InDesign Secrets shared this excellent InDesign script that converts your layered InDesign file to a layered Photoshop file. Mike Rankin takes you through the simple steps in the article, but I’ll tell you from experience that this is the sort of thing that is best left to designers who are obsessive about details like naming and organizing their layers, regardless of what program they’re working in. And as Mike points out, this is something that is best left as the “final” step—as you won’t know (or have a whole lot of control over) what remains editable after the conversion.

Simply select the object(s) on your InDesign page that you want to export before hitting Command + E (File>Export) and choosing JPG from the drop-down menu. When the JPG Export dialog box appears, tick the Selection button at the top before setting your other JPG options. InDesign will export a flattened JPG the size of your object(s) at your specified resolution and color mode.

In any case, my friend discovered the work around, and shared with me where he found it. Russell Viers offers the solution, that requires little more than a quick PPD download and install. Again, I’m not sure why you would want to do this because your printer generally handles this in-RIP at their printing facility. You really need to know what you’re doing when you enter the settings.

Learn how to print PDF color seps from InDesign here.

I have all my Photoshop panels set up on my 30″ LCD in the perfect spot, and my keyboard shortcuts set up the way I prefer, so starting from scratch is a pain.

Thankfully, John Nack (Adobe Photoshop Product Manager) shared a script that one of the Adobe engineers wrote to export and/or import your customized Workspaces. You can download the Workspaces script here. Details can be found in this post on John Nack’s blog.