Now, how it works is this, when I click the preview play button, I can toggle through these different states. It remembers it and it is just all on one layer and when I save this out it is a PSD and reopen it, my layer comps will be the same. Now I want to show you how to edit this and update it. Let us say you wanted to add some text to this after you have gotten all of these states. I am going to do something a little different, add text on a pass so I am going to select the pen tool from the toolbox over here, the regular pen tool come up to the options bar and what you want to make sure is this middle icon that has the picture of the pen tool inside the square highlighted. We just want to create a path. I want to type on a curved path so I am just going to click and drag in the direction that I want to go, release and then come over here and click and drag. Just to get kind of an arch, I am going to release that and if I want to adjust this, I can hold down the Ctrl key on the PC or command key on the Mac, it will toggle to that white arrow which will let me move these points or adjust the direction lines to get a curve or stretch amount so it is a nice curve like this.
Once I have the curve shape, how I want it, I am going to add type to it. Now do not worry about the direction lines. The type is going to come on the curve line that is between these two anchor points here. These direction lines which you can adjust again by holding down the Ctrl or command key will change the direction of the line. I just want sort of a semi arch here so that is fine. So, the next step is I am going to change my foreground color to white, select the horizontal type tool and when I hover over this area, it turns into the type on a path tool. You can see that little line on it and I am just going to click to start to set it up and I am going to type the word color me or words color me in a funky font. Oops, all right that is in there but it is a little bit too large so I am going to commit it and then just take this down maybe to a 100 points and hit return.
And if I want to move the whole position of the type, I can just get the move tool and come down here like this. Click back on the type tool. If I wanted to change the font here, I can click up here on the top options bar and view the various font, styles and families that are here and notice that my menu shows some very large. I am just going to deviate here real quickly and show you how to set that up.
If you are on a PC, you go under the edit menu to preferences, if you are on a Mac you go under the top Photoshop menu to preferences and we want to come over here and just go directly to where it says type. Once you are in this preferences dialogue box where it says font preview size. I have change it to huge because I am over 50 and it is hard for me to read things so I like it huge right now so that is how you can change that user interface size of your type. All right, anyway back to layer comps, we have got the type here and if we click on our layer comps here, click on this little well, you will see that it disappears. I want to update this particular layer comp to reflect the type as well. So, I put the little icon in the well there for the layer count then turn the visibility on for that newly added type layer and click this little refresh button which are these two circular arrows and now it puts the icon there.
Come up here, click on the well for the next layer comps state, turn the visibility on and click refresh while that is highlighted and we will do this on the ones well just like so. Turn it on and refresh so now we can go through here and that type has been added and updated to all of the layer comps. Now, also let me mention this too, you can see that path line is there, that is not going to print or show up when you re [audio jump] purpose select this layer to make it disappear. What we are going to do now is create a PDF slideshow that you could send the client with different variations of this one image. It basically has four different renderings but only two layers, the type layer and the basic layer. So, how do we create a PDF presentation from layer comps? Just go under the file menu over to the scripts menu and then come over here and choose layer comps to PDF.
Click on that and this dialogue opens up and it saying where do you want to send it to. So what I am going to do is send it to my desktop and just call this color comps, click save so we have set up that destination and you also have an option here that says selected layer comps only. If I wanted to make this presentation with say only two I could have just selected them but I want all of them so do not check that. I want the slideshow to advance every five seconds you can change that if you want and also add if you want to loop it.
So, I am going to click run and this dialogue box will appear script alert, comps to PDF was successful and click okay. And then I will come out to my desktop and open it up and I want it to open up in full screen so I click yes and you will only see part of this on here because of the movie software but every five seconds, it is going to change to those layer comps and to escape out of the PDF, you can hit the Esc key and then that will give you the menus of the PDF but this is a great way to create a smaller file size that has quite a variety in it. Hope you have enjoyed this tutorial.
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