How Photoshop CS4 Saved the Day

When I first learned about Photoshop’s ability to import and edit video files (introduced in CS3), I had the same initial reaction as most people that I tell about this feature: “That’s cool, but why would you want to?” After all, Photoshop is for photos; it’s the premier image editing software, not the premier video editing software – that’s what After Effects is for, right?

I deal mostly in Flash and in photography, so I filed this nugget of information far away in the back of my mind. It wasn’t long before I was presented with a challenge that this feature solved handily. I was at work (at Deutsch, my 9-to-5), when a producer came up to me in a panic. Apparently, some copy in an intro video for a site we were building for Alzheimer’s sufferers and their caregivers needed to be edited, but we didn’t have the source After Effects files in-house (the video was produced by a motion graphics firm), and even if we did, we didn’t have an AE guru on hand to make the changes.

Photoshop made short work of editing the text on this video file

I was about to tell the already distraught producer that being an After Effects neophyte, I couldn’t help her, when I remembered Photoshop CS4. I opened the video file in Photoshop, and after copying  a clean section of the background texture onto a new layer, inserting a few keyframes and new text layers here and there, I had the finished, re-exported video file done in less than an hour. The producer was happy, money and time were saved, and the site is now live at exelonpatch.com.

It was all incredibly easy, and I’ll give a more detailed walkthrough of exactly how I did this in a future tutorial.