At some point during your work on a storyboard image, you may find that you want to do something that would be easy in your favorite dedicated bitmap graphics editor (like Photoshop, Corel Draw, Paint Shop Pro, The GIMP, etc.) but difficult in Springboard. Just for these situations, Springboard supports editing a bitmap layer in an external program. You can use the features you're used to in your graphics editor while still benefiting from Springboard's storyboard structure.

The steps in the process are:

1. Configure external editing in the Edit > Preferences dialog, on the Edit  Images tab. Test it with the Test button on that tab before continuing.
2. Select the layer you want to edit externally.
3. Do Layer > Edit Externally.
4. Edit the image in the external editor, and save it.
5. Return to Springboard. The frame will update automatically to show the changes to the layer.
6. When you are done, do Layer > Finish Editing Externally in Springboard to finish.

Troubleshooting External Editing

• You cannot edit vector layers externally. You can Merge them to another  bitmap layer and then edit that bitmap layer externally.
• If you get an error message like "A device attached to the system is not functioning" when you try to edit an image using the Test button in the Preferences dialog, Windows may not be configured correctly to edit the specified image type. Try changing the options in the Preferences dialog - some applications are set up to do Open properly but not Edit, or have Open and Edit set up properly for Windows Bitmap files but not Truevision Targa files. If changing these options doesn't work, you can try specifying the command line directly in the Preferences dialog by selecting the "With this command line:" radio button, browsing for the program file, and adding any necessary command-line arguments. (This requires detailed understanding of the way your graphics editor works.)
• If you find that a spot-color layer looks black in an external application, this may be because the layer uses transparency in a way that your graphics editor does not interpret correctly. Try viewing and editing alpha channels instead of RGB channels (these are the terms for Photoshop; the exact names may differ in other products).
• Another option that may simplify working with transparency is to use Layer > Matte-In Transparency to discard a layer's transparency information before editing that layer externally. If transparency is important for that particular layer, this won't be helpful, but for many layers, transparency isn't important. Note that Layer > Matte-In Transparency only works on full-color layers, so you would have to change a spot-color to full-color first using Layer > Convert To Full Color.