CreativeTechs Tips

Say you must produce a looping slideshow of images for a client's tradeshow booth — but you don't have many technical details.

You know the images will be displayed on a HDTV connected to a Windows laptop. You don't know what software will be installed, or what image formats that laptop might support.

Luckily, you know that PDFs can be displayed on almost any computer today — thanks to the ubiquitous free Adobe Reader. This tip will walk you though the basics of creating a self-running PDF slideshow that can run almost anywhere.

Continue reading "Build an Acrobat PDF Slideshow." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 06:00 AM | Permalink

It's a sign you know your way around Photoshop when you've mastered the keyboard shortcuts for the Layers palette. Here is a quick reminder: Combine the bracket keys [ or ] with Option/ALT to select the layer above or below; Use Command/Control to move your selected layer up and down.

Continue reading "Keyboard Shortcuts for Photoshop's Layers Palette." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 06:00 AM | Permalink

Seasoned graphic designers wouldn't dream of sending a print project to press without first approving an accurate proof. Your client's email marketing campaign should be no different. You need to be sure you know what your design looks like on the different email clients your readers might be using.

Unless you have a studio filled with testing computers and different email servers, you can't test all the combinations yourself. In this week's creative tip we profile two services that make proofing your email designs quick and painless.

Continue reading "Proof your email designs in different email clients." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 06:00 AM | Permalink

We've been mining for Acrobat tips in preparation for Jason Hoppe's upcoming workshop on Building PDF Forms. This week, we'd like to link to the mother lode of PDF Forms tips:

101 PDF Forms Tips.pdf

Ted Padova, author of the Acrobat Bible, has created this free 55-page document that covers some of his most frequent tasks when creating Acrobat PDF forms. The tips range from the design stage through adding specialized JavaScripts. And since the document is a PDF (of course) Ted has provided working examples of most the techniques in action.

Continue reading "Ted Padova's 101 PDF Forms Tips." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 06:00 AM | Permalink

Seattle designer Darlin Gray emailed friends and colleagues links to a short video welcoming them to her new website. What makes this tip-worthy is the simple HTML trick that automatically forwards web visitors to her main website after the video introduction is complete. See her example at:

Video Welcome Page: Darlin's Place

Interested in trying this technique yourself? Apple provides a free set of scripts for integrating QuickTime movies into your website. Read on after the jump for a short tutorial on how to create this effect yourself.

Continue reading "Create a QuickTime Video Landing Page." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 06:15 AM | Permalink

Last week, our Adobe trainer, Jason Hoppe, led a fast-paced overview of Adobe Lightroom. This was a lot of fun — and for this week's creative tip, we've posted a free PDF of the 8-page workshop booklet you can download and share:

Lightroom Basics.pdf

It still amazes me that Jason can crank out a new workshop like this each week. Not to mention developing the materials for participants to take home. This particular handout is a terrific overview to Lightroom's overall interface and modules.

Continue reading "Adobe Lightroom Basics. Free PDF." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 06:15 AM | Permalink

My name is Donnie, and you suck at Photoshop!

Thus starts the funniest and oddest collection of Photoshop tutorials we've seen. The production values are terrible. The language is crude. The Photoshop techniques are pedestrian at best. These tutorials are not exactly kid safe or appropriate for some workplaces.

So on this April Fool Day week, we invite you to follow the decline of Donnie's marriage, job, and quality of life, as you strap on your stupid and get into some big-boy Photoshop work.

Continue reading "You Suck at Photoshop." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 07:15 AM | Permalink

InDesign lets you control the visibility of layers in your placed Photoshop graphics. That can be pretty handy when you find yourself designing a series of related ads that require minor changes to the same image.

In InDesign, select a placed Photoshop graphic and choose Object > Object Layer Options. This gives you a dialog box where you can toggle the eyeball next to any layer to turn it on or off.

Continue reading "Turn Photoshop Layers On/Off in InDesign." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 07:15 AM | Permalink

Just because most of your work is done on the computer screen doesn't mean marking up hard copy is obsolete. Print out a copy of this proofreading cheat sheet and post it near your desk.

The Chicago Manual of Style Online: Proofreading

The Chicago Manual of Style started in the 1890s as a single sheet of typographic fundamentals drawn up by a University of Chicago Press proofreader. Over the years this authoritative style guide has been updated roughly once a decade. The 15th edition was published in 2003, and was heavily revised to reflect the emergence of computer technology and the Internet in publishing.

Continue reading "Proofreading Marks Cheat Sheet." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 07:15 AM | Permalink

Here is another quick-but-useful tip for InDesign and QuarkXpress. When you need to set a tab that aligns to the right edge of your text box, don't waste your time fumbling with manual tab stops. Both InDesign and QuarkXPress have a hidden feature that makes this easy. Just remember these shortcut keys:

InDesign: Shift-Tab
QuarkXPress: Option-Tab

Continue reading "The Magic Right-Indent Tab." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 09:15 AM | Permalink

xScope ($27) is a great utility for Mac-based web and UX (user experience) designers. It provides a number of floating tools for measuring, aligning, and inspecting on-screen graphics.

xScope

You have to play with xScope to get a sense of how helpful it is. It has on-screen rulers, floating guides, and a nicely designed screen overlay that shows the usable space for any screen (including new templates for the iPhone). My favorite feature is a new dimensions tool (shown above), which instantly identifies the pixel dimensions of anything on your screen. Link to the movie below for a better sense of how cool this feature is:

Movie: xScope Dimensions Tool

Download a free trial of xScope and give it a spin.

Continue reading "xScope is an Ideal Tool for Web Designers." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 09:15 AM | Permalink

This week's creative tip is one of those handy shortcuts you can use all the time. As basic as it is, a lot of us missed this feature along the way.

In many Adobe application (InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop), hold down the Shift key while dragging a guide to snap to the nearest ruler mark. The cool part is that your guides snap to the visible tick marks on the ruler whatever the magnification level. Once you've tried it, you'll be using this trick every day.

Continue reading "Hold Shift to Snap Guides to Rulers." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 09:15 AM | Permalink

Back in January 2007, we published a tip showing how to use PDF watermarks to add studio-branded "proof" stickers to the PDFs you send clients (Add proofing messages with PDF watermarks). That's been a popular tip over the last year.

This week we'd like to provide an updated tutorial showing how you can do the same thing using custom Acrobat stamps. In hindsight, using Acrobat stamps does a better job, and is a lot more fun.

Continue reading "Add an Acrobat Stamp to Your PDF Proofs." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 09:00 AM | Permalink

Last year we published a tip about Adobe dropping development and support for Macromedia FreeHand (Goodbye FreeHand. But is Illustrator Enough?). In that tip, we argued that most die-hard FreeHand users are happier and more productive switching to Adobe InDesign rather than Illustrator.

Since then, we've been looking for a method to help designers migrate their old FreeHand documents over to Adobe InDesign. Here is our best approach right now. Export your FreeHand files as PDFs, and use a new tool that converts those PDF files into fully editable InDesign documents:

Recosoft's PDF2ID Converter

The conversion is far from perfect. But if you are a designer who has spent years using Macromedia Freehand as a page layout tool, this is one way we've tested to help move those old files from FreeHand over to Adobe InDesign.

Continue reading "Convert FreeHand files into InDesign using PDF2ID." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Saturday was Groundhog Day. In a national media event, Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow, leading the groundhog to forecast six more weeks of winter. And speaking of shadows...

Have you ever found yourself with a Photoshop image that has an object's shadow on an opaque white background, when what you need is that same shadow on a transparent layer. Read the full version of this tip for a simple technique to accomplish just that!

Continue reading "Photoshop Opaque-to-Transparent Shadow Trick." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 03:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Most in-house creative teams face the issue of corporate images scattered throughout their department. Each designer ends up with a different assortment of photos they've compiled over the years. Collections of photos end up stored in individual project folders — even if those same images end up linked later to a dozen other projects.

Over the last several years at CreativeTechs, we've helped a lot of in-house creative teams develop image management and keywording strategies get control over their unwieldily image collections. In the end, they create something like their own private in-house stock image library.

Continue reading "Creating an In-House Stock Photo Library." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 03:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Say you manage an in-house creative department that has amassed a large library of company images (product photography, buildings, headshots, etc). How can you make your photo library available to outside vendors or other people within the organization.

Back in April of 2006, we recorded this short 5 minute video tutorial showing how to share out your image library on a password-protected website using Extensis Portfolio and Extensis NetPublish. The software has been updated a bit since then, but the basic approach and strategy remains largely the same.

Continue reading "Share an image library using Extensis NetPublish." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 02:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory has developed an online autotrace tool that is dramatically more accurate than the LiveTrace tool available in Adobe Illustrator, or the old Adobe Streamline utility that some designers still have lurking around their hard drive. Even better it’s free! VectorMagic is available as an online tool on their website:

vectormagic.stanford.edu

You upload your bitmap image, answer a couple questions about the original image, and the system creates a vector EPS version that you can download and edit. Their example results are stunning, and from our own experiments at CreativeTechs with a few real-world projects, the results are impressive.

The interface is fairly straight-forward. But if you get lost they also have a quick 3-minute video tutorial showing the system in action. Give it a shot.

Continue reading "The Best Auto-Trace Available." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 10:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A tips reader wrote us this week: "I have an issue with drop shadows and spot colors in Adobe InDesign. When I use a drop shadow in front of a spot color background it looks fine in InDesign, and prints properly as spot color separations. But a white box shows up around the image in Acrobat when I make a PDF to show the client. Is there a way around this problem?"

An excellent question, and one that comes up a lot for designers working with spot color. There are several ways to make sure your spot color jobs preview properly in Adobe Acrobat.

We'll cover 3 different techniques in this tip. Plus we'll throw in an extra tip on how to avoid that annoying white box when printing on cheap inkjet printers.

Continue reading "Avoiding the "White Box" around shadows in Acrobat PDFs." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 09:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here is one of those great small details that makes Adobe's InDesign CS3 upgrade such a pleasure to work with. Eventually, most designers want a shortcut to switch to the Selection tool while you're working inside a text frame. You can't tap the V shortcut because you'll just end up adding the letter "v" to your text.

Now with InDesign CS3, when you are finished editing your text, just hit the ESC key on your keyboard. This is the quick-and-easy way to jump out of an active text box and switch directly to the Selection tool.

I've come to love this simple little keystroke. Pass it along to another friend in your life who uses InDesign.

Continue reading "Hit ESC to exit a text frame in InDesign CS3." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Photographer and designer Trevor Morris has updated his terrific Photoshop keyboard shortcut cheatsheets for Adobe Photoshop CS3. Download this handy PDF cheatsheet, print it out, and keep it near your computer:

Photoshop CS2 Keyboard Shortcuts (Mac)

Photoshop CS2 Keyboard Shortcuts (PC)

The PDF's include 4 pages. The first two pages are organized by function in Photoshop. The other two pages show the shortcuts organized alphabetically by keystroke.

Continue reading "Photoshop CS3 Shortcuts Cheatsheet." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 09:00 AM | Permalink

This week we're taking a slight break from our normal tips format. If you are looking for the right gift to bring a smile to the graphic designer on your holiday list, here are ideas in the $20-$80 range. Plus one extravagant gift idea you might want to reserve for yourself.

Creative Gift #1— Helvetica The Film. On DVD.

Helvetica The Film (DVD)

Helvetica, a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture, is finally out on DVD. An essential addition to any graphic designer's movie collection.

Update: Seattle-area designers can pick up a copy of Helvetica at Scarecrow Video in the U-District. Or you can order Helvetica from Scarecrow's online store.

Continue reading "Holiday 2007 Creative Gift Ideas." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 07:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sometimes after working with images on a transparent background, you're left with extra space around your object. Cropping the image precisely can be tricky, especially if you have soft shadow edges.

This is where Photoshop’s Trim command comes in so handy (choose Image > Trim in Photoshop's menu).

As long as the area you want to crop is transparent or a solid color, the Trim dialog box lets you instantly crop your document's canvas to the outer border of your image.

Continue reading "Don't crop. Use Photoshop's Trim feature." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 03:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Join us at the CreativeTechs office Wednesday mornings 9:30am to 11am. Pick up a couple new skills, and get back to work before lunch. You can put what you learn into use the same day.

Continue reading "December 90-Minute Mini-Workshops" »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 07:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Too many active fonts can slow your computer down, make the font menu long and unwieldy, and lead to a host of other computer problems. So to coax a little more speed and stability out of your copy of InDesign, graphic designers should keep those long font menus under control.

But what if you are brainstorming a new logo? That's exactly the time you want access to your full library of thousands (and thousands) of creative fonts.

Happily, the big three font managers (FontAgent Pro, Suitcase, and FontExplorer) all provide a quick way to try out your fonts — without having to activate them first. Type a name or phrase into the preview window. Then scroll through your huge font collection and see what catches your eye. When you find something you want to play with, turn that font on for use in your graphics applications.

Continue reading "Use your font manager's preview window." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 01:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The problem with grasping Adobe's pen tool is that you can't really learn it by reading a description or watching a demonstration. To master the pen tool, you must actively draw with it. Eventually, after enough repetition, something clicks and the pen tool starts to make sense.

So, how does one teach a skill that relies so heavily on learned muscle memory?

The ingenious answer from Veerle Pieters, who publishes the wonderful Veerle's Blog, is to create a series of Bézier dot-to-dot exercises that let even inexperienced designers and illustrators put the pen tool through it's paces.

Download a copy of Veerle's Illustrator exercise file here:

Pentool-exercise.zip

You can also place this file into InDesign and practice your pen tools skills there as well.

Continue reading "Learn Adobe's Pen Tool with Bézier Dot-to-Dot." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 10:00 AM | Permalink

If you've ever wondered how to create animated GIFs in Photoshop, we've created a simple tutorial with some example files you can download and try out.

We use a lot of animated GIF files in our weekly tips. They are fun to build, and better for our email subscribers because Flash animations are not supported in most email readers.

Continue reading "Build Animated GIFs in Photoshop." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 08:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last week we posted a fun collection of Halloween MP3s which received a tremendous amount of web traffic. Many people asked about the embedded MP3 player we used to let visitors to listen to songs from their browsers.

For this week's creative tip, we decided to provide a short tutorial on how to setup and use a free Flash-based music player developed by Fabricio Zuardi.

To demonstrate that player in action we'd like to feature the work of CreativeTechs' newest Mac IT consultant, Dave Corter, who in addition to being an excellent Mac engineer has also published several albums of Didgeridoo music. Click on a couple titles above to give them a listen, or scroll down for a tutorial on how to embed your own music player.

Continue reading "Embed a free Flash MP3 player on your blog." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 01:08 PM | Permalink

Join us at the CreativeTechs office Wednesday mornings 9:30am to 11am. Pick up a couple new skills, and get back to work before lunch. You can put what you learn into use the same day.

The cost is $50 per workshop.

Continue reading "November 90-Minute Mini-Workshops." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Microsoft Office 2007 was first released for PC users in late 2006 — introducing a slew of new file formats that couldn't be opened on a Mac. These new formats include Word 2007 documents (docx), Excel 2007 spreadsheets (xlsx), and PowerPoint 2007 presentations (pptx). The new Mac Office 2008 isn't expected to ship until January ’08.

We field calls every month from Mac-based design firms who find themselves receiving these new Office 2007 file formats from their PC-based clients. We wrote a tip back in February 2007 called Convert MS Word 2007 .DOCX files for a Mac, but that only covered one of the new formats.

The good news: Apple's new iWork ’08 which shipped in August can open and save in all those new formats. So if you are a designer who often receives files from PC-based clients, buying this new $80 package can greatly simplify your life.

Continue reading "Apple iWork '08 opens Microsoft Office 2007 files." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 12:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Photoshop guru Jason Hoppe teaches non-destructive retouching techniques in Photoshop. In classes at CreativeTechs he shows many ways to improve your images without overwriting the original image data. Done properly, image quality doesn't degrade as you make edits, and you retain flexibility when clients come back with later change requests.

Here's a classic example of those non-destructive techniques in action: We've added a separate cloning layer instead of cloning directly onto our image. And we've used a color adjustment layer to correct our subject's skin tone without directly changing our photo's original colors.

However, you must be aware of a subtle-but-important detail when using a cloning layer on images that have been color corrected with adjustment layers. In this week's creative tip we'll discuss that issue, and we'll show why retouchers know to always turn off their adjustment layers before cloning on an image.

Plus we'll show Photoshop CS3's new Ignore Adjustment Layers button that makes life better for Photoshop retouch artists.

Continue reading "Photoshop CS3's clone tool adds "Ignore Adjustment Layers"." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 03:01 PM | Permalink

Retouching skin is rarely an easy task. There are no absolutes when it comes to making skin look the “right” color, smoothing out wrinkles, or reducing blemishes and blotchiness. This tip will take you through one popular technique for smoothing skin texture for a younger, smoother look.

Continue reading "How to smooth skin in Photoshop." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 04:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Join us at the CreativeTechs office Wednesday mornings 9:30am to 11am. Pick up a couple new skills, and get back to work before lunch. You can put what you learn into use the same day.

The cost is $50 per workshop.

Thanks to everyone who helped make last month such a success. We continue to get rave reviews of our new 90-minute morning workshops. It seems the short format is really working for people. Here is the new lineup for October and November.

Continue reading "October 90-Minute Mini-Workshops." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 09:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Every couple weeks we'll get a call from a client producing interactive PDF forms. Inevitably, what they want is a way to define the Acrobat form fields directly in their InDesign layout.

There isn't a way yet to build your form fields in InDesign. However Acrobat 8's new automatic Form Field Recognition feature can save you a lot of work the next time a PDF Form project crosses your desk.

Unfortunately, the new Form Field Recognition feature in Acrobat 8 Professional is lightly documented (a euphemism we borrowed from Carl Young). In today's creative tip we've provided some sample files and a simple tutorial to walk you through the basics. Plus we've compiled a collection of links to articles that dig deeper into the voodoo art of form field recognition.

Continue reading "Acrobat 8's new Automatic Form Recognition" »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 11:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of Adobe's highly touted features in InDesign CS3 is the ability to place multiple graphics at a time. InDesign provides small preview of each graphic next to the place cursor. You can cycle through your loaded graphics by pressing the right or left arrow keys until you reach the one you wish to place. You can even remove a graphic from the list by hitting the Esc key.

What I didn't realize was that if you hold down the Option key (Alt key on a PC)
and click on a graphic frame — it will replace the existing graphic with the new one you currently have loaded! This Multiplace-and-Replace combination is a terrific time saver for designers who produce catalogs, or other projects with a large number of placed graphics.

Continue reading "InDesign CS3's great Multiplace-and-Replace." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 01:12 PM | Permalink

Every now and then I'll come across a tip that makes me slap my forehead and ask "How did I miss that one?"

Photoshop CS3 and CS2 both let you easily extract images that are embedded in PDF documents. Next time you open a PDF file in Photoshop CS3, look at the top of the import window that normally displays a preview of all the available pages in your PDF. Click on the Images radio button and you'll be presented with a list of all the images embedded in that PDF.

Tip: In Photoshop CS2, the Images option is hidden under a pop-up menu.

Choose the image you want and click the OK button to open it. You can then save it in any file format you like.

Continue reading "Photoshop lets you extract images from PDFs." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 04:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Option-dragging is a shortcut to duplicate objects in most modern design applications. But in InDesign, duplicating with the Option key goes much deeper.

In InDesign, you can also hold down the Option key when making some Control panel adjustment to make a duplicate of your selected item. For example, if you make change to the location values and then hold down the Option key when typing Enter, a duplicate of your object will appear in the new location.

Windows Users: Use the Alt key for the same result.

Add InDesign's ability to perform basic math operations, and you have an great shortcut for quickly and precisely duplicating objects. (Read "Let your design apps do the math for you" back in QuickTips #24)

Continue reading "Duplicate objects in InDesign's Control panel." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 11:07 AM | Permalink

Last month's first mini-workshops were a hit. Thanks to everyone who made it out for one of our first topics in August. Here is the new lineup for September and October.

Join us at the CreativeTechs office Wednesday mornings 9:30am to 11am. Pick up a couple new skills, and get back to work before lunch. You can put what you learn into use the same day.

The cost is $50 per workshop.

Continue reading "September 90-Minute Mini-Workshops." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 02:08 PM | Permalink

Ever find yourself wanting to create a quick hanging indent for a drop cap or bulleted list?

The special "Indent to Here" character in QuarkXPress or InDesign makes it a snap. Type this character in a text block and all remaining lines of the paragraph are indented to that point.

To make things easier, Quark and InDesign use the same shortcut:

Macintosh: Command + \ (backslash)
Windows: Control + \

Continue reading ""Indent to Here" in InDesign or Quark." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 09:00 AM | Permalink

Here's a light InDesign tip for any designers finding themselves cranking out the occasional old-school direct mail letter. You can easily create a "yellow highlighter" character style with InDesign's Custom Underline feature.

While the effect itself is a bit cheesy, the technique does let us demonstrate a few shortcuts using InDesign's character styles.

Continue reading "Create a "Yellow Highlighter" style in InDesign." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 12:25 PM | Permalink

Starting in August, CreativeTechs is offering weekly, mini-workshops every Wednesday morning in our office.

Here's the pitch: Join us Wednesday mornings at 9:30am, pick up a couple new skills, and get back to work before lunch. You can put what you learned into use the same day. The cost is $50 per workshop.

Continue reading "August 90-Minute Mini-Workshops." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 09:00 AM | Permalink

Photoshop provides a neutral gray canvas around your images when you work in full screen mode, or when you zoom out so the image is smaller than your document window.

Have you ever wished you could change the color of this default grey? There’s and easy way, and although most people don't know the trick, it’s been in Photoshop since version 4.0.

Continue reading "How to change Photoshop's canvas color." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 04:51 PM | Permalink

A couple months ago our production and training guru, Jason Hoppe, developed a great series of "What's New in CS3" booklets for our summer workshops at Seattle's School of Visual Concepts. If you missed out (or don't live in the Seattle area) here are the PDFs for you to download:

What's New in Photoshop CS3.pdf

What's New in InDesign CS3.pdf

What's New in Illustrator CS3.pdf

These provide a quick, visual guide to all those cool new features in Adobe Creative Suite 3. Jason did a wonderful job putting these together — and while they are intended to be supplemented with lots of additional information in the live class, they stand on their own as a handy resource.

Continue reading "What's New in Adobe CS3 - the Booklets." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 03:33 PM | Permalink

Two weeks ago we ran a tip on how to remove unwanted people from public photos. Apparently, it's a popular topic — that post received almost 20,000 visitors in the first 10 days. Less than a week after publishing that tip, I ran across another technique using Photoshop CS3 Extended that makes the process virtually automatic.

As before, you must take several shots of the same scene using a tripod. This technique uses a new feature in Photoshop CS3 Extended called image stacks. With the right settings, Photoshop automatically identifies areas that are similar between your photos (the unchanging background) and removes the elements that change between shots (the wandering people).

So, if erasing people by hand seems like too much work to bother with (and if you spent the extra money to get the Extended version of Photoshop CS3), you can use this cool automatic people remover technique.

Continue reading "Photoshop CS3's Automatic People Remover." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 03:00 PM | Permalink

Here is the Creative Sweet TV podcast that was a partial inspiration for this week's tip: Photoshop CS3's Automatic People Remover. Australian trainer Mike McHugh is the host of this entertaining and informative Adobe CS3 Podcast.

Continue reading "Photoshop People Remover - The Video." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 02:07 PM | Permalink

It takes a lot of time to add bookmarks, hyperlinks, form fields, buttons, and other interactive elements to a PDF. Inevitably however, you'll need to change your design. How can you update your PDF when the original layout is modified?

We'll often catch designers painstakingly copying form fields from the old PDF into a newly created PDF — or worse, rebuilding all those interactive elements by hand. There is a much easier way.

Continue reading "Update PDF Forms with Acrobat's Replace Pages." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 12:53 PM | Permalink

This tip comes in handy for graphic designers who need a quick way to get pedestrian-free photographs of their signage or environmental projects.

There is a classic digital photography technique for removing unwanted people: Take several shots of the same scene using a tripod — then layer those photos in Photoshop. People move around between shots, so you can use parts of one photo to erase an unwanted person from another. A good tutorial is available for this technique:

How to remove tourists from your photos. [dsphotographic.com]

Our own twist is to use Photoshop CS3's improved Photomerge feature to automate this task. Simply shoot a collection of photos, erase the unwanted people in Photoshop, and let Photomerge stitch together a finished image.

Continue reading "Remove unwanted people from public photos." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 02:59 PM | Permalink

How much useful information can you fit onto a standard 3x5 index card? That's the challenge our Adobe Expert, Jasson Hoppe, takes on each month with his growing collection of Photoshop cheatsheets.

This month's tiny cheatsheet contribution covers shortcuts and tricks for Photoshop's Brush Tool:

Photoshop Brush Cheatsheet.pdf

On there own, these small quick-reference guides are handy to have around. But stay tuned as we add more each month. Soon you'll have your own small 3x5 flipbook with the best shortcuts and tricks for all of Photoshop's tools.

Continue reading "Photoshop Brush Tool Cheatsheet." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 03:54 PM | Permalink

Everyone knows that tapping the Tab key is the quick way to temporarily hide all open palettes in Adobe Photoshop, InDesign or Illustrator. But press Shift+Tab instead and you can keep your Toolbox and Options bar, while the other palettes are hidden!

Continue reading "Hide all palettes fast. Except your toolbox!" »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 09:00 AM | Permalink

In May of 2007 Adobe finally admitted what we've known for a while — FreeHand is dead. Adobe will no longer update or patch FreeHand for new operating systems or hardware (such as Intel Macs). Adobe has created several migration guides to help long-time FreeHand users move over to Adobe Illustrator instead.

But here's the problem: If you've spent the last ten years designing and working in FreeHand, then Illustrator may be the wrong place for you to switch to. Many die-hard FreeHand users will be far better served switching to Adobe InDesign instead. Yet as far as we've found, no one has created a good resource to help designers migrate from Freehand to InDesign.

Continue reading "Goodbye FreeHand. But is Illustrator Enough?" »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 05:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over the last couple weeks we've been polling our clients for some of their favorite features in Adobe CS3. One tool mentioned by several designers is InDesign CS3's new Gradient Feather Tool. For situations where you want to fade a photo into the background, this tool saves you a trip back into Photoshop — for some designers this is a great time saver.

As is our style, we've created a simple animation showing this tool in action.

Continue reading "InDesign CS3's new Gradient Feather Tool." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 12:52 AM | Permalink

When you find yourself working with more text than you can fit into your InDesign text frame, the easiest way to see how much copy is overflowing is to open the Story Editor. (Edit > Edit in Story Editor)

In the Story Editor, a red line on the left side will show you how much text is overflowing your layout. If you decide to trim the text to fit your available space, you can edit your copy directly in this window.

Continue reading "Edit overset text in InDesign's story editor." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 12:26 AM | Permalink

We love cheatsheets. Those handy quick-reference guides that keep all sorts of vital information right at your fingertips.

In fact, we're dedicating one issue each month to provide a growing collection of creative and technical cheatsheets.

Photoshop Lasso Cheatsheet.pdf

This month's creative cheatsheet covers the Photoshop Lasso tool. We've distilled the basic functions of this widely used tool into a concise format that fits on a standard 3x5 index card.

Continue reading "Photoshop Lasso Tool Cheatsheet." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 02:22 PM | Permalink

Want to get up to speed on the new versions of Adobe CS3? We'll make it fast and easy for you: Seattle's School of Visual Concepts (SVC) is hosting a series of half-day, hands-on workshops to help you get up and running quickly.

We know you are busy, so we've packed a lot of great stuff into these morning sessions. You'll learn all the new CS3 features in a rapid, fun, environment. Each workshop is led by CreativeTechs' powerhouse production guru, Jason Hoppe:

• Making the Move to Adobe Photoshop CS3
• Making the Move to Adobe InDesign CS3
• Making the Move to Adobe Illustrator CS3

Each half-day workshop comes with a class binder, a visual guide to help you apply your learning back at the office, and CDs filled with sample files and resources. The cost is $150 per workshop, or $395 for all three.

The focus of these classes is to help graphic designers and production artists get up to speed with the new features in CS3, and get back to work.

Continue reading "Adobe CS3 Training Classes in Seattle." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 05:32 PM | Permalink

By default, Illustrator will use your selection's bounding box when aligning or centering objects. Have you ever wished you could tell Illustrator to center everything around a particular object instead?

Continue reading "Controlling the Align feature in Illustrator." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 06:11 PM | Permalink

We're taking a break from our regular technical tips this long weekend. Longtime readers of this newsletter know we like to collect papercraft PDF projects. If you find yourself looking for a creative project this summer, download these plans for a working 35mm paper camera.

dirkon_en.pdf

The legendary Dirkon pinhole camera template was first published in Czechoslovakia in 1979. Graphic designer David Balihar had the text translated into English so it would be accessible to all fans of this camera technique.

Continue reading "Fold your own paper pinhole camera." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 01:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This week's creative tip is inspired by a question on how to create an interactive PDF for showing off before/after examples of Photoshop retouching projects.

The technique itself may apply to a limited number of people, but it is a fun way to introduce some of InDesign's lesser known interactive features.

This tip includes a quick tutorial on how to build interactive rollovers into your next PDF. The tutorial includes a sample file you can download to try out yourself.

Continue reading "Make a PDF portfolio with interactive rollovers." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 04:20 PM | Permalink

Adobe's pen tool works pretty much the same across Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. Yet, as important as this ubiquitous tool is, many people get confused with how to handle certain tasks, and the differences between the various pen symbols.

Adobe Pen Tool Cheatsheet.pdf

CreativeTechs' resident Adobe Certified Expert, Jason Hoppe, has put together a quick Adobe Pen Tool cheat-sheet to help keep some of the basic techniques straight. Download the PDF, and pass it along to a friend.

Continue reading "Adobe Pen Tool Cheatsheet." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 02:18 PM | Permalink

When you find yourself brainstorming a new logo, here's a quick way to roll through your font collection in InDesign while looking for inspiration.

Continue reading "Roll through your fonts in InDesign." »

Posted by Craig Swanson at 11:00 AM | Permalink