How to Export PNG's for NFT's - Procreate and Photoshop

How's it going everyone? Today I'm going to be showing you how to export your PNGs for NFTs. In the first part of the video we're going to be in Procreate, then in the second part of the video we'll be hopping over to Photoshop and I'm going to show you how to export the files using actions. Stick around to the end of the video and I'll show you exactly how I organize my files to be generated into characters, and I'll talk a little bit about the rarities that you can use in your NFT. Let's get started! Let's talk about the size of your canvas. I'm working at 3000 by 3000 at 300 DPI. A lot of people work at different sizes. You can get away with working at 1500 by 1500. I like to work at 300 DPI just because I like to keep high-resolution files intact as much as possible. It just gives you more flexibility in the future, whether you're going to print or post it up online somewhere else. You want that high-quality look. So with that said, let's dive into Procreate. If you watched my last video, you saw how I drew Crunchy Cows. So this video is this is not going to show you how to draw these characters from scratch. This is going to assume that you already have your character drawn and you have all the parts in place with either within one Procreate file or within multiple files. What I like to do is break down each file, each character file into multiple body parts or multiple items. So I have Crunchy Cow hair, Crunchy Cow eyes, Crunchy Cow eyebrows, eyewear, mouths, hats, which it looks like a helmet, and mustaches. Nose rings, the food in front of the Crunchy Cows is an item. So I put everything into separate Procreate files. One, this allows me to name these files differently. So when I export the files, the files are already named Crunchy Cow Eyes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7. And all I have to do is just add a description after the eyes instead of having to rename the entire file. And I like to just have my items all in one Procreate file. So I can go through and I can use a template at the bottom of my Procreate file and I can just draw the eyes right on top. This is very simple to export from Procreate. There's not much to it. Once you have your file open, all you need to do is tap the wrench and tap the share icon, and then you're going to go down, scroll, don't choose PNG single, singular. I can't talk today. PNG single, uh, Export item, choose PNG files. It might take a second if you have a lot of files to, to export. So once you get the prompt, I usually AirDrop them to my MacBook. In order to generate these characters, you're going to need to have the files on your MacBook. You probably might be able to do it from an iPad, but I don't even want to bother with that. It seems like it'd be too much work. So I want to get all the files onto my MacBook Pro. So what I do is, is tap MacBook. All the PNGs will be sent over to my MacBook, and then I'll organize them into folders, and I'll show you how I do that at at the end of this video. Really quick before moving on, if you could hit that like and subscribe button, that would let me see that you want to see more videos and I could put more time and effort into creating these videos. And if you have any questions or comments, please drop them down below. I'll try to answer everyone and maybe even create videos based on them. This is the second way I'm going to show you to export your PNGs for NFTs. What we're going to do is we're going to send each one of these Procreate files over to my MacBook Pro, and then I'm going to open them in Photoshop and I'm going to export all of the layers as PNGs. There's a couple of workarounds you need to do in Photoshop, so I'll explain that when we get there. Here we are, I have all my Procreate files here. I'm just going to hit Select and I'm going to send over the files I want as Photoshop files to my MacBook. I'm just going to hit Share and choose PSD. This can take a while, my files are pretty large, so I will fast forward this part. Then we'll switch over from iPad to MacBook. So I have my Photoshop files over here. I'm— what I'm going to do is open up one of the Photoshop files. Let's go with the eyewear. I'm just going to double-click that. So you can see all the PNG files on the right-hand side. These are all the layers of the Photoshop file. I still have my template down below. I'm going to keep that on until I export. I'm going to merge these layers. Just use a Command-E to merge those layers. And I'm going to actually shrink the amount of layers here so it doesn't take too, too long in this video. So now we're just going to have, um, 6 layers here to export. The one thing to know is Photoshop does not let you export PNGs at 300 DPI. You need to do one little workaround, which is save each layer as a Photoshop file. And then we're going to reopen those Photoshop files and do a File, Save As PNG, and then you'll get a PNG at 300 DPI. So let me show you the size that we're working with here, 3000 by 3000 at 300 DPI. I'm going to go to File, Export. You know what, before I do this, I'm going to open up an action. Window, the— open up your Actions panel, and I'm going to go Save PSD. So what actions do is they record all of your steps and they allow you just hit one button and repeat those steps. So I'm going to go File, Export, Layers to Files. I'm going to select PSD, the eyewear setup. I'm going to create a new file, maybe on my desktop, call it eyewear, and we will run this. And all the layers that were selected are going to export, and that bottom layer probably will export too. I will hop over into that folder just to make sure it's good. Let me stop this action first. After you run an action, stop it. I may not need that action, but I wanted to capture it while I had it open. All right, let's see what's here. We have— now you can see these Photoshop files are 3000 by 3000 at 300 DPI. And then I'm going to delete this bottom layer because I don't need it. What I'm going to do is open up one of these Photoshop files. I'm going to record a new action. I'm going to go to File, Save As. Uh, the new Photoshop is a little bit weird. You can't select PNG in this dropdown menu. You have to select Save a Copy over here. Drives me crazy. I wish they never put that feature in there. I'm going to save that PNG. Let's save it as a large file. Then I'm going to close this file. I'm going to press Command-W to close this file, and I'm going to stop that action. Now I'm going to close out of this original file too. I'm going to go to File, Automate, Batch. I'm going to choose a folder. It's already this folder here, and I'm going to Make sure Override Action Save As Commands is checked. I'm going to run that. Oh, didn't choose a folder. This is my destination folder I need to choose. All right, I'm going to run this. Let's see if this works. Uh, high probability I did something wrong here and I'll have to do it again. If this worked, you'll see PSD files along with PNGs in the folder. Let's see, we do see PSDs, we do see PNGs. So now once I have that, I can delete all of my Photoshop files here. I'm actually going to delete this original copy that I made, and then I have high-resolution PNGs at 3000 by 3000 at 300 DPI. Now let me show you how that action can be extremely effective. I can bring over— let's, let's open up the hat file, the hat PSD file, and I'm going to delete a bunch of these layers just to speed it up. So now we have about 6 or 7 to export. My original action, which was Export Layers to Files, and let me just choose the location. Flying through this. So now we're going to export this, looks like as a double underscore. Going to run that action and I'm not even going to switch over to the folder. I'm just going to go to automate batch. And I could have, I could have just put all of my Photoshop files into one layer or one folder first and just run this action one time. I just did that in that first set to show you how to set up the action, but Once you have that action set up, I would put all your Photoshop files in that one folder and just do this action once. So now I can just, let's go to Automate, Batch. I guess I have to choose a folder, which I did. And then, uh, let's see. I think I have that set up. Now I'm going to run this action and it's going to export out. It's going to turn all these Photoshop files back into PNG. So here's number 6. Here's number 6. You can see there's a little bit of a color difference between the PSD and the PNG. That's totally fine. So now I have all those files exported out and I'm just going to delete all these Photoshop files and we'll be good to go. So to recap, send your Procreate files to your MacBook Pro, open those Photoshop files, export all the layers as Photoshop files, and then create an action to open those Photoshop files and export all those PNG files. I'm I'm highly aware of how complicated that just sounded, but hopefully you can go back and rewatch this video if you need to do it. Actions are super powerful. They save me a ton of time, and I hope they will save you a ton of time. All right, so now that we've talked about how to export files from Procreate and from Photoshop, let me show you how I set up my PNGs to be generated into NFTs. Here we are on a MacBook. I have all my PNG files exported, and I have them organized into these layers. Each one of these folders is going to become a layer group in nftgenerator.art. So I like to keep my folders named exactly as I would set them up on the NFT generator. So you'll see I have background, clothing, color, earrings, eyebrows. Every single item that I think will need to change is going to be— is going to have its own folder group. So let's dive into each one of these folders. I have 4 separate folders for common, rare, super rare, and uncommon. While I'm setting these up on the NFT generator, this makes it easy for me to drag and drop all these PNGs at once. And set the rarity. So then I would do that, I would drag and drop the commons over, drag and drop the rares over, and building the characters becomes a pretty easy thing. It's pretty quick to do when your folders are organized exactly like you're going to set up the character on the NFT generator. Now the only thing that these aren't organized by is how they will stack up and layer in front of each other. And on the NFT generator, you're going to need to create the backmost layer on top and the foreground layer on the bottom., and then you're going to have to work out your layers in between to make sure there aren't any strange overlaps in your character design. So that wraps up how to export your PNGs for NFTs. Thank you so much for watching, and I will see you next time.