Rocky Mountain Training | Adobe Training Classes in Denver

Stop the Blinking and Winking

Have you ever taken a rapid series of group shots, but can't find a single image where every single person is looking at the camera, eyes open and smiling? If you are looking for a quick way to combine two mediocre portraits into one perfect portrait, try the new Auto-Align Layers in Adobe Photoshop CS3.

Take a look at the two images below. The one on top is better of the boy, but the girl has her eyes closed. In the second picture she looks better, but he's got one eye closed.

There are many ways to combine these two pictures using Photoshop, but the single most efficient technique is to combine both images into one file, each on their own layer. Then, using the new Auto-Align Layers command you can let Photoshop line up both images with each other, and then just use a mask to punch through to the underlying image.

Let's give it a try...

1. Open Adobe Photoshop CS3.
2. Open up two images you would like to combine.
3. Using the Move tool, Shift + drag one image into the other file. (Using the Shift key as you drag centers the incoming layer in the new window.)
4. Double-click each layer thumbnail on the layers palette and give each layer a unique name.
5. Drag the thumbnails up or down, so that the top layer is the better image, but the bottom layer has a better expression on one or more of the subjects.
6. Select both layers by clicking on one and then shift-clicking the other.
   
   
7. Choose Edit > Auto-Align Layers, and set Projection to Auto. (This allows Photoshop to align two rapid sequence photos, making it easy to remove the goofy expressions from the top layer and expose the better expression from the bottom layer).
   
   
   
8. Intro. level PhotoShop users may opt to use the Eraser tool to carefully erase the girl's face from the top layer, but for the Intermediate to Advanced user, a Layer Mask is a much better solution because it is non-destructive. To use the Layer Mask, select the top layer, and choose Layer > Layer Mask > Reveal All.
   
   
9. Press the letter D on the keyboard to reset your color chips to Black and White.
   
   
10. Use the Brush tool with a soft brush to paint away to the underlying layer, exposing the image underneath.
    
    
11. If you remove too much of the top layer, just press the letter X on the keyboard to switch your colors so that White is on top, and paint back in pixels from the top layer.
12. When everything is perfect, flatten the layers and you have created a fabulous portrait out of two mediocre ones.
    
    

There are many ways to combine these two pictures using Photoshop, but the single most efficient technique is to combine both images into one file, each on their own layer. Then, using the new Auto-Align Layers command you can let Photoshop line up both images with each other, and then just use a mask to punch through to the underlying image.

Let's give it a try...

1. Open Adobe Photoshop CS3.
2. Open up two images you would like to combine.
3. Using the Move tool, Shift + drag one image into the other file. (Using the Shift key as you drag centers the incoming layer in the new window.)
4. Double-click each layer thumbnail on the layers palette and give each layer a unique name.
5. Drag the thumbnails up or down, so that the top layer is the better image, but the bottom layer has a better expression on one or more of the subjects.
6. Select both layers by clicking on one and then shift-clicking the other.
   
   
7. Choose Edit > Auto-Align Layers, and set Projection to Auto. (This allows Photoshop to align two rapid sequence photos, making it easy to remove the goofy expressions from the top layer and expose the better expression from the bottom layer).
   
   
   
8. Intro. level PhotoShop users may opt to use the Eraser tool to carefully erase the girl's face from the top layer, but for the Intermediate to Advanced user, a Layer Mask is a much better solution because it is non-destructive. To use the Layer Mask, select the top layer, and choose Layer > Layer Mask > Reveal All.
   
   
9. Press the letter D on the keyboard to reset your color chips to Black and White.
   
   
10. Use the Brush tool with a soft brush to paint away to the underlying layer, exposing the image underneath.
    
    
11. If you remove too much of the top layer, just press the letter X on the keyboard to switch your colors so that White is on top, and paint back in pixels from the top layer.
12. When everything is perfect, flatten the layers and you have created a fabulous portrait out of two mediocre ones.
    
    

Dreamweaver CS3: Navigation Menus

Should you use a JavaScript Navigation Bar or a Spry Menu Widget for your menu navigation?

Let's begin by saying that both the JavaScript navigation bars and Spry Menu Widget techniques can be used to create attractive, functional menu bar navigation systems.

Using menu commands built into Dreamweaver CS3, the creation process for is both simple and straightforward. Of course, the code produced in the background is quite complex, but for those of you staying in Design view, who cares? The best part of Dreamweaver is that you get to produce very high-end coding with a point and click interface, and almost no typing-who doesn't love that?

So which one do you pick? I'd say go with the Spry Menu Widget, for one specific reason: we all want our Web pages to be picked up and indexed by search engines so that our sites will come up on a Web search. Search engines have a hard time with JavaScript-driven menus. Spry menus are just a fancy display of an unordered list, and so they are easy for the search engines to understand and index correctly.

For those of you spending time and money on Search Engine Optimization (SEO), this is a quick and easy way to get more bang for your buck. Here's how it works:

1. Place your cursor at the position where you would like to place your navigation bar
2. Choose Insert > Spry > Spry Menu Bar
3. Select a horizontal or vertical orientation
   
   
   
   Click OK
4. Edit the navigation names directly on screen or, if you click on the blue Spry Menu Bar tab at the top right of the menu, you can edit in the Properties Inspector.
   
   You can add and delete menu levels, as well as edit the wording at any time.
   
   
   
   What was that about these being a fancy view of an unordered list? Click the Turn Styles Off button in the Properties Inspector and you'll see what I mean. You can edit the lists in this view as well.
   
   
   
   Wish they looked a bit prettier? After you click the Turn Styles On button to return to the menu view, edit the style with CSS.

Wow, functional navigation bars in just a few easy steps, and the links are accessible to the search engines. Pretty amazing.

Adobe Bridge: Create Quick and Easy Contact Sheets for Your CDs

How frustrating it is to sort through a stack of photo CDs, each with a written label like the CD on the left? Wouldn’t it be cool to make a contact sheet that fits in the front of your CD case, to make the searching process much more visual? Especially if it was a quick and painless process?

   

I think so! Here’s how…

1. Open Adobe Bridge (comes free with stand-alone Photoshop and with the Creative Suite).
2. Navigate to the folder that contains the images you have put on the CD. You can optionally select key images, or make the contact sheet from all the images in the folder.
3. Select Tools > Photoshop > Contact Sheet II
4. Under Source Images, you can pick Folder (to generate the thumbnails from all the files in the folder) or Selected Images from Bridge (to generate the thumbnails from only the images you selected prior to opening up the dialog box).
   
   
    
5. Under Document, set the units to Inches, and the width and height to 4.75 x 4.75. The resolution can be fairly low, i.e., 150 ppi. I prefer to flatten the layers to keep the file size down.
   
   
6. Under thumbnails, decide how many columns and rows of photos you would like on the contact sheet. (Too many and you’ll need a loop to see them!)
   
   
7. Decide if you would like the filename of each file to appear as a caption below each photo. And if so, pick a font and a size. (I chose not to use the captions in my example above.)
   
   

It seems to me that most creative professionals are visual folks, and this is a great way to visually catalog your CDs.

©2008 Barbara Binder of Rocky Mountain Training

Using Find /Change InDesign CS3

In my twenty plus years of laying out publications, I’ve learned a series of lessons:

Lesson One: People preparing documents for me to place into a page layout program do some very wacky things in their files. Besides being unable to resist formatting their word processing files (even though they hired me to format their files for them) they also add all sorts of double spaces, triple spaces, tab space space tab sequences,  tabs in the middle of paragraphs, hard returns in usual places, and on and on and on. 

Lesson Two: Whatever strange thing someone is putting in their files, they tend to do it consistently.

Lesson Three: They really don’t listen when I try to tell them how I want the files to be prepared. Or they pretend to listen, and then do their own thing anyway.

So what’s a girl to do? Accept the files they way they are submitted, and then run a series of Find/Change sequences on them to clean them up and get them ready for my formatting. This works in any page layout program, from FrameMaker to Quark to InDesign. However, InDesign CS3 has added some particularly clever features to the Find and Change dialog box that really save some time. Here are three of my favorites:

1.       Multiple Space to Single Space. In lieu of running a series of searches to weed out all extra spaces, I can now just pick this one preset. The Find What line looks very scary, so just don’t look too closely. Basically, that string of characters is searching for multiple spaces of any kind (spacebar spaces, tabs, non-breaking spaces, etc.). Run the search and poof! All extra spaces are gone.

2.       Multiple Return to Single Return. Another preset, this one pulls out all the extra hard returns.

3.       Remove Trailing Whitespace. Trailing whitespace refers to one or more spaces at the end of a paragraph, between the final punctuation and the hard return. Most of the time these spaces don’t cause any problems, but sometimes they don’t fit on the same line as the punctuation and they force a new line or even a new page. For long documents, this can be a real nightmare.

Here’s my workflow: place all the files into my InDesign layout. Open the Find/Change dialog box from the Edit menu. Select each of these three queries in succession from the Query menu at the top of the dialog box, while setting the Search parameter to Document, so that you can clean up all the files at one time. Change All.

Next: more on Find/Change to streamline your workflow.

©2008 Barbara Binder of Rocky Mountain Training

FrameMaker vs InDesign: Which One is a Better Fit for You?

You’ve been producing publications in Word for years, but are finding that your files are just getting too complicated and difficult to handle. You are ready to make the move to a professional page layout program and turn to Adobe Systems, the world leader in publications software. Adobe offers two programs specifically for publishing multi-page documentation: FrameMaker 8 and InDesign CS3. Which one do you chose?

The two programs share a number of features. Both allow you to design the page structure with master pages, including the ability to pull live data off the page to display chapter and section headings for quick reference. Both programs support paragraph styles and character styles to make quick work of text formatting. If tables are prevalent in your publications, you’ll be glad to know that both programs offer table styles to quickly and uniformly lay out your tables.

So how do you figure out which one to purchase and use for your work? InDesign excels at shorter, multi-story publications such as brochures, flyers, newsletters and magazines. It is chock-full of high-end typography controls such as automatic ligatures, tracking, kerning, glyphs, hanging punctuation, drop-caps, and more. FrameMaker can produce the multi-story pubs, but it is very cumbersome. FrameMaker excels at laying out long, multi-chapter publications. With the strong and flexible numbering options, you can make quick work of table, figure and section numbering, plus you can add cross-references, equations, conditional text, all sorts of hypertext links, and user variables.

Adobe states that InDesign has “robust” long document support. It does have some of the features mentioned above, but in my opinion, it still falls short for the really long, complex technical documents. If you are a technical writer, working on product documentation, I’d steer you towards FrameMaker. For the rest of you, the wide and varied features of InDesign will probably be a better fit. Or do what I do, buy both and then you can chose the best fit for each individual job!

©2008 Barbara Binder of Rocky Mountain Training

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Are you looking for Adobe InDesign training in Denver? How about Photoshop instruction, or a class on Illustrator?
    Barbara Binder of Rocky Mountain Training offers instruction in the Denver metro area, and beyond, on the Adobe Creative Suite 3 (CS3), plus Adobe Framemaker and InCopy. As an Adobe Certified Instructor with more than 20 years of classroom experience, Barbara promises to deliver top-quality Adobe training at an unbeatable price.