If you’ve upgraded to InDesign CS2, and you use drop shadows, you have have noticed a new feature in the drop shadow dialog box. It’s called Noise. To understand how valuable this addition is, take a look at a piece you’ve done with drop shadows on a white background, or a solid color background. Notice any banding? Does the shadow not “blend” with the background? Does it ever look like the drop shadow is simply another colored object? Enter Noise. What adding Noise does to your drop shadow is it breaks up the drop shadow color into random dots, rather than a smooth gradient of color. Between using Multiply and adding Noise, your drop shadows should look much more natural, and blend much better with background colors.
Getting better drop shadows in InDesign
The problem is that now when you hit Command + J to jump to a page, you can’t because you’re using Section options. The way around it is to use the standard Command + J, but instead of typing just “3” you must use +3 instead. The + (plus key) tells ID that you want to go to the absolute document page 3… which is actually page 1 in your page numbering scheme. This is somewhat confusing, and quite frankly, I find it very unintuitive, but once you get used to doing it, it’s still faster than going to the pages palette and scrolling through a long document to get to the page you want.
When you have content placed in a frame in Adobe InDesign, you can press Command + Option + C to resize the frame to the size of its contents – text or graphics. You can also hit Command + Option + E to stretch a graphic to fill a frame. If you want to keep the graphic scale proportional, add the Shift key. Once your graphics are placed in a content frame and sized to your liking, you can center the graphic in the frame by pressing Command + Shift + E. These commands may seem obvious, because they’re in the menus and in the manual, but I’ve found that many designers and production artists are so used to Quark’s key commands that they forget to learn new ones.