Layout templates

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Layout templates

I am starting to think in making some .layered layout templates - I never made them before. My first doubts are: Can you just leave shapes as shapes, or need to rasterize them or so? Should I add shadows on template, or it´s better to let the person shadow by him/herself?

Also, in case I deceide to share my templates, people would like to have them in other format apart of .psd? I mean, can a template on png or jpeg be useful for someone?

I tend to make my own templates for layouts (enjoy the challenge). When I save the template, I always save it as is without any shadowing. When it's basic, you can do so many different things vs. being locked into one look (when you save it as a .psd you can always turn off layer effects, but it can be time consuming).

I personally prefer .psd because I have photoshop. When templates are png files, it means more work to separate the different layers. It's doable, but so much quicker and easier when the layers are already separated. I'm interested to see what other people think about this...especially people who don't use photoshop.

What Janet explains in this quote below is why I won't download anything but a psd. template. I use to download tiffs... but have found that some people weren't saving them correctly and then it required work on my part, too. I download templates to make my job scrapping easier and if I have to put too much time into making it work in PhotoShop, I might as well just start from scratch. just my two cents on the subject. The only thing I do that takes no time for me but saves space is my own conversion to tiff from psd to save space on my HD. But I created an action that I can run on an entire folder and it takes me 10 seconds to open the action and hit play. So, that's not much investment for saving almost 1/2 the space of a psd.

Quote:
I personally prefer .psd because I have Photoshop. When templates are png files, it means more work to separate the different layers. It's doable, but so much quicker and easier when the layers are already separated.

As far as shadowing... I like shadowing or layers styles etc... because usually I learn from the designers expertise if I truly love how it looks. I can see what their setting are. But that's how I learn to do what I like. so, that's not a major requirement.