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October
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Archives
October 11, 2005
Elemental!
With the recent release of Photoshop Elements 4, it was time to reaquaint myself with this excellent program. What amazing value you get with Photoshop Elements! For tutorials of the latest features have a look what Philip Andrews has put together.
Anyone with a digitial camera and thousands of unsorted, unfixed family photos will love this application. Automatic red-eye removal on import, realistic skin tones, face tagging, Magic Selection Brush... cool!
Steve
October 10, 2005
Fear of Scripting
On the surface scripting applications such as InDesign and Photoshop sounds pretty scary. The thing that really turned me on to scripting and therefore overcome my fear, was a calendar script I came across on the Adobe Share Studio. The original (I believe) was created by Jan Suhr then adapted by Robert Cornelius. It automates the generation of a calendar using tables, character and paragraphs styles, for an excellent result. With InDesign CS came the ability to write a user interface to scripts. I went to work to add a front end dialog to this script, making it a little easier to use. With a few adaptions and a translation into JavaScript, to make it cross platform, this is great example for how scripting can avoid repetitive, boring tasks.
There is a wealth of information available regarding scripting Creative Suite applications such as InDesign. There are dedicated user forums for scripting the Creative Suite 2 applications.
I have seen some amazing uses of scripting including Shane Stanleys' AppleScript that would take all the Photoshop images in an InDesign document, crop, rotate (if necessary), resize, rename and replace, optimised for the layout. Brilliant!
InDesign CS2 now can access image Metadata via scripting - meaning metadata such as photographers name and photo caption can be retrieved from the image and placed into your layout.
The possibilities are endless.
Regards
Steve
October 06, 2005
DG Portfolio is looking for imagery...
The Design Graphics Porfolio issue has come of age and is now its own stand-alone publication to be known as DG Portfolio.
As before, DG Portfolio will showcase a wide range of images from around the world. The search is on for top flight graphic design, digital illustration, photography, image manipulation, new media, computer graphics, packaging, logos, fonts and typography, 3D, television graphics, television comemrcials, movie titles and effects... this is a great opportunity for exposing your work to a broad audience.
Entries close 31 October.
For more information or enquiries http://www.designgraphics.com.au or portfolio@designgraphics.com.au
October 04, 2005
Long Document Features in InDesign
In our recent Auckland, Sydney and Melbourne InDesign presentations we were able to spend more time focusing on some of the excellent long document features of InDesign. Of course it is always hard to take in all the information presented.
The following links are to tutorials for some of the long document features such as creating a book, automatic Table of Contents generation, Index generation, using Layout Adjustment as well as search and replace to format text.
Regards
Steve
October 02, 2005
Synchronised text in InDesign
Do you need synchronised text in InDesign? Anne-Marie Concepcion shows us how.
PS do you want the Adobe Blogs to appear in your Bridge Center? Copy and paste http://blogs.adobe.com/index.xml into your RSS Reader in Bridge Center.
Typography
Typography is a relatively recent interest of mine. Despite producing documents of varying sizes for many years, type was a means to an end. Now I know why, I didn't have the right tools at my disposal. Without formal training in traditional typesetting I didn't know what I was missing.
InDesign and OpenType changed all that. I now have easy access to designed small caps, beautiful swash characters, fractions, amongst many OpenType features. If you are wondering what I am talking about, have a look at the Glyphs palette under the Type menu in InDesign. Choose one of the many OpenType Pro fonts that comes with the Creative Suite 2, then scroll through the many glyphs that make up a typical OpenType font.
The Adobe web site of course has a number of interesting type topics. It was only recently that I discovered the ampersand is a designed E and T representing the latin 'et' meaning 'and'. For an excellent overview of type go to Thomas Phinney's "A Brief History of Type".
InDesign will set beautiful type, if we let it! My typical workflow is to start with my body font and column width, flow in some dummy text, then work the justification and hyphenation settings until I am happy with the overall look of the text. The Adobe Paragraph Composer does an excellent job with line endings. My aim is to minimise any manual work I have to do to paragraphs.
Using this method I have managed to get away with leaving hyphenation on in corporate documents – no mean feat when most corporate clients are led to believe hyphenation is evil.
Photoshop and Illustrator CS2 of course also support OpenType. Russell Brown has an excellent tutorial on his site.
So if you have not discovered OpenType yet, hopefully I have wet your appetite!