside the document window, choose Arrange, and choose Send to Back. That'll just get that out of the way. Then I'll click off the item to deselect it, and I'll click on this lip shape right here. That indicates the bottom of the lip of course. Let's say I just want to move it to a different location. Now that is not something I could as easily inside Fresco because I would actually have to lasso the region and it would get the flesh as well. Here I'm just leaving a big hole. Well, if I want to move that hole, I could click on it with the black arrow, but that's going to select the entire compound path. You can see that it's a compound path with holes because of the words compound path here in the Properties panel. If you're looking at the horizontal control panel, you'd see compound path on the far left side. If I just want to select part of that path, then I would switch to the white arrow tool, the one that Illustrator calls the Direct Selection Tool, and then I would click off the paths to deselect them. I would alt or opt click very carefully just on the outline of that path, and then I'll just go ahead and zoom in by cmd + spacebar + clicking, that's a ctrl + spacebar + click on the Mac, and I'll go ahead and drag some representative point like this guys right here until snaps into proper alignment. Or what am I doing that for? All I need to do is get rid of it, so I'll just press the backspace key, or the delete key on the Mac, in order to get rid of that hole. And now I'll just go ahead and press cmd + 0, or ctrl + 0 on the Mac, to once again settle my zoom. And then I could go ahead and click the close item up here in the Title tab. And if I wanted to save my changes into Photoshop I would click on the Save button. Here's the thing though, and this is what you've got to be careful of, very likely this will turn the layer into something that Fresco no longer recognizes as a vector brush layer. So you won't be able to apply the same kinds of modifications that you could at the outset. So what I'd recommend you do is, if you're going to save your changes, which is just fine, that's not going to save them over the other file. It's just going to save your changes into Photoshop. Then you'd want to switch back over to Photoshop, go up to the File menu, and choose Save As so you don't overwrite that original file. And that's how you work with art that you've created in Adobe Fresco on a mobile device here inside Photoshop 2020 or better running on the Mac or PC.

Contents