Happy to announce that I have today successfully completed my required CS5 Recertifications for Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. Spending the last 6 1/2-days  locked in the house (with the airconditioning on, as we’ve been having a heat-wave in Perth) and studying hard…

It’s amazing how many new little things you pick up when you really try and learn the tiny little details of all of the new features across the Adobe applications… It was fun to go through InDesign in-depth, as well as Illustrator and Photoshop, and I feel there is still more to learn… isn’t there always? Have you played with Merge to HDR Pro in Photoshop CS5 yet? Or Illustrator’s Perspective Grid?

With almost perfect scores (100%, 100% and 97%) … I must admit I’ll always be bugged by the fact that I’ll never know which question I got wrong in the InDesign recertification exam   What does it mean to pass these recertification exams? It means that my Adobe Certified Expert and Instructor status for these CS5 applications is now fully up-to-date and will not expire.

That’s it … I’m going out to celebrate

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

Note that this is a seminar in the ‘Beginners’-corner, so a great one to watch if you are new to working with masks and want to learn about non-destructive editing in Photoshop. Believe me… no pixels were harmed in Photoshop during the delivery of this eSeminar

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkHdLpVUNNM

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uefwbOCuu_M

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

Augmented Reality (AR) combines the physical and interactive 3D world. It’s not a new technology, but it will definitely make you jump up and down. I know I did when I first saw this back in March at an Adobe event I attended. Simply wave a piece of paper at the camera and some video is projected on your piece of paper in virtual reality.

Want to know more?

Read “Augmented Reality using a webcam and Flash” on Adobe’s Developer Connection or watch some of the Max 2009 videos on Adobe TV:

• Designing for Augmented Reality. What is it, how is it being used? how can you use it yourself inside of Flash?
• Augmented Reality within Flash Player. (FLAR), superimposing graphics over video…

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

The preference setting hasn’t disappeared in Photoshop CS4… Press Ctrl+Alt or Cmd+Option on startup of the application and you should see:

I’m guessing that the reason why this preference setting is now hidden is the fact that most of us editing images in Photoshop are working on workstations with 4+Gb RAM, which would mean that Photoshop would hardly be using the swap file for memory usage.

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

Fall of Autumn‘s Alan Lastufka is the producer of the following video on Letterpress.

Letter Press

From job case, leading, quads, coppers & brasses, guide pins, chase & furniture to inking and printing.

Deconvolution sharpening in Photoshop

Mike McHugh did this really cool & funny video on Deconvolution Sharpening. I have to admit I’d never heard of this before… you might not have either. Watching his video, I’m thinking “aaaaahhhh… so that is how they do that on NCIS, CSI etc.” the blurry and invisible become visible.

If you’re looking for some background information on deconvolution:

• Wikepedia provides additional (technical) info.

ePubs from InDesign

David and Anne-Marie recorded back in September a cool InDesign Secrets video on creating ePubs from InDesign. A nice accompanyment to Gabriel Powell’s Essential guide to making and editing eBooks published in the last edition of InDesign Magazine.

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

Modified: 13 September 2009 – Added “Note”.

Super quick tip. A  practical example. I’ve been writing Technical Documentation the past weeks, and am processing an awful lot of screenshots. Sometimes they are kind of big and I really only want to focus on one part, but would love to see a fading edge and I crop the images so they don’t take up too much room. Photoshop CS4′s Mask panel helps be produce the desired effect.

Photoshop CS4 makes this a 3 second task… I’m not kidding ! Don’t blink, you might miss them.

Quick Steps 1-2-3

Create a Selection, with the Rectangle Marquee tool, roughly the size you want the final image to be.

Note: If you want to feather the bottom half of an entire screenshot, don’t select the entire canvas. Instead, just select an area that falls a few pixels within the canvas area at the feathering point.

Click Add Pixel Mask in Masks Panel.

Click Mask Edge… The Refine Edge dialog appears.

Play with Feather and Contract/Expand settings (and others if preferred) until you get the edge just right

Click OK

and you’re done.

Video Tutorial

[apologies, 2nd video upload... I goofed up on the first one...]

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

Web-reference: deke Pod (2008, O’Reilly Media Inc.)

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

This tip is Part 3 of a three-part tip and generates the masked text. Part 1 describes how the Photoshop artwork is created and Part 2 outlines how to apply Live Trace and maintain colour editing ability.

I’m adding my standard “Bogus” text. Select Text and Background (shift-click each with Selection Tool, or click drag Selection Tool around both objects). Ensure the Transparency panel is visible. From the panel menu enable “New Opacity Masks are Clipping” and “New Opacity Masks are Inverted”, then select Make Opacity Mask.

I’m not entirely happy with the result here.

I would have liked to trace a darker image. Fortunately I retained the Link to the original Photoshop file that Live Trace was applied to… so let’s go and edit that…

Edit the original Photoshop file

In the Transparency panel, ensure the graphic (not the mask) is selected. Display the Links panel, then select Edit Original.

The image that is being traced in Illustrator opens in Photoshop.

Double click the Filter Gallery layer in the document, and make preferred adjustments. Click OK and Save and Close the Photoshop document.

When you return to Illustrator, Illustrator will notices you’ve modified the original Photoshop file that was placed and asks if you’d like to update the linked Photoshop file. Click Yes to enforce the update and view the new result.

The cool thing about this technique is that you can:

a)  edit the original Photoshop file that is being “Live Traced”, as long as you retain a Link to that file when placing it in Illustrator. This way you can take advantage of using Photoshop’s Filter Gallery, which I prefer to use over the more limited version that Illustrator has.

b) edit the Live Trace options…

c) edit the global colours generated by Live Trace

d) edit the text.

Edit Text

To edit the text ensure the Mask is selected in the Transparency panel. Next select your Type tool and make the text change.

Well, that completes a long overdue tip with lots of extras…

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

This tip is Part 2 of a three-part tip. Part 1 describes how the Photoshop artwork that is placed into the Illustrator file was created and Part 3 will create the Text Effect that will give our finished result.

We’re ready to place the previously created Photoshop graphic in Illustrator now. But let’s create a New Illustrator document first that has the same width and height as the Photoshop file.

File > Place. Enable the Link option in the Place dialog. This will allow further editing of the Photoshop file at a later stage.

Tracing the Graphic

From the Live Trace menu in the Control panel select Tracing Options…

What I’d like to do is generate two colour swatches that I can easily edit, whilst retaining Live Trace ability. To generate these swatches on the fly as part of the Live Trace functionality, change the following Adjustments settings:

Set Mode to Colour, Set Max Colours to 2 and Enable Output to Swatches. With the Preview box ticked you’ll be able to see the Live Trace result. Feel free to make additional adjustments.

Click Trace to apply the settings and generate the swatches.

To make it a bit easier to identify the two swatches that are generated, shift-click the swatches in the Swatches panel, then select Create Colour Group from the Swatches panel menu. Name the Colour Group and select Create From: Selected Swatches.

Click OK.

Amending the colours

Editing the colours of the Colour Group is as easy as double clicking the colour and amending the settings.

We’re now ready to get the text part of this three-part tip happening, let’s continue at Part 3.

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

A month or so ago I demoed a masking technique that works well with text in Illustrator during an Adobe eSeminar I delivered. At the time I promised to write this technique up as a digitip, however, an extremely busy workschedule meant I’d not yet gotten around to posting the tip. But a promise is a promise. To make up for the delay in posting this tip, I’ve spruced up the tip with Adobe Photoshop CS3 artwork creation, and that’s where I’ll start Part 1 of this three-part tip.

There are many different ways of achieving this end result, some much quicker than my tip, purely using Photoshop or Illustrator. The tips uses Photoshop’s Filter Gallery, Illustrator’s Live Trace, Colour Groups and Opacity Masks…  and will show you how you can still edit each of those components at the end…

Part 2 of the tip will take the Photoshop artwork we’re creating here into Illustrator and trace it, and Part 3 will create the Text Effect.

Creating the trace graphic

We’re starting in Photoshop CS3 and are creating a new graphic. As I’m imagining this might become a header of some sort, I’ll stick to A4-width and about 8cm height. (File > New).

Because I want to limit the colour effects for the final result I’m restricting myself to creating a greyscale image.

Fill the image with 100% Black (Edit > Fill). I want to be able to edit the Filter settings after initially applying them. In order to do this the Background must be converted to a Smart Filter Layer. Select Filter > Convert for Smart Filters.

With the use of a few filters the scattered look is generated. Select Filter > Filter Gallery and expand the Sketch filters and click Graphic Pen.

A diagonal pattern appears. Let’s stick to the default settings for now. We’re going to add apply another Filter. Click the New Effect Layer icon .

Question for Adobe: why is this caled a New “Effect” Layer and not a “Filter”Layer?

Two Graphic Pen Effect Layers appear in the Filter Gallery dialog.

The top one is the newly created one. With this Layer still selected, expand the Brush Strokes Filters and click Accented Edges.

Click OK.

Now let’s look at the Layers panel. It displays our Smart Filter layer, and in addition shows us the Filter Gallery that’s been applied to the image.

To further edit the two Filter Gallery effects or add additional Effect Layers, double click Filter Gallery.

The previous dialog appears again, and you can make changes to the settings for the two Effects Layers. I’m pretty happy with my default result at this stage, so will leave things as they are.

Time to save the image and bring it into Illustrator…

I’m saving as a Photoshop file with Layers in tact.

Part 2 of this tip will bring the graphic into Illustrator…

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

This tip succeeds the previous tip, and show cases how the dotted patterns created earlier can be faded, whilst retaining their vector and spot colours.

Spotted dots

The dotted patterns created in tip 53, can also be spot colours, by ensuring that the colour of the circular component that forms part of the pattern is filled with a spot colour.

Add Black and White Gradient

Draw a rectangular shape over the top of the dotted pattern object and fill this with a Black and White Gradient.

Turning Gradient into Mask

Using the selection tool, select both objects by roughly click dragging with the selection tool over one of the corners. This will ensure the top and the underlaying objects are both selected.

Ensure the Transparency palette is visible and select “Make Opacity Mask” from the palette fly-out menu.

The gradient effect is now complete. Spot colours are retained. When saving this file as an Illustrator file and placing it in InDesign, spot colours are also honoured.

For more information on Opacity Masks, please also refer to tip 007. Although this tip was written for an earlier version of Illustrator, the technique is valid today.

Video Tutorial

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

I’m especially excited, as I’ve also just received another XMas present: A brand new MacBook Pro Intel Core 2 Duo And yep… the mac version of the Photoshop CS3 Beta release certainly is Universal Binary Which means the application will take full advantage of the Intel driven architecture.

Web Reference: Photoshop CS3 Beta (2006, Adobe)

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

This is part 3 in a 3 part tutorial on Vector Smart Objects.

Previous tutorial: Part 2

Replacing the content

So, if we edit an individual smart object, that has been copied, all related objects are also updated after the edited object has been saved…

So what happens when instead of editing we select the Replace Contents.. command from the Layer > Smart Objects menu?

Well, it’s kind of obvious by now I guess , so let’s just go ahead and do it. We’re locating our replacement Illustrator file — in my case coffee bug number 2.. –

Placing this and returning back to Photoshop…

Wow, I love this stuff. A different bug for all copied instances

So the tip for today really is to start looking at how you work with Photoshop? We’ve been using layers for many years, but have never been able to work with them in a non-destructive manner, and smart objects can do even more than what I’ve just shown you in these three short tutorials.

Video Tutorial

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker