Adobe has updated the bulk of their Creative Cloud apps such as InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Premiere. Rather than list all the changes, I’ve linked to an update list provided by Macrumors.com. Some of the additions to Photoshop are really interesting, and InDesign seems a bit speedier. Another nice little update from Adobe.
Category: Adobe Apps
Photoshop CC to add Artboards (pages) feature
Learn how to use InDesign’s Liquid Layout rules to simplify cross-platform design
When you live in the modern-day design world, it’s not often that you design a piece destined for print that won’t eventually be found online. To truly create a piece that can live in both worlds, you have to format the file to work in print, as well as multiple mobile screen sizes. This is where Adobe InDesign’s Alternate & Liquid Layout features can help.
I offer you two great articles over at CreativePro that cover the use of InDesign’s Alternate/Liquid Layouts.
Alternate Layouts lets you have multiple layouts—of different sizes and orientations—all contained in one single document. What’s that you say…you don’t create digital publications? Not to fear! Alternate Layouts are a great way to create multiple layouts—destined for print or digital or a little of each—that share the same text and images. Maybe you have a campaign that includes posters, postcards, table tents, and door hangers that all share common elements. Or maybe you have a print version and a digital version of your client’s novel and you want to avoid having to maintain two documents when the editorial changes start rolling in. This is a job for Alternate Layouts!
Getting to know Photoshop’s Content Aware tools
Adobe Photoshop has some powerful tools for moving, cloning and extending your image in the form of it’s Content Aware tools. If you’re unfamiliar with them, take a look at these two brief video tutorials from Adobe.TV. These are some fantastic tools I use quite often.
Using Content Aware Patch
Using Content Aware Move and Extend
Adobe discontinues Photoshop Touch
Adobe is getting to be a bit like Google in the way they introduce and subsequently kill new products. Photoshop Touch for iOS and Android will cease to receive any support as of May 28th, and is the latest of a handful of mobile apps Adobe killed off after a short life. Of all their mobile attempts, Photoshop Touch was probably the most useful.
The good news is Adobe is planning on releasing a new app to replace Photoshop Touch codenamed Project Rigel later this year.
Moving stylized text from Word to InDesign
Creative Pro writer, Jamie McKee, shares the ins-and-outs of getting stylized text from MS Word to Adobe InDesign without a lot of fuss.*
We all get MS Word files from a client for placement in a brochure, booklet, newsletter, or magazine. We end up having to reformat the text by hand more often than not. But there is a better way, which Jamie goes into.
*That being said, I find Jamie’s solution to be more trouble than it’s worth by an order of magnitude. The problems with his methods are:
A) you have to go through the trouble of setting up the style sheets in word, being careful to name them the same as the ones you’re using in InDesign.
B) you have to do that for every Word file, because…
C) your client isn’t going to bother using your stupid Word file anyway
Now don’t get me wrong, his solution will work if you have a technically savvy client, or you work in an in-house design shop such as a magazine, etc. But the real-world realities are that it’s rare that you’ll find a client that will not make a mess out of this otherwise simple process.
But take a look at the article, because it’s quite informative. Even if your client refuses to use your perfectly stylized Word file, it’ll show you how to at least take some of the work out of the manual stylizing process.
Video Tutorial: How to add interactivity to your Adobe InDesign document
Learn how to add interactivity to an InDesign document, and export it as an interactive PDF file with this quick AdobeTV video tutorial.
Create color themes for use in all your Adobe CC apps
The Adobe Creative Cloud apps have a (fairly) new panel called Adobe Color Themes, which allows you to browse, create, save and use color themes in all your Adobe apps. Formerly known as Kuler, Color Themes allows you to browse a wide selection of pre-made color themes, or create your own using the Panel’s color mixer. Once you’re happy with your color theme, you can save it to your Creative Cloud account so the theme is available in InDesign, Illustrator or Photoshop.
You can find the Adobe Color Themes Panel under the Window menu. It’s fairly easy to figure out how to use just by playing around with it, so I won’t bother going into details here. It’s much more fun to just play around with it, but if you feel the need you can view a video tutorial here.
I don’t know how I missed this feature when it was introduced, but I’ve been using it for a while now and it’s a real time saver, and a great color inspiration tool.
How to deal with disappearing white text & objects when printing
Your design is done and you’re printing your file. Then you see it. Some white object or text simply refuses to print. You’ve tried printing directly from Adobe Illustrator, you’ve placed the object into InDesign and printing from there, and you’ve even tried saving it as a PDF. But no luck, that object still won’t print. I’ve seen this happen a ton of times. In almost every case, it’s an object created in Adobe Illustrator—usually a logo.
More often than not, the problem is simply that the object is set to overprint in Illustrator. To fix the problem, select the object in Illustrator, open the Attributes Panel, and make sure the Overprint Fill (and/or Overprint Stroke) checkbox is NOT ticked.
It happens for a variety of reasons, and it’s easily missed. If you’re working in Adobe Illustrator or InDesign, you can check to see if you’ll have the problem by turning on the Preview Overprint feature found under the View menu in both apps.
Photoshop Smart Objects: linked vs. embedded
Using Photoshop Smart Objects is a great way to work non-destructively. You can embed a Smart Object directly in a Photoshop file or link to a separate file and update it and reuse it in multiple projects.
I recently had a co-worker ask what they were and why I use them. I had a difficult time explaining it, so when I came across this video tutorial, I quickly fired-off a link. It’s a great walk-through for those who’ve never used them.