InDesign guides all over your beautiful design? Photoshop and Illustrator have a Clear Guides menu item, but not Indesign.
Why, I have no idea, but I do know how to clear them quickly. Make sure the guides are unlocked and the layers the guides are on are also unlocked.
Win: CTRL+ALT+g
Mac: CMD+OPT+g
Now all your guides are selected, hit delete.
Fabio Sasso of Abduzeedo writes up a nifty tutorial on combining vector elements in Photoshop. Personally I think the end result is uber-busy student work, but the techniques in the article are more important than the final result.
Vector Effects [Abduzeedo]
Oh boy, you’ve likely seen this once in your career, and with luck it on was on color proof and not at the press check. Black on Black. 100% Black on Rich or Super Black (Black with CMY added to darken it more). Most cases of these coming up is because you weren’t paying attention to the black background of a photo edited photoshop and you forgot to match the black in Indesign or Illustrator to it.
Photoshop by default has this wild idea of what the blackest of black should be: C75, M68, Y67, K90. Now how Adobe decided that’s the CMYK equivalent of R0 G0 B0 is beyond me, I can’t imagine any printer printing that or any paper thinner than cardboard holding that ink without curling. Most printers use C60 M40 Y40 K100 for a Rich Black for coated cover stock, and you can set Photoshop to always aim for that number when setting black points.
With NO documents open, hit ‘x’ so your Foreground, Background swatches are black and white and double click on the black. Set your numbers to C60 M40 M40 K100 and click OK.
Now create a new document, and go to Image > Adjustments > Curves (or Levels) and double-click on Set Black Point. Color Picker will come up and again input the Rich Black settings. Click OK, and OK again at which point Photoshop will ask if you want to save this as the default targets, Click Yes. Close Photoshop to save all these settings. Now when you choose Black for a fill you will get your C60 M40 M40 K100, when ever you chose a shadow area as the black point, that pixel will be pushed to the same.
If you prefer to not use Rich Black, do the same steps removing any CMY from the black point values. You can achieve similar results by customizing your UCR/GCR settings under color management but I would advise against it, as it will alter your ICC profiles.
After bashing GIMP in my previous article I feel I should do something to lift the spirits of any GIMP fanatics out there. Here is a round up of GIMP tutorials. Learn to play with that {cough} toy of yours.
Gimp Tutorials [Tutorials Blog]
So let’s say your Art Director is a tyrant and asshole…no…just follow me on this one.
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“Yeah so I like the field and the color of the sky from this first shot but we need to have this lightning from this cityscape. I don’t want the sky from it, just the bolt…think you can get me a comp to look at by 2pm? Thanks.”
You could do this with layer masks and cloning, it will look sloppy and take you all day. Or you hope either Multiply, Screen or Overlay is gonna magically solve this problem. Instead we’re going to use a feature Photoshop has had for years and I bet you never even touched it. First dump the lightning photo into a layer above the field photo, don’t even worry about cropping anything.
Now double-click on the layer thumbnail of the lightning (or select Layer Options from the Layers Palette) to bring up the Layer Style menu.
Note the Blend If at the bottom, and drag the leftmost slider for This Layer to the right.
Notice how the shadows start to drop out of the layer and slowly start encroaching on the lightning. Here is what is happening, Photoshop is dropping the dark pixels of the layer to allow the underlying layer to come through. If you were to move the rightmost slider on This layer, the lightning would drop out.
Now it’s time to smooth the transition. Move the slider so the lightning still has a healthy amount of its original sky around it in all the channels, Grey, Red, Green and Blue, then hold down [ALT] to split the slider for each.
This makes the transition between lighter and darker pixels smoother. Some channels will have a more dramatic effect on dropping out the pixels you don’t need and keeping what the pixels you do. Play around with each channel to see what combination of all 4 works best. Also try playing with Underlying Layer to see how this affects your blend.
I hate when I see this shit. In Quark Express it used to mean I’d have to go through every EPS file or use FlightCheck to hunt down the file that has a misnamed spot color. Big pain in the ass. Well if you happen to use Indesign like most designers who have turned their back on Express you don’t have to worry about it. Alias it.
Under the Swatch palette, click the menu button and scroll down to Ink Manager.
Now that you have it open, select the errant color and alias to it’s fraternal twin. This will ‘point’ the misnamed ink to the chosen ink when it’s time for separations. Seems sloppy to leave the wrong color floating around on your swatch palette but be assured it won’t cause any problems when it’s on press.
This unfortunately will not change the look of the aliased ink to match the correctly named color in InDesign (at least in CS and CS2).
Most users know in Photoshop, Indesign and Illustrator ‘TAB’ will hide all the palettes. Not all know this trick.
Instead of ‘TAB’ try [SHIFT]+’TAB’
This hides all the palettes except your Toolbar and Control Palette (or Options bar in Photoshop).
Wanna create a tint of a color in Illustrator visually? Easy. Start with your base color:
Now hold [SHIFT] and drag the slider, the ink values will move as one proportionally.
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