I recently purchased a Photoshop add-on called Storyboard by Code and Hustle, a company based out of Canada. What Storyboard does is it creates diptychs out of multiple images to create a storyboard style blog post. Pretty much all of my session blog posts are in this format, so as you can imagine, I do this a lot. I had been using a template combined with some custom photoshop actions to create my storyboards previously but this was very time consuming.
I finally decided to take the plunge to purchase Storyboard and it was brilliant. It cut my storyboarding time by a significant amount. The only thing it couldn’t do out of the box was add a watermark logo during the diptych creating process. I would have to go back in to the finished diptychs and add the logo after the fact. Not efficient enough for me. After tweaking around and creating my own watermarking action, I was able to add it to the Storyboard process so it creates my final product in one fell swoop. The following is a step-by-step guide on how to do it:
The first step is to create a new Photoshop action in the Actions window. I’ve created a folder for some of my custom actions that are used frequently.
Next, name the action. In this case I’ve chosen to name it appropriately as “Storyboard Watermark.” Once you select Record, you can begin creating the action.
All you have to do is have an image open already in Photoshop and drag and drop your watermark from your watermark folder onto the open image. This creates a “Place” action that will remember the folder location and the name of the file you placed, in this case I use my logos folder. Click the Stop icon to stop recording the action. Next, select the “Toggle dialog on/off” switch on the “Place” row in your action.
This tells Photoshop to pause the action and to wait for your input. Doing so allows me to select one of my different logos on the fly if I need to. More specifically, it allows me to select between my black logo and my white one for each diptych. You’re done!
In the Storyboard Configuration window under the General tab, check the “Run the following action before saving” checkbox. Then navigate to the appropriate Action Set and select your watermark action.
This is what it looks like when you run Storyboard with the action activated. It first allows you to select any file to use as a watermark. I use transparent PNG’s and have different iterations of my logo. The action allows you to resize and move the logo. Once you hit Enter, Storyboard finishes the process and creates your final image.
Ta Da! This action works great with Storyboard’s Loop mode which is exactly what I needed, a fast and easy way to crank out a blog post. I would say it’s cut down my time from about 20 minutes to compile a blog using my old combination of templates and actions to about 3 minutes. I just export the individual images from Lightroom into a folder and then use Storyboard to process them all. Easy peezy.
