It's here!
One of the most-wanted features requested by the The Brief community is now live.
Marketers, designers, advertisers, and business owners, today, I present to you the latest addition to The Brief – the Photoshop Integration.
In this post, you'll find out everything you want to know about this feature – how it works, how to use it, requirements, and limitations.
Let's get into it.
Everything you need to know about the The Brief Photoshop Integration
The Brief is now more than a complex design tool. It's also an online PSD editor that can be used to simplify your design workflow and boost your team's productivity.
You can use it in two different ways:
1. To send a PSD file from Photoshop to The Brief
2. To upload a PSD file from your computer in The Brief
Now, I'm going to show exactly how it works.
1. How to send a PSD file from Photoshop to The Brief
Before this feature was released, we know that many of you would upload each layer individually in The Brief.
Now, you can say goodbye to all that time-consuming manual work.
What's more, is that you can get the The Brief plugin directly from the Adobe Exchange App Marketplace.
Just follow these steps to get started:
- Open Photoshop on your computer.
- Click on the Window menu, then on Find Extensions on Exchange.
- In the search bar that's on the Extensions section, type in The Brief to find our plugin.
- Click on Install, and then restart Photoshop.
- After opening Photoshop again, enable the The Brief Plugin from the Window > Extensions menu.
- Go to the The Brief > Account options section to generate the API access key and copy it.
- Go back to Photoshop and login to the The Brief Plugin using the API access key you just generated.
- You can switch to your The Brief account by just clicking on Go to The Brief.
And that's how you use the Photoshop Plugin for sending PSD files in your The Brief account.
It's that easy.
In case Adobe Exchange does not work for you, here's an alternative that you can try:
- Then, enable the The Brief Plugin from the Window > Extensions menu and follow the same steps as above.
2. How to upload and edit PSD files in The Brief
Uploading a PSD file from your computer in The Brief is also extremely easy and won't take you more than a few clicks.
Here are four different methods you can use to do that:
- From the Choose size screen and click on create new from a PSD file.
- From the Banner creator screen, click on the Add image icon, then upload your PSD document from the My images section.
- Drag and drop your PSD file to stage. This is a huge time saver when you need to add an image to a specific size from the set.
- Upload a PSD file directly in your Library and save each layer as a separate image in a folder named after the PSD file. However, please note that you can only upload image files with rasterized effects.
How to take advantage of the Photoshop Integration
You probably already know how exactly you're going to use this feature to improve your workflow but here's the overall view on how it's going to benefit marketing teams.
- Make quick edits when you don't have Photoshop installed. This means that you'll no longer have to wait for a designer to help you modify something that can take a couple of minutes. If you have the PSD file, simply upload it in The Brief and quickly edit the design. Then, download it in the desired format.
- Create multiple sizes for the same visual. When you run an online advertising campaign, it can be incredibly time-consuming to create the same design in various sizes. In Photoshop, you'd have to do it from scratch for every size. Thanks to the Photoshop Integration, you can now create only one design in Photoshop and then use The Brief to generate all the sizes you need. This is going to save you hours of work for every ad campaign.
- Animate any design in seconds. The Brief helps you go beyond the limitations of Photoshop, which means that you can import any PSD file and animate or add transitions to your layers in just a few clicks. Then, you can simply export it in HTML5, GIF, or MP4 formats.
Current requirements and limitations
Here are a few important aspects that you need to be aware of when using the Photoshop Integration feature:
- If the PSD file has multiple artboards, a banner will be created from each artboard.
- When you export a PSD file, we’ll keep the fonts in case you already have them in your The Brief account. If not, then we’ll replace them with the Open Sans font.
- Almost all effects (with the exception of drop shadows) will be rasterized into images.
- The maximum PSD file size supported is 100MB and 3000 x 3000 pixels.
- The plugin does not support Photoshop versions earlier than 2017.
- Blending options cannot be translated to The Brief, so we recommend rasterizing the layers before sending the PSD file to our platform.
- Rotation only works for text layers.
- We only import visible layers.
- We do not have auto leading or horizontal/vertical scaling for the moment, so texts might look differently when using these options.
- All shapes will be converted to PNG files in Bannnersnack.
- Due to technology limitations, text tracking is not interpreted as letter spacing.
- The 8-bit color mode is the only one supported so if the PSD was already designed you need to change that from the Image Mode menu before exporting it. Alternatively, you can start your project using the 8-bit color mode.
Conclusion
We're thrilled that we finally released the Photoshop Integration and we hope that you're just as excited as we are about using this new feature to optimize your design workflow.
We want to hear back from you so let us know down in the comments your feedback or suggestions.
