fidel's blog

Have you ever had a problem like the the picture above in InDesign?

All those red zones are above 300% inkt percentage.

So you need to change those percentages, there are a lot of ways of doing it, with profiles and so on...

I found an interesting way in Photoshop. Here it is...

Colorcasts can be very annoying and there maybe a thousand ways to get rid of them. Some or better then others I'm just gone give you two tips

Ok I may be known around this community as an InDesign freak but I'm also interested in other Adobe products. Let's take Photoshop for example.

One of my favorite teachers has always been Russel Brown, not only for his fine techniques but also for the way he presents them. And now you can get a great tip by the doctor by subscribing to his free podcast. For some of you it will all be very obvious, but for the rest of the world this is great stuff

Subscribe for the podcast here:

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=102204470

Amusing introductions and great stuff

Two tips that relate to the same problem.

Sometimes your client wants colour but he/she hesitates about the cost of a full colour print. The only option you have left is use a spot colour (Pantone). But it's limiting your creativity. Well sometimes InDesign helps you being creative by giving you some options.

First of all you create a spot coluor in your swatches. Click on the litle black triangle of the swatches pane and select 'New Colour swatch'. In the colour type option choose 'Spot Colour', in the colour mode choose a Pantone colour model you want (I selected 'solid coated). That's that. Your can recognice the spot colour because in the little square after your new colour there is a circle, there isn't one if you chose the process colour type.

Now place a B/W picture in your document. There are two ways of colourising the picture. In the example on the left I selected the frame and clicked on the spot colour I wanted. The spot colour is applied to the highlights of your picture (in fact the colour has been applied to your pictureframe. In the second example I selected the pictureframe but instead of clicking on my colour I clicked and dragged the colour and dropped it on the frame. This time the shadowparts of the picture are colourized.

ItalianMike asked me to explain how my 'Vector shapes' InDesign tip could be done in Photoshop. I promised I would, so here it is.

Photoshop is a very big box and everybody has his own ways of achieving things. So this tutorial is my way of handling this problem.

First of all open your image (that's easy).

Now double click in the 'Layers palet' in the background layer and rename your layer (the lock must disappear).

Next step is to create some shapes.

Tip 3 of the InDesign workout

Having rulers follow your text is a paragraph option in InDesign and can be found in the Paragraph options.

Put your cursor in a paragraph, select the paragraph option in your option bar and on the righthand side click on the black triangle, there you'll find 'Paragraph Rules'.

You have two options: Rule Above and Rule Below. To activate click in the check box, you can use either or both.

If you want to span a picture into several shapes. How do you do it?

Start with a couple of vector shapes. I used some squares, make a pattern at your wish. Select all your vector shapes and go to Object > Compound paths > Make

Now your vector shapes will handle as one shape.

I don't like the underline function in text, because it creates too much black and text becomes unreadable.

But now I found a new way of using the underline option, Highlighting, just as you would with a regular marker.

Select a word and underline it with the button in your option bar. With the word still selected go to the little black triangle on the right of the option bar. And go to Underline Options.

A new menu is shown. Now you can play with the width, colour and offset of your line and it is possible to create a highlighted word or text.

Put these options in a Character Style and you can use it over and over again.

Sorry for the abscence on the blog but I was very busy. To compensate let's call next week 'The InDesign Workout with Fidel'.

The Table function in InDesign is very powerfull and I want to do some entries about the possibilities. First of all there are the Stroke options.
When you create a table just like the example above you can determine in the table options the stroke and color and so on. But with the table selected you can click on the stroke pallet and you will have something like the image above. Now what does this mean?
You see some blue lines, depending on the formatting of your table and the possibility to change the stroke width just like normal. Every blue line determines a stroke in the table (rows, columns, border). When you change the stroke when all the lines are blue, the changes are applied to all the blue lines. But you can deselect a line (it becomes black in the preview stroke box. When you apply a different stroke it will be applied to all the blue lines (selected) and not to the black line (not selected). If you want to change only a few lines you can keep on selecting and deselecting until you have the pattern you want to change.

This is the first in a couple of post about the use of tables as a layout tool. If you have special desires or questions, just post them here and I'll make a topic about it.

The Align palet let's you align different objects left, right, center, bottom & top. The alignment always takes the object most to the left or to the top as the reference to align the other objects, depending on the alignment you choose.
What if you want to align to a specific object?
Select the object and go to menu Object> Lock position.
When you select the other objects as well as the locked object and use one of the align options the locked object will be the reference point for the alignment.