Software Articles

March 6, 2011

Benefits Of Using Layers In Adobe InDesign

Filed under: InDesign — Tags: , , , , — admin @ 9:58 pm

Several programs within the Adobe Creative Suite have a layers feature: Photoshop, Flash, Illustrator and InDesign. Their function differs from program to program but, in general, the use of layers serves to offer flexibility of composition. Items of related content can be placed on their own individual layers. Layers can then be made visible or hidden or can be locked to prevent their content being changed. Equally, the stacking order of layers can be changed to determine which elements are displayed in front of which other elements. Layers are not always necessary when creating a publication in InDesign, but they can beneficial in several situations.

Intricate page layouts often require the creation and complex manipulation of many different InDesign elements. This process can sometimes be made much easier by placing elements on a series of layers.

Perhaps the most common reason for using layers is where you need to produce several different versions of a publication. For example, there may be one version of a catalogue for in-house use and another for clients; or you may need to create different language versions of the same document.

Layers are also useful where certain page elements take a long time to redraw. For example, if you’re creating a large poster with a high resolution background image, you may find it useful to place it on a separate layer and hide the layer when you are working on other elements.

Since layers can be made none-printing simply by hiding them, it is also possible to use layers to store text and other elements which are relevant to the publication but are not to be included in the final version. Such layers could also be used for comments and reminders and can simply be deleted once the publication has been completed.

Another trick is to use layers for creating a document by using a similar publication as a template. A full sized scan of the original document can be placed on a locked background layer and used to ensure that each part of the layout is in the right place, has the right dimensions and so forth.

PowerPoint users often complain that elements placed the slide master will always be behind elements placed on the slides. Whilst the same if true of InDesign master page elements, using layers allows to overcome this fact. Simply place all those items which need to be front-most on a separate layer and move that layer to the top of the heap.

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November 24, 2010

Understanding Photoshop’s Marquee Selection Tool Features

Filed under: Photoshop — Tags: , , , , — admin @ 11:28 pm

Adobe Photoshop’s Marquee tool is one of the three tools which are used to make selections, the other two being the Lasso and Magic Wand. It is perhaps the most basic of the three, allowing you to make a rectangular or elliptical selection on any part of the image. As with all of the other selection tools, it can be used to make both new selections and to modify existing selections. To choose the marquee shape you wish to create, simply click on the tool and hold the mouse button down until the flyout menu appears then choose either “Rectangular” or “Elliptical”.

If you are making a new selection, the modifier keys can be used to determine the behaviour the tool. If the Shift key is held down while you drag to describe the selection, the resulting selection will either be a circle or a rectangle. If you hold down the Alt key while creating the shape, the shape will be drawn outward from the point you initially click on. Naturally, you can use these two keys in combination to draw a circle or square from the centre.

Similarly, if there is an existing selection in place, you can use the same two modifier keys to determine how the selection you make will interact with the existing selection. This time, Shift is used to add to a section while Alt is used to subtract from the selection. Thus, for example, if you want to make a semi-circular selection, you could start by making a circular selection with the elliptical Marquee tool. You could then switch to the rectangular Marquee tool, hold down the Alt key and draw a rectangle which intersects one half of the circle. The area where the two shapes intersect will be subtracted from the selection.

The behaviour of the Marquee tool can be modified in the options toolbar. You can switch from Normal mode to Constrained or Fixed Size. Thus, for example, if you were creating a series of images which all need to have a 4 by 3 aspect ratio, you could choose the Constrained option and enter 4 for the with and 3 for the height. Each selection you make with the Marquee tool will then automatically have this shape.

As well as the elliptical and rectangular shape, the Marquee tool flyout menu also allows you to choose “Single Row” and “Single Column”. In this mode, simply clicking on any part of the image creates a selection one pixel high or wide going right across the image. If you zoom in, you can hold down the Shift key and click again to make it two pixels, three pixels, etc This mode is sometimes useful when restoring old photographs to select a crease in the original photograph prior to using the cloning tools to remove the flaw.

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November 11, 2010

Why Invest In Photoshop Training

Filed under: Computers — Tags: , , — admin @ 12:43 am

Beginning to use Photoshop without Photoshop training can be a frustrating experience. I had my first “hands-on” experience with Photoshop in 1995. It was one of the most rewarding and frustrating experiences in my life. I was producing a feature-length animated film for our independent start-up company in Merida, Mexico. We were developing this project with amazing talent-that was the rewarding part of the experience.

It was the first time that I found myself part of a project that relied on digital editing and compositing. Some of the people I worked with and got to know at that time were major talents in the world of high-end digital solutions-people who had risen to top positions at Apple Computer and Silicon Graphics. And then there were the whiz kids just out of college who could do anything you could imagine on a Macintosh computer running Adobe Photoshop. Just watching them use Photoshop to color animation frames in a fraction of the time it would have taken to paint the frames by hand was a great learning experience for me. I had the opportunity to watch people with amazing talent do amazing things with Adobe Photoshop. But when I sat down and started playing around with Photoshop, trying to emulate the simplest effects I had seen others create so effortlessly, I quickly ran into trouble. I didn’t take the time to seek out any sort of Photoshop training; I learned to get by with simpler design software.

I did what was necessary for my text presentations, but I gave up dreaming that I’d ever be able to do anything myself with Photoshop. Like many people, I decided that Photoshop was too deep for me-I wasn’t a graphic designer or visual effects artist anyway, so I saw no need to sign up for Photoshop training. And like most people, I thought that Photoshop training was only for those who wanted to turn their Photoshop skills into a career path. I didn’t have time for it, I didn’t really need it, so I crossed “Photoshop training” off my wish list and went on to other things. That was a big mistake.

It wasn’t too long ago that I was forced to realize-after all these years-how badly I need to learn enough digital editing and compositing to create better graphics and videos for the Internet. Just a hobby to begin with-I told myself-but something that has been in the back of my mind ever since I crossed “Photoshop training” off of my wish list. I had mastered the simpler software and gotten as much out of it as I was going to get. There is only one program in the world that can let me do what I want to do with photos and video-Photoshop. It’s time for me to get serious about Photoshop training.

I hope you’ll decide to get serious about Photoshop training, too. It’s one of the best investments you can make-even if you only want to get the most out of your photos and Internet videos.

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April 10, 2010

How To Transform Adobe Photoshop Selections

Filed under: Computers — Tags: , , , , , — Chris Mason @ 7:42 am

Selections are a big deal in Adobe Photoshop. If your boss says to you, “Can we cut out this person and put them against a different background?”, there is no way that you can tell the program to do this. As far as a computer is concerned, your image is just a series of pixels. How easy or difficult it is to select the person will depend on how much contrast there is between them (or more likely their clothes) and the background scene behind them.

Having made an initial selection, you will often need to transform it in some way. Photoshop selections can be transformed in a manner not dissimilar to the way that objects are transformed in the vector environment. One key thing to remember is that in order for this transformation to work, one of the selection tools has to be active. If the Move tool is active, the pixels inside the selection will also be transformed.

The simplest form of transformation is movement. This can be done either by placing the cursor inside the selection and dragging or by using one of the cursor keys on the keyboard. Each time a cursor key is pressed, the selection will move one pixel in the direction specified. If the Shift key is held down while a cursor key is pressed, the selection will move 10 pixels in the given direction.

For other forms of transformation, choose Transform Selection from the Select menu. A bounding rectangle will then be displayed around the selection with handles similar to those found in vector drawing programs. You can drag the handles to resize the selection or drag just outside the handles to rotate. You can even hold down the Control key and drag the handles to distort your selection.

As well as these manual transformations, Photoshop’s Select menu also contains a number of automatic transformation commands. One of the most commonly used is feathering: Select – Feather. Feathering blurs the edges of a selection enabling the selected area to blend into the non-selected parts of the image. To access the other options go to the Select – Modify sub-menu. For example, the command Select-Modify-Expand allows you to increase the size of the selection by the number of pixels you specify. Naturally, there is also the reverse command: Select-Modify-Contract.

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August 21, 2009

Using The Book Command In Adobe InDesign

Filed under: InDesign — Tags: , , , , , , — admin @ 6:11 am

When you choose New from the File menu in Adobe InDesign, you may have noticed the option to create a new book without ever knowing exactly what a book is. Well, in fact, books are a fairly nifty feature: they allow you to take a series of related InDesign document and treat them as a single entity; a book. All documents in the book can then share resources such as paragraph and character styles, colour swatches, master pages, sections and page numbering.

Having created a book, by choosing File-New-Book, the Book panel is displayed. It contains a panel menu with all the necessary options. The first task is to add documents to the book: from the Book panel menu, choose “Add Document” and select the documents you want to be treated as part of the book.

The book file can now be saved. The book is a separate entity to the documents it contains and the documents in a book do not have to reside in the same location as the book or as each other. To save the book, choose Save Book in the Book panel menu.

Next specify which of the documents in the book will be treated as the style source. The document elected as the style source will be used as the master document in the process known as synchronization whereby InDesign replaces the colour swatches and styles of all documents in the book with those in the style source document.

To control page numbering across the whole book, choose Book Page Numbering Options in the Book panel menu. The default behaviour is “Automatically Update Page & Section Numbers”: this will number pages in the documents within the book according to the order in which they are listed in the Book panel.

You can replace an existing chapter of a book with another InDesign document by simply selecting an existing book chapte and choosing Replace Document from the panel menu. Next, navigate to the replacement document and double-click to select it. InDesign will then replace the selected chapter with the new document. Deleting chapters from a book is equally straightforward. Just highlight the chapter(s) and choose Remove Document from the panel menu, or click the Remove Document icon at the bottom of the Book panel.

Books are a great tool for division of labour since the fact that a document is part of a book does not stop it from being a regular InDesign document. If a book contains five documents, five different people can work on each of those documents and then, at the end, the whole book can be preflighted, printed and output as PDF as a single unit.

Both tables of contents and indexes can also be generated for an entire book as well as for a single document. Simply create the table of contents or index in the normal way but activate the option “Include Book Documents”.

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