Storyboard “ROCKS”

On December 20th, after much fanfare from the beta version, Storyboard was born. Mainly developed out of necessity (which I’m digging by the way), Storyboard brings the power of Photoshop scripts into the hands of photographers of all levels. It’s an amazing little script that makes my life so much easier. I’ve never made storyboards this fast! You’ll need at least Photoshop CS4 to make this work smoothly. I use Photoshop CS5 and it works like magic! I’m not kidding! The authors and developers did mention on their site that it can work in Photoshop CS3 with some minor tweaks. And at a low introductory price of $59, it’s hard not to think twice about getting it. It’s BRILLIANT!

Before I found Storyboard, I used Photoshop templates created by my wife, Melissa, in Illustrator. A typical storyboard, using the templates, would take me anywhere between 10-20 minutes per board! Even though there are a higher number of images that can fit in our Illustrator templates, it was still quite labor intensive. Here’s a sample post that I created a few months ago using the Illustrator templates. The entire storyboard post took about well over an hour to create as I had to drag each image into the template and modify them. Here’s a sample of how the templates looked like:

Setup is quite easy. Once it’s saved in the Scripts folder of Photoshop, you’ll simply need to run configuration setup and that’s it. The screen shots below are really easy to understand. It takes a little less than a couple of minutes to configure Storyboard and you’re off and running doing what you do best – presenting your images to the world.

The configuration screen has a wonderful feature – a Blog Width Appearance. This means this will work for any sized blog. My blog is set to 900px currently but there are times when I change it to 960px so I’ve set mine to crop the storyboard at 960px. It’s totally effortless. While there are no actions indicated on the screen shot, I’ve since configured it to run a “Save For Web” action to minimize the file size of my storyboards.

I truly believe that Storyboard has great potential and photographers like myself will find it incredibly useful. My workflow for blog posts have changed overnight. It saves me time and money and the end product is beautiful! I created the storyboard below in less than one minute! The images are over 100mb each at full resolution which were directly exported from Lightroom 3 and brought into Photoshop CS5. I’m at a loss for words! It is simply amazing!

I have to admit that once I started running the script, I felt giddy… much like a kid in a candy store.

The simple and easy to use script for Photoshop, that makes laying out images on your blog the fastest thing since a cheetah on steroids! No more using templates, resizing and dragging photos around.Storyboard does this all automagically with just one click.