615 Exporting a multipage PDF from Photoshop CC

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Now as you may recall, last week I showed you how to create a low-resolution Photoshop document that contains a total of 17 artboards. The problem with this is you can't really print the document, because, for one thing, it's low-resolution, it doesn't contain enough pixels, and the print dialogue box inside Photoshop is not sensitive to artboards, and you can only print one page at a time. Which is why this week, I'm going to show you how to take that document and export it as a high-resolution, multi-page PDF file that you can print any old time you like.

Alright, here's that 17 page document created inside Photoshop CC, that documents every single one of Photoshop's nearly 400 shortcuts. Specifically where this document is concerned, for the Mac. Now, if you have access to the exercise files and you're working along with me, make sure that you've loaded up my font One-on-One Micro. Thereby indicating that it's an open type font, that's compatible with either the Mac or the PC, and it contains these characters right here, incidentally, and this is all live, editable type.

Alright, now let's switch over to that shortcuts file, and incidentally, if upon opening this file, Photoshop alerts you to update your text layers, definitely do so before you try to export the document as a PDF file. Alright now, I want to zoom in on this top right artboard, so I'll switch over to the layers panel here, and I'll press the ALT key, or the Option key on the Mac, and click on this fourth artboard down. And then, I'll just go ahead and zoom in on it as well, so that we can see that this file is looking pretty jagged on screen.

And that's because it's limited to a resolution of 72 pixels per inch, and that's just the basic nature of Photoshop. It's always converting its layers to pixels on the fly. But, in point of fact, every single layer inside of this document is either vector based text, or a vector based shape layer, which means everything's going to export to PDF just fine. And to make that happen, go up to the file menu, choose export, and then choose this command right here, Artboards to PDF, which, if you loaded my custom Deke Keys shortcuts a few weeks ago, itself has a shortcut of Control + Shift + Alt + p here on a PC, or Command + Shift + Option + p on the Mac.

Now there's not much to do inside this dialogue box, just need to make sure that you light the file name, and the reason it says prefix is because Photoshop's going to add a .pdf extension. You may also want to browse to a different folder. However, I'm going to leave both of these options as is. Now you want to select this second radio button, Artboard Content Only, which is going to turn off the top one, and that way you're just going to export the stuff that falls inside the artboards, which in the case of this file, is everything. And then you want to turn off this Track box.

If you leave it turned on, Export Selected Artboards, then you're just going to export the one artboard and nothing more. So, I'll go ahead and turn that checkbox off. There is no background, so you don't need to worry about that one. Now, we definitely want a multi-page document as oppose to an independent file for every artboard. So go ahead and leave that option selected. Where this file is concerned, I found that you get a smaller file size if you select ZIP, as oppose to JPG. But if there were any pixel-based imagery inside the file, then JPG would provide the better compression.

In our case there are no pixels, so I'll select ZIP. You might as well include the ICC profile, which conveys the color settings. And I also want to include the artboard names, and that way, every single one of our artboards will have a title, and that title will be the names that we see here inside the layers panel. So the first page will be Command Letters, the second one, Command Shift Letter, and so on. Now when your turn this checkbox on right here, notice that you get some formatting settings. I went ahead and set the font to Myriad Pro Bold at 30 points.

The canvas extension, which is going to be the color of the extra canvas that Photoshop adds, should be white, and we want the text to be black. At which point go ahead and click the Run button, in order to start the process. Now, this is quite the script. If you take a look at what's happening over there in the layers panel, you can see that Photoshop is automatically assembling new layers on the fly. Now this process does take a minute or two. Now toward the end of the process, you'll see that Photoshop is adding an even boundary around the entire document, and it's placing the title up in that top area, which is going to create a little bit of a design problem, as we'll see in just a moment.

Now once the process finishes, you should see this script alert that's telling you that the Artboards to PDF command ran successfully. In which case, just go ahead and click OK to dismiss the message. Alright, now go ahead and open up that folder, at which point we can see this new file, dekeKeys for PSCC Mac.pdf. And when I double click on it, it just happened to open up inside Acrobat Pro, which if you have access to that program, allows us to edit the file. Which is going to prove to be very useful.

And so I'm going to go up to the view menu, choose Show/Hide, choose Navigation Panes, and then choose this command right here, Show Navigation Pane. But, in my opinion, it's so much easier to remember the keyboard shortcut F4, than to remember where this command is located. And that's going to bring up these page thumbnails. Now notice if I zoom out by clicking on this Fit in Window command, that the page isn't balanced very well, and that's because, whereas this text down here at the bottom is something I actually created inside Photoshop and I kept it tight to the bottom of the artboard as well, the title is something that Photoshop added automatically and it placed it inside that margin area.

And that means we need to add some room at the top and subtract some space at the bottom. And I'm going to do that by clicking on this Options icon and choosing Crop Pages, and I want to expand the page by dropping down to this Change Page Size area, and selecting Custom. Now, notice that currently the page measures 9.9 by 12 and a half, whatever. The problem is, if you try to enter 9.903, and you do have to enter a value here that's at least as wide as the document is currently, but if you enter 9.903, notice that it rounds down to 9.9, which is going to cause this process to fail.

So what we need to do instead, is take it up a little bit to 10 inches, let's say, and now I'm going to increase the height value to 13.2 inches, happens to work nicely, and then I'll turn off the Center checkbox, so that the page drops down a little bit. We want to affect all the pages in the document, so go ahead and set page range to All, and then click OK, and that's going to expand the page like so. So even though the difference might not be that perceivable, we do have some additional room up here at the top of the page, and I'd love to show it to you by choosing Undo, but that command is dimmed, for reasons that only the Acrobat team understands.

Alright, now what we need to do is crop away the bottom of the page, which is something we have to do in a separate operation, by returning to that same Crop Pages command. And now I'm going to crop the margins by clicking this up arrow a few times, next to the bottom value, to take it up to 0.375 inches, like so, and that will crop away the bottom of the page, at which point I'll once again set the page range to All, and click OK, and we end up with this much improved effect here.

And now, you can go to the file menu, and choose the Save command, in order to update your PDF file. And that friends, is how you export a multi-page PDF file from Photoshop CC, as well as how you adjust the page margins here inside Acrobat Pro. Alright now, I think it's great that Adobe is constantly updating Photoshop CC, but I also realize that not everybody has access to that version of the program, which is why next week I'm going to show you a trick that's old as the hills.

It works in any version of Photoshop out there, and that's how to create a seamlessly repeating tile pattern. So you can see that we have these repeating elements here using the clouds filter. But of course, there's a trick to it. So don't try it without me. Deke's Techniques, each and every week. Keep watching.