From the course: Toon Boom Storyboard Pro Essential Training

Importing an image as a layer or scene - Storyboard Pro Tutorial

From the course: Toon Boom Storyboard Pro Essential Training

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Importing an image as a layer or scene

- You may want to bring photos or scans into Storyboard Pro for any number of reasons. Maybe you've boarded a scene on paper, and you want to import the panels into Storyboard Pro for editing or to help make an animatic, or maybe you want to include a logo or a photo into your boards. Maybe you want to add a sketch, or maybe you want to import a photo to sketch over it. In other words, tracing, and yes, we do trace, it does save a lot of time. Or maybe production gave you photos of backgrounds for the project you're working on that you want to work over. Now, the fastest way to bring a photo or scan into your project as a layer is to use the library. So let's go over to the right, and we see, we have these four tabs here, in your panel view, and the fourth one over is our library. Now, we have set up in here a couple reference images of horses, so let's say that we want to, in this empty panel here, we want to draw a horse. I don't know about you, but it's faster for me to trace a horse than to draw one from memory. So, if you right-click in this area here, right-click, and we're going to open a library. And within your Great Grain Robbery folder, you'll see Reference Images, select that, and then click on Select Folder. Reference Images opens here, in our list of libraries, I'll click on it, and here's a bunch of horses. And, let's say, for right now, that I want to use this one, and I'm just going to drag that over and release, and it pops up inside as the top layer, well, I'm going to move that down to a lower layer, and I'm going to reduce the opacity very quickly, down to about 40 percent, it could be whatever you like, and then I'm going to select my ink layer, grab my brush, and I can just very quickly start tracing over the horse, because this is the look that I want, and then I can simply turn off that image, and I've got a quick horse sketch. So it's a wonderful way of working. Another way that I can import an image is under File drop-down, and go down to Import, and I have options, import images as shots or layers. For right now, we want to import it as a layer, same thing, I can go and let's select a different horse this time, click Open, and it's going to open it again as my top layer. Now, I do have an option here, if I select it with my selection tool, I can re-scale it, and I'll hold down the shift key so it stays the proper proportions, I can move that around, and I can trace over that. I can actually just keep it there and use the image, as well, if I want. So, let's say that we have some scanned images from paper, a lot of people still like drawing boards on paper, or maybe you've done roughs and you want to do the cleanup in the software. We can do that very quickly, and we can have it set up so that each drawing imports as its own scene, or own shot. So, let's go to our File drop-down, and go to Import, Import Images as Shots. Select that, now, instead of using our reference images, let's go back one level, and we have a folder called Scans. So double-click on that, open it up, and here we've got a bunch of scans of earlier shots. So let's go ahead and select, I can shift select a number of them, I'm going to click on Open, and right after, the image that we were working on, notice that they all show up, each individual scan, shows up as a separate layer. And it shows up with the image on the top layer, here, and then the default, Storyboard Pro A in background, shows up there, well, I can actually click and drag that into a new location, so underneath, I can draw over the top of it, but as we click through on our Timeline, you can see that all of them are in there with the scan automatically placed on our top layer. If you've named your scans properly, in sequential order, or alphabetical order, they will show up in the right order on your storyboard. So make sure, when you're numbering things, or labeling them, that, that'll help you out. Otherwise it'll be all a jumble. Now, you have many, many options, let's take a look at the different types of images that you can import. So if we go to Import Images as Shots or Layers, and we open this up, you can see, we can do .bmp, .jpe, .jpeg, .omf, .opt, .pal, .png .psd, .scans, .sgi, .tga, .tif, .tvg, or .yuv. Anything you're likely to be working with can be imported as either a layer or as a complete panel within Storyboard Pro. Makes it super fast and easy, we often use this for importing logos and photos, signage, things that we might be working with in Photoshop or in another program, any way that you want, Storyboard Pro makes it fast and easy to import and use your scanned or saved images.

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