Dividing a canvas into regions with photoshop?

Question

I'm working on a CD foldup for a friend and it's a tri-folded 12cm by 36cm sheet printed on both sides. It creates six 12cm by 12cm pages, but I'm not sure how to work on it in photoshop. Should I create two different documents, both 12cm by 36cm, one for each side, or a single 24cm by 36cm to have every page on it?

I currently have the first page as a single 12cm by 12cm document because I didn't want to run into the other page at all.

Is there any way I can have a large canvas but confine myself to part of it? Something more reliable than just a selection please.

Answer 1

To answer your specific question: You can simply do that with a guide in the middle. And keeping all layers in Folders. But I would strongly recommend to do both sides extra.

You should also add an inside margin since you are going to fold it. Otherwise you'll fall short on the 2nd fold and everything looks uneven.

Answer 2

You could do this in more ways. One manner of working could be to have your first page in a group of layers and lock this group. Perhaps add on top of it a locked, halftransparent white layer to make visible that this page is locked. Then use a set of guidelines to help position your pagecontent. To force yourself to work only in the other part of the document, you could apply a layermask on the new working layers. succes!

Answer 3

I'd ask the printer. Chances are they'd like a PDF with trim and registration marks. So that's one PDF per page, or a two paged PDF. You can still use Photoshop to create the PDF. Also, make sure it's CMYK, if that's how it's being printed (it sounds likely that you don't have special colours or other plates).

The printer will be the best person to answer the question though.