Clint Funk, fearless leader, was back with us again for this second look at the Creative Suite, following our May meeting on InDesign® CS2 at the Apple Store. July’s meeting focused on the “other” key CS2 apps, Photoshop and Illustrator.
Jennifer Mindel showed us the latest in Photoshop CS2, starting with a new twist on workspaces — a set of nine workspace help commands, representing major capabilities in the program. Choosing commands like Color and Tonal Correction, Printing and Proofing, or Working with Type, you’ll see all the related command names, highlighted in a single color throughout the menus, that help you accomplish those tasks. More on interface changes — Tile Vertically and Tile Horizontally commands from Window>Arrange let you put multiple open images or multiple windows of the same view in parallel view. Want to add type to your image? Just like in InDesign CS2, the Font menu now shows your font names in wysiwyg mode, as well as displaying icons for OpenType®, PostScript®, and TrueType fonts.
Jennifer gave us an introduction to the Bridge, “control central” and media asset manager for locating files for use in Creative Suite apps, plus a lot more. For Photoshop users, the Bridge replaces and enhances the popular file browser of the last two Photoshop versions. For example, you can now open your camera raw files right from the Bridge. And the big news is that you can batch-process multiple camera raw files by shift-clicking them in the Bridge and then choosing File>Open in Camera Raw — a huge production gain. The full-screen Camera Raw dialog features tools at the top and a real-time histogram. Click the Select All button and then the Synchronize button below to see a dialog with many options for types of corrections you can apply across the board, such as exposure, shadows, brightness, contrast, and so on. Changes you make can be saved right in the dialog to individual files in a variety of formats, including .dng, the universal camera raw format known as a “digital negative.”
Next she showed the vanishing point filter, heralded as a “revolutionary” new feature because it lets you render type and other cloned or transformed pixels so they match the visual perspective of your original image. For her first example, Jennifer showed how the words “JENNIFER TOWER” could follow the perspective of a black skyscraper façade. She set the type in a bold sans serif font, adding layer styles for bevel and emboss as well as a drop- shadow.
Next, she rasterized the line of type and then copied it to the clipboard for later use. Working on a duplicate of the background layer, she then completed the task with the Filter>Vanishing Point command, opening to another
full-screen dialog with its own tools. Using the Create Plane tool, she established a perspective plane by marking the four nodes of the building’s front-perspective façade, drawing the corners of this grid so that the blue grid lines exactly matched and overlaid the perspective of that face. After that, she pasted the line of type and then moved it into position within the grid, automatically following the building’s perspective. Voilà!
In a second phase with the Vanishing Point dialog, she slid a copy of that type from the broad front face of the skyscraper, call it the “A” face, over to the adjoining side face, call that the “B” face, so that again the type followed the perspective, only this time a lot more foreshortened. The first step here was to extend the grid she created earlier so that it overlaid the “B” face by command-dragging a node. Amazing to see that grid automatically follow the vanishing point of the perpendicular face, based on the angles specified with the first grid.
For the last act of her wizardry, Jennifer used that extended grid to position a copy of the type so that its perspective perfectly conformed to that shorter face. She first marked out an area of pixels surrounding the type using the filter’s Marquee tool. And, of course, the marquee automatically followed the grid perspective. Then dragging out a copy of the type, she slid it “perpendicularly” across to the side face so convincingly that the type seemed to almost diminish into thin air. Using similar methods on another image, she even extended a skyscraper higher by at least a third more floors, beautifully following the perspective vanishing into the sky.
Rich Carroll took over the helm to show the hottest spots in Illustrator CS2. You can now get acquainted with the new features of CS2 by using the new Demonstrator app. When you click “Show me what’s new” from the Welcome screen, it first takes you to the OS X system preference for universal access so you can turn on “Enable access for assisted devices.” Then in Demonstrator, choose from six topic areas, including Control Palette, Live Paint (four topics) and Live Trace to see words being typed into a small palette, along with an Audition voice-over soundtrack, stepping you through the actions to show off the new goodies. Menus open, and options on palettes are checked as the expert demonstrates step by step. To stop the demo, just move the mouse.
Live Paint is one of the biggest treats because it gets you past the hurdle of repeatedly selecting each shape and then getting a color to fill or stroke it. You can even color the intersections of overlapped shapes without any extra steps. Skip Pathfinder Divide — it all happens so easily. First select all the shapes you want to color, and then grab the Live Paint Bucket tool (K) and click on any of the selected shapes to pass color into that area and to make that set of selected shapes a Live Paint object. As you pass your mouse over the individual shapes within the Live Paint object, any shape under your mouse that you can color is outlined in red — closed shapes only. Once you create a Live Paint object, you don’t even need to select it next time around — just choose a color and go. Then the neatest part of all is what happens when you select and move any of the overlapped shapes with the Direct Select tool. The intersection shapes are dynamically changing shape as you drag, while still retaining the original fill color. That’s where the “live” part comes in.
Live Trace is a great complement to Live Paint and a terrific way to start your work. It’s a lot like Adobe Streamline. Remember that one? Though Illustrator has had an autotrace tool for years, Live Trace is a quantum leap beyond. When you place a bitmap image, like the line art “Adobe Superman” Rich placed, the Control palette has a Live Trace button. With one click your artwork is converted to vectors. But because it’s “live,” you can keep changing the parameters of how the vectors are made, changing thinner lines to thicker, using the density value, for instance. Undo not necessary, just change the parameters and it auto-updates. Working with his grayscale hotrod file, Rich showed how you can use the Live Trace presets to convert grayscale or color images to vectors, not just line art. Presets include Color 6, Color 16, Grayscale, Comic, Technical Drawing, Inked Drawing, etc. Then when you want to work with editable paths, click the Expand button on the Control palette, which also breaks the link to the source file. Rich showed how easy it is to work with a placed image: First slam it with Live Trace, and then frill it up with Live Paint — and you’re done!
A few other things. Like in InDesign CS, you can now in Illustrator choose whether your colored strokes lie to the inside of the path, to the outside, or smack in the middle, the longtime default. Though Rich wasn’t so enamored of the new Control palette, à la InDesign, many may appreciate skipping the palettes and finding what you need in one place. Thank goodness, Illustrator now has custom workspaces like InDesign and Photoshop CS. But no stashed palettes like InDesign’s. You can place a .psd file with layer comps, turning on or off the desired layer comp in the Place dialog. Doesn’t support choosing layers, just the comps. Went over some of the new preferences like Appearance of Black, just like in InDesign CS2, affecting how rich black can look on screen to differentiate it from flat black. Can no longer apply a filter to a linked image — got to embed it first from the Links palette.
After the break, Tom Petrillo showed us the Bridge, which displays all the contents of a selected folder, even non-Adobe files. You have virtually total control of the thumbnails and icons display. There’s a slider for smaller-bigger, and you can drag items aroundadd colors and stars to group and “rate” them (no longer “flag”). You can move files around, or create a copy by option-dragging them. Or drag a file into a folder at the same level or to a side panel showing your OS folder structure. Can’t get to the Bridge via Acrobat®, by the way. Metadata is big. See a list of the fonts and swatches for InDesign files in the Metadata panel. Type in your own metadata for a file. Save swatches for exchange to share color palettes with your Workgroup. Tom showed a QuickTime movie in action in the preview panel.
If you own the Suite, you’ve got the Bridge Center. If you just have a “point product,” then you have the Bridge, a slimmer version. For example, the Bridge Center lets you see recent folders and recent files, and lets you save groups of files so they can all be opened with a single click. Tom showed the new Adobe stock photo service, where you can search the collections of five stock houses to get royalty-free images. Then click the Get Price and Keywords button. Clicking the Download Comp button gives you a low-res version with no watermark. You can rename the image and it still tracks it. Spot your image in Links, where a special icon flags it as Adobe Stock Photo. Tom also showed Version Cue®, the application few have been using, which let’s you keep track of your versions in any CS app and choose a new file to be the current version. Though individuals can use it, its main purpose is to help workgroups stay on the same page.
Thanks to our wonderful presenters, we got the inside scoop on where to look in our latest fave programs. The evening was “capped” off <ha-ha> with a raffle and many lucky winners. Join us next time, most likely September 8, when Anne-Marie Concepción debuts her new book, InDesign CS/CS2 Breakthroughs.
— Yours truly, Eda Warren
Adobe Certified Training Provider and
Adobe Certified Expert on InDesign CS
http://www.go-training.com
