PHOTOSHOP FILE IN PREMIERE PRO

`LAYERED PHOTOSHOP FILE IN PREMIERE PRO

In this Blog I'm going to show you the power of working with layered Photoshop files in Adobe Premiere Pro. I'll go over the various ways to import a Photoshop file into premiere and take a look at some of the creative ways to use this feature. So, now when you import a layered Photoshop file you have a variety of different ways on how you can actually import the file into premiere.

Now, for the purposes of this Blog I already have a layered Photoshop file that I've prepared. I've isolated the various elements in this photograph so I have three different elements that I've photoshopped here we have the Earth, the Moon and then a simple black background.

So, I want to show you the various ways we can get this into Premiere Pro.

I'm going to give you two ways to import into Premiere from Photoshop. The first way is to right click in the project bin you could go to import or you could also go to up to file-import or you could also hit CTRL+I (Command+I on mac) but the way that I like to do is to click and drag the physical file onto your project bin. Simplest way.        

                     

So, In Premiere I'm going to go ahead and import this PSD file so as soon as I import. I have the “import layered file” dialog box up here and under import as we have four options

1. Merge all layers
2. Merged layers
3. Individual layers and,
4. Sequence

These top two ones are exactly what they sound like. If you merge all layers, you cannot select which layer to include, it simply merges all of your layers and will import them as one single two-dimensional file or still image file which you can use and if that's what you want to do that's fine.

Let's import that just, so you can see and you'll see this in project panel. We have our image here but that's not what we want.

I want to show you how you can import the individual layers and with merged layers. This simply allows you to pick and choose which layers you want to leave in or include and it will merge those layers together into once again in a single image file. With individual layers we can select which of these individual layers we want to import and they will import as their own individual still image files.

Select whichever you like import these and you can see when we import individual layers it creates a bin here with each of our individual layers as still image files.

Our last option here is sequence and once again as it sounds if we select sequence, we have the choice to select which layers we'd like to include or which the layers we'd like to leave out and when we import this as a sequence it's going to create a bin with all the individual layers as well as a sequence and it's going to instantly put each of our individual layers on their own track.so I've got my sequence here with all my Photoshop layers on their individual tracks.

Now this import as window will pop up and here's where I will tell you the two ways that I prefer to import you could do merge all layers or sequence. Preferably I like to do sequence which I'll cover here but merge all layers we'll treat it as if it were say a PNG file. There is a big difference between using a Photoshop file in a PNG and why I highly suggest using PSD / PNG is because of this in your sequence you could right-click and you could edit in Adobe Photoshop or you could edit original either of these is going to bring back up that Photoshop file.
Now let me show you the way that I prefer to import my photoshop files because I like the manipulation of being able to animate all of my different layers from my Photoshop file in Premiere Pro. Before I import into Premiere, I want to do a little pre-planning and make sure that the hierarchy of my layers is set to how I want them to animate in or how I'm going to be manipulating them in Premiere Pro.

The power of using a Photoshop file is that you can go back and you can change everything in the Photoshop file and then every single time you save a change in Photoshop it will update in Premiere Pro as opposed to PNG files where you would have to export one every single time if you needed to make a change so use PSD instead of PNG in my opinion.