Work with Photoshop and Premiere

If you use Photoshop to create still images, you can use Premiere to make them move and change. You can animate an entire image or any of its layers.

You can edit individual frames of video and image sequence files in Photoshop. In addition to using any Photoshop tool to edit and paint on video, you can also apply filters, masks, transformations, layers styles, and blending modes. You can paint using the Clone Stamp, Pattern Stamp, Healing Brush, or Spot Healing Brush. You can also edit video frames using the Patch tool.

In Photoshop, with the Clone Stamp, you can sample a frame from a video layer and paint with the sampled source onto another video frame. As you move to different target frames, the source frame changes relative to the frame from which you initially sampled.

After making edits, you can save the video as a PSD file, or you can render it as a QuickTime movie or image sequence. You can import any of this back into Premiere for further editing.

If you use Premiere to create movies, you can use Photoshop to refine the individual frames of those movies. In Photoshop, you can do any of the following:

• Remove unwanted visual elements.
• Draw on individual frames.
• Use the superior selection and masking tools to divide a frame into elements for animation or compositing.

Comparative advantages for specific tasks

The strengths of Premiere lie in its numerous video editing features. You can use it to combine Photoshop files with video clips, audio clips, and other assets. You can use the Photoshop files, for example, as titles, graphics, and masks.

In contrast, Photoshop has excellent tools for painting, drawing, and selecting portions of an image. The Photoshop Quick Selection tool and Magnetic Lasso tool make it easy to create a mask from a complex shape. Rather than hand-drawing a mask in Premiere, consider doing this work in Photoshop. Similarly, if you are applying several paint strokes by hand to get rid of dust, consider using the Photoshop paint tools.

The animation and video features in Photoshop Extended include simple keyframe-based animation. Premiere, however, provides quite a bit more keyframe control over various properties.

• Exchanging still images: Premiere can import and export still images in many formats. For greatest versatility, however, use the native Photoshop PSD format when transferring individual frames or still image sequences from Photoshop to Premiere. When you import a PSD file into Premiere, you can choose whether to import it as a flattened image, or with its layers separate and intact. It is often a good idea to prepare a still image in Photoshop before importing it into Premiere. Examples of such preparation include correcting color, scaling, and cropping. It is often better to change a source image in Photoshop than to have Premiere perform the same operation many times per second as it renders each frame for previews or final output.

In Photoshop, you can create a PSD document that is set up correctly for a specific video output type. From the New File dialog box, select a Film & Video preset. In Premiere, you can create a PSD document that matches your composition and sequence settings.

• Exchanging movies: You can no longer exchange PSD video files with Photoshop, however, you can render a movie directly from Photoshop and then import it back into Premiere. For example, you can create a QuickTime movie from Photoshop that can then be imported into Premiere.
• Color: Premiere works internally with colors in an RGB (red, green, blue) color space. If you want to edit video clips you create in Photoshop in Premiere, create the clips in RGB.

If you want to broadcast the final movie it is best to ensure, in Photoshop, that the colors in your image are broadcast-safe. Assign the appropriate destination color space—for example, SDTV (Rec. 601)—to the document in Photoshop.

Create and edit Photoshop files

You can create a still Photoshop file that automatically inherits the pixel and frame aspect ratio settings of your Premiere project. You can also edit any still image file in a Premiere project in Photoshop.

Create a Photoshop file in a project

Edit a still image file in Photoshop

From within a project, you can open an image file in most formats that Adobe Photoshop supports. Premiere does not import files in CMYK or LAB color formats.