So this one is a real quick look, taking the rotation tool in Illustrator and looking at a quick and simple way of changing the centre of rotation.

So this is what I’ve got, a simple triangle shape.

Hit R to quickly bring up the rotate tool. Doing so brings up an aqua cross hair to show where the centre of rotation is, this isn’t like Photoshop where you can drag it to where you want it. Instead hit Shift + R where you want the centre to be, if you want to reset it you can just pick another tool and bring up the rotate tool again.

You can press Alt + R to bring up this rotate tool dialog box and change the centre of rotation.

Make sure you check Preview to see what you’re doing. And that’s about it really.

Quick and easy.

Do you ever draw something in Illustrator, whether it’s a shape or a freehand illustration, set all the stroke weights then resize it and find that the stroke weight is the same as it was before resizing? Then this week’s quick look has a handy hint for you.

I came across how to set it so that the stroke weight scales with the paths when I was working on my Fashion brief. Thought it might be handy if you don’t want to manually change each stroke weight.

Above I have three circles with different stroke weights (5pt, 7pt & 10pt) when you go to resize them their stroke widths remain the same, which when they’re really small isn’t very suitable.

To stop this simply right click > Transform > Scale… to bring up the following dialog box.

You’ve probably guessed it by the highlighted check box that you need to enable Scale Strokes & Effects, this applies to free hand scaling (when you’re dragging the frame corner handles) as well as the effects of this dialog box. Now when I go to scale it the stroke weights have scaled as well (to 2.032pt, 2.845pt & 4.064pt).

Well that was quick and easy.

So I thought I’d do a little quick look at InDesign as I found this little trick quite useful. InDesign’s underline has a lot more depth than a simple button so I’m going to go into the options InDesign has built into it, you can even achieve a dynamically updating box behind the type.

So just clicking underline normally does a pretty standard underline, however if you Alt + Click then you bring up a whole new dialog box which has plenty more options to it.

Obviously to make things easy (and for it to work) you should check Underline on and Preview so you can see what you’re doing in real time. The options are pretty basic and are as follows:

Weight: Thickness of the line in point size.
Offset: The gap between line and the bottom of the text.
Type: A variety of presets are available such as dotted and dashed.
Colour: The colour of the line, by default it’s text colour but it can be changed in which case the Tint becomes available, this is simply the strength of the colour, but this isn’t the same as the opacity.
Gap Colour: This never seems available but I guess it’s pretty explanatory.

To achieve a dynamic black box behind the text you simply need to change the text colour to white, the colour to black (for example), set a really heavy weight and a negative offset to bring the underline closer to the text, like so, the text in this example is 72pt Helvetica.

You can of course change the colour of the underline to imitate a yellow highlighter look like below useful if you need to highlight some notes that were given to you on the computer.

Update

Just a quick update, I forgot to say you can use Character Styles to make this a one click job. With the text selected go to the Character Styles palette (Window > Type & Tables > Character Styles or Shift + F11) click the New icon and it’s saved it, you can rename it by right clicking and selecting Edit “Character Style 1″. When creating a character style it saves every property related to the text including the font, point size, kerning etc.

Well that was nice and quick.

Below you can see the final outcome, as you can see it’s simply a camera panning across a rotating planet model but you can take what you learn here much further and create something like my final animation.

This tutorial will use Photoshop, Premiere Pro and After Effects. Photoshop for the image editing, Premiere Pro for animation sequences, audio and exporting and After Effects to create the animated scene. Quite a lot to get through so let’s get going. I’ll write another tutorial soon to take it further, adding new elements and doing some DVD authoring using Adobe’s Encore software.

The Photos and Photoshop

Now I’m not expecting you to have a planet model on a rotating base just hanging around so just for you I’m going to include a 180 photo set for one of my planets that I used for my final animation so you can follow along. You can download these files here, it also includes the Star background I used. Don’t go using them commercially, as if you would.

If you’re interested the planet is a styrofoam ball with dry brushed paper mache on it, the planet is called Iron. This is then mounted on a skewer, slotted into my rotating base, a bit of steel piping with ball bearings, and then placed in front of a bit of blue card, lit with two desk lamps and rotated 2 degrees at a time.

I then took all these photos into Photoshop, cropped them, colour corrected and removed the base out of them. That’s all I used Photoshop so if you’re using my ones then you won’t really need Photoshop.

The Animation Sequence and Premiere Pro

Sure you could just use After Effects to make the animation but I found it easier to have Premiere Pro do it for me. I won’t go into much detail because I’m hoping you will have read how to do it all in my previous tutorial.

Create a new project, give it a new name and click OK. In sequences choose the DV-PAL Widescreen 48kHz preset, you can make it bigger if you like but the included assets are set up for that size. Click OK to continue.

Now find the folder called ‘Planet Photos’ in the resources pack and drag it into the Premiere Pro project files. Once it’s finished importing them drag the folder to the beginning of the timeline. Save it and then close the project, that’s all you need to do in Premiere Pro.

Notes

• Premiere Pro make sequence animation easy
• New project, DV-PAL Widescreen 48kHz
• Drag in planet photos, drag to timeline
• Save and close

Importing Assets into After Effects

Now the reason you just made a Premiere Pro project is so you can use Adobe’s Dynamic Link to import it into After Effects and use it in the animation. You can do the Premiere Pro bit in After Effects but the only way I know is tedious, and Premiere Pro does it instantly.

After Effects open with an untitled project so go to Composition > New Composition and under the Basic tab choose PAL D1/DV Widescreen Square Pixel and set the Duration (at the bottom) to 0:00:20:00, that’s 20 seconds. Timecodes can be represented as h:mm:ss:ff where f is frames. Give the composition a name if you want. Save your project so you’re not working on an untitled project.

Now to bring in your assets, go to File > Import > Adobe Premiere Pro Project… and find the planet project we just made by default it will be in the Adobe folder in your Documents under Premiere Pro. When it brings up the Premiere Pro Importer choose Sequence 01 and deselect Import Audio.

This will then bring in all the photos and a sequence file in a folder in the Project palette. Drag in the Star.jpg file from the Resources Pack as well.

Notes

• Composition > New Composition, PAL D1/DV Widescreen Square Pixel
• Timecodes — h:mm:ss:ff where f is frames
• File > Import > Adobe Premiere Pro Project… brings in all Premiere Pro assets and sequences

Making an After Effects Camera

The last to do before we begin is create the camera that we’ll use to pan across our scene. Go to Layer > New > Null Object… and Layer > New > Camera… when it brings up the Camera options dialog just click OK and it will come up with a warning about there being no 3D layers, that’s alright, click OK on that too.

Now we have to link the Camera to the Null Object so we can use the Null Object to key frame the movement of the Camera, this can be done by left click and dragging the spiral like thing (called a  pick whip) on the Camera 1 layer and dragging it to the Null 1 layer and letting go.

Now we need to turn on the 3D setting for the Null 1 layer, just click in the box below the cube icon. By turning on the 3D settings for the layer we will be able to move it around in three dimensions which we will use to add some depth, although I don’t use it in this tutorial this can be used to add depth of field.

Notes

• Layer > New > Null Object…
• Layer > New > Camera… keep the settings the same
• Pick whip link them together, set 3D settings

Make the Scene with After Effects

Now it’s time to set up the scene, drag in the Star.jpg file, turn on the 3D setting as this is going to be the background we want to put it as far away as possible, this way as the camera pans it will move more slowly as you’d expect because of the Parallax effect. To do this you can drag the blue handle on the movement tool or select the layer, press P to bring up the position and give it a large Z value. I’ve got it set to 1100.

Find the Premiere Pro sequence, probably Sequence 01, and drag that in as well. Now in the timeline you will notice we want a 20 second animation but the planet rotation is only a bit longer than 7 seconds. No worries, just copy and paste the layer a couple of times and to keep them all together we need to Pre-Compose them, select them as all and use Ctrl+Shift+C (Cmd+Shift+C) to do this. Give the Pre-Comp a name if you like and double click it to open it up.

Now it’s just a matter of dragging them along so they follow on one after the other, you can use the Zoom Slider at the bottom of the timeline to make this easier, make sure there aren’t any gaps.

When you go back to your original composition you will see that it is now long enough to be rotating for the entire 20 seconds. Time to Chroma Key it now to remove the blue background. With the Planet Pre-Comp selected go to Effect > Keying > Keylight (1.2) and this will open the Effect Controls palette in the place of the Project palette on the left.

Above is the final results, first you use the eye dropper next to Screen Colour to grab the blue background then Screen Gain and Balance to fine tine it all to remove the background completely. Screen Colour is the main one as that removes any remaining blue and Screen Balance fine tunes the edge of the planet model.

Turn on the 3D setting for the Planet Pre-Comp and send it back a little bit so it’s not just following the camera. Just in case you’re copying me exactly I put mine to 350 on the Z axis.

If we were to export it now we would have a rotating planet, which is all well and good, but not as interesting as it could be, so let’s crack on with some key framing.

Notes

• Ctrl+Shift+C — Pre-Compose
• Effect > Keying > Keylight (1.2)
• Set colour with eye dropper, Screen Gain and Balance fine tune it

Key Framing with After Effects

Animating in After Effects is done by setting a series of keyframes between which After Effects automatically tweens, meaning if you give it a starting position and an end position it will evenly move between the two points. The pace at which it moves it determined by how far apart the key frames are on the timeline, the smaller the separation, the faster it moves.

As I’ve kept this tutorial pretty simple all we need to do is set the starting position and the end position of the camera to create a panning motion. We move the Camera layer by moving the Null layer as they are tied together so select the Null layer and press P to bring up the position. To key frame a layer you’ve got to click the little stop watch to the left of the layer property.

Make sure you’re at the start of the timeline when you do this, then you’ll want to move the camera to its starting position, this can be done three ways. With the layer selected click and drag the red arrow in the composition, click and drag on the numerical value or type a value in. I set my camera’s starting position to 971, 288, 0.

Now drag the timeline slider to the end and set your camera’s end position, After Effects will automatically create a new keyframe if you change a keyframed property when not already over an existing keyframe. As you move the camera you will see it leaves behind a trail, this is the path that the tweening will follow.

To jump between keyframes you can use the arrows to the left of the layer name, the central diamond can be used to create a keyframe without changing a property first.

I set my final camera position to be –112, 288, 0.

Notes

• Use the Stopwatch to set the layer property to be keyframed
• After Effects automatically tweens between keyframes
• Changing a keyframed property automatically creates a keyframe
• Use the arrows to move between keyframes

RAM Preview in After Effects

When you have numerous assets on screen at once After Effects can struggle to play it back smoothly (press Space to start playing), it tells you in the top right what the frame rate is. To create a temporary preview you can use the RAM Preview, this loads the scene in your Work area slider into your RAM.

Depending on how much RAM you have you should probably only RAM preview a few seconds at a time with intensive scenes. To do this drag the Work Area slider to contain the area you want to preview and click the RAM preview button, this can be found on the right hand side.

After Effects will then load it into your memory, the green bar below the Work Area slider shows which frames have been rendered and play it back at the set frame rate, in this case 25 fps.

If everything look right then it’s time to load it into Premiere Pro and export it.

Exporting with Premiere Pro

Okay so with Premiere Pro open create a New Project, give it a name and click Ok and then choose the same preset as before, in this case that’s DV-PAL Widescreen 48kHz. If you don’t want to create a new project and use the existing one you can right click in the Project palette select New Item > Sequence… and choose the correct preset there.

Now to set up the Adobe Dynamic Link, go to File > Adobe Dynamic Link > Import After Effects Composition… and navigate to the After Effects Project file, usually in your Documents in the Adobe folder. Choose the main composition and not the one you made for the planet.

Use the icon to drag the file it imports into your Project palette into the timeline. Using Premiere Pro you could now add sound effects and music if you wanted but I’m going to leave mine the way it is, I already covered Sound in Premiere Pro in my last tutorial.

Now it’s time to export it go to File > Export > Media… and it will bring up the Export Settings window.

As we’ve been using Adobe presets the entire time it’s really easy to export this video but for some reason the file that came out played a bit odd so I used some custom settings to make it right. Using he H.264 format and the PAL DV Widescreen High Quality preset as a base I changed the following.

• Frame Width: 720px
• Frame Height: 576px
• Frame Rate: 25
• Level: 4.2 (this changes quite a few settings hence why I had to change them back)
• Target Bitrate: 2
• Maximum Bitrate: 4
• Set Key Frame Distance: 25

Click Ok, Start the Queue in Adobe Media Encoder and you’re done.

So I intend to make another tutorial where I take another look at this and go deeper into After Effects using such things as layer blending options, keyframing curved paths and more animated objects.

I decided to write a more full featured tutorial for this week and thought a good subject to cover would be making a stop motion animation in Premiere Pro which is also pretty similar to Final Cut Pro so if you know what to do in Premiere Pro you can apply your knowledge to FCP just change a few shortcuts.

In this tutorial I’m going to presume you have all the photos you need, this isn’t about animating, this is about the technical side of putting it together in a video program and exporting it for viewing and uploading to Vimeo (who let you upload one 720p video each week).

Before getting started in Premiere Pro you’ll need to have taken your photos, copied them onto your computer and (in this tutorial) made them 1920 x 1080. I do this because 1080p is the best HDTV resolution you can get and also because on its lowest setting my camera takes 1920 x 1200 pixel photos so it’s easy to batch resize and crop all my photos. To find out more about Photoshop Actions read Quick Look #5.

Setting up

Okay, now it’s time to load up Premiere Pro. I’m using CS4 but that shouldn’t effect anything we’ll be using really. Once loaded click New Project, which brings up this screen.

Give your project a file name and location and change Capture Format to HDV (we won’t be capturing but I like to do this anyway). The other tab deals with scratch disks: where Premiere Pro saves captured footage and its render files so it’s useful to have a fast hard drive with plenty of free space on it. Then click Ok.

Starting in the first tab choose the HDV 1080p24 preset, give the sequence a name, then in the next tab the preset should have set most things up but make sure it’s using the HDV 1080p editing mode, 23.976 frames per second and everything else should be fine. The third tab isn’t important as it’s easier to just add new tracks as you need them.

Then Premiere Pro will load everything up and present you with this screen, it won’t be exactly the same as I’ve resized some of my windows, which you can do my grabbing the corner of any of the palettes and making them the size you want.

There’s one more key stage before you start importing and that’s to set the default duration of a still image, otherwise you will have to change every photo after import. Go to Edit > Preferences > General… and you’ll get the screen below.

Now find the Still Image Default Duration (above, highlighted) and change it to what you want it to be. I use 2 frames so that my animations are 12 photos per second for a 24 frames per second video.

Notes

• HDV Capture Format
• HDV 1080p24, HDV 1080p, 23.978 fps
• Edit > Preferences > General… change Still Image Default Duration

Workspace

I’m just going to quickly go over the various areas in the Premiere Pro workspace so you know what I mean when I say timeline or canvas.

Importing

When you’re using Premiere Pro or any other video editor there are always three ways of doing things, the right click method, the menu method and another method usually some form of dragging. And that’s no different when it comes to importing. You can choose File > Import, right click in the Project palette and choose ‘Import…’ or drag the file or folder in from Explorer/Finder into the Project palette.

I chose to drag the folder containing my photos in from Explorer, Premiere Pro will tell you it’s Importing (above) and then they’ll appear in the Project palette along with any other assets your project uses.

It’s always useful to keep this organised so you can find things quickly, you can do this by creating Bins (folders) for each sort of asset, such as Stills, Video and Sound.

Once it’s all imported it’s time to drag all your photos into the timeline, this is as simple as selecting them all (Ctrl Click or Shift Click to select many) and dragging them into the Video 1 Timeline. Premiere Pro will then go through creating thumbnails which can take a little while depending on how many there are.

If you find that your photos are a tiny block on your timeline you can zoom in using the highlighted slider or use the keyboard shortcuts for Zoom In (=) and Zoom Out (-).

The red line above your photos in the Timeline means that playback hasn’t been rendered and won’t display at best quality. To render just press Enter on your keyboard. This dialog box will then come up while it renders and saves the created preview(s) to your scratch disk.

By default Premiere Pro plays everything once rendering is complete, if not then select the Canvas palette and press the Spacebar. Now that you’ve seen what you’ve got it’s time to edit it.

Notes

• Importing — File > Import, right click Import, drag and drop on Project palette
• Organise your Project palette with Bins, right click New Bin
• Drag files from Project palette into the Timeline to create your animation
• = Zoom In
• - Zoom Out
• Enter - Render
• Space — Play

Editing

How you edit it is really down to taste and what you want to do with it but I’ll tell you the basics of changing things and moving them around on the Timeline. We’ve already come across dragging things, but now it’s time to learn a bit more about different sorts of editing.

Overwrite Edit

This is the default form of editing; if you drag something or copy and paste it it will overwrite what’s after it to fit into the Timeline.

Insert Edit

Instead of overwriting something, an insert edit simply moves what comes after it out of the way to fit into the Timeline. When you’re dragging you can hold Ctrl to achieve this, or if you have something copied you use Ctrl + Shift + V to insert paste it.

Clear

The same applies to deleting, the default delete or ‘Clear’ (Backspace or Delete) will remove the video from the Timeline but leave behind a gap where it was.

Ripple Delete

A Ripple Delete (Alt + Backspace or Shift + Delete) will remove the video and close the gap.

You can use the extra Video Tracks to apply Video Transitions from the Effects palettes to your video, because individual photos represent a frame or two you can’t apply transitions directly to them, instead I use a black PNG image file and drag it into Video Track 2. Then I stretch it out and apply a Video Transition such as Cross Fade so that it fades out and acts like a traditional fade in or out.

Remember when dragging something into another video track to use the default Overwrite edit.

Keep rendering your work (Enter) so you can play it back and see how it plays out.

Beyond that I can’t tell you much more, once you’re happy with it we can add some sound to it.

Notes

• Insert Edit — Ctrl Drag or Ctrl + Shift + V to insert paste
• Ripple Delete — Alt + Backspace or Shift + Delete
• Enter — Render

Audio

Sound effects makes animations come alive so it’s important to find the right effects (or make your own). Currently I’m just making short Army men animations using Google to search for various gun and explosion sound effects that are free, whilst you might be paying for excellent quality royalty free sound effects. But the methods are the same either way.

As with importing images I just drag in the folder containing all my sound effects to the Project palette. And again it’s just about dragging the effects you want to where you want them on the Timeline, same editing techniques apply with Insert Edits and Ripple Deletes.

Use the directional keys when using the Timeline to advance one frame at a time or Shift + directional keys to advance 5 frames and to be accurate with your timings, once the playhead is at the right point drag your audio and by default it will Snap to the playhead.

If you download your sound effects from various places like me you might find that some sound effects can’t go in Audio Tracks with other effects, this is because they are not the same format, such as 5.1 Surround, Stereo or Mono etc. I just create as many tracks as necessary to layer my sound and create a rich atmosphere.

To create the correct sort of Audio Track just drag your sound file below all the other Audio Tracks on the Timeline and let go, Premiere Pro will automatically create the right track.

After a while I ended up with this; lots of sound effects and tracks.

Now it’s time to correct the Audio Levels to conform with TV regulations. I was taught to keep all sounds TV Safe at –6 dB, this way it also prevents any sounds from distorting as indicated by the colour of the Audio levels in the Audio Levels palette. The best way to make a sound loud is to make everything else quieter so people turn up their volume rather than distorting the loud sounds.

You could change the window layout to Audio by going through Window > Workspace > Audio but owing to the nature of loads of differently sourced SFX my tracks have wildly differing levels so I use Clip > Audio Options > Audio Gain… and change all instances of a particular effect to the same level.

This is the Audio Gain window, if your sound is maxing out the levels at 0 dB then you should Set Gain to –6db. But sound isn’t that simple so if there are lots of other sounds you will need to lower it to below –6dB so all the sounds don’t push it over –6db. Sometimes sounds are even louder than can be shown, it’s all a matter of experimenting to see how loud each sound is.

There are Audio Transitions to in the Effects palette, I always use the Constant Gain transition and adjust the size of it to what I need.

Once you’re happy with how it looks and sounds it’s time to Export it.

Notes

• Left and Right keys — Move the playhead one frame in the Timeline
• Shift + Left/Right — Move the playhead five frames in the Timeline
• –6db —  TV Safe Audio Broadcast
• Window > Workspace > Audio
• Clip > Audio Options > Audio Gain… to change sound audio levels

Exporting

Go through File > Export > Media… to bring up the Export Settings dialog box.

Now in this tutorial I’m going to presume you want to export a 1080p version and a Vimeo ready 720p version. With the Adobe Media Encoder we can queue up our render orders and get them all done before leaving our computer to render them.

1080p

So let’s start with the high quality version, we could of course just whack all the settings to highest and leave it at that, but there’s a point where you won’t see the difference and will end up with a huge file that might crash your video player.

So first I set it to use the H.264 Format then give it an Output name, set the destination as well and then:

Video Tab

• TV Standard: PAL video
• Frame Width & Height: 1920 x 1080 pixels
• Frame Rate: 23.976
• Pixel Aspect Ratio: Widescreen 16:9
• Bitrate Encoding: VBR, 1 Pass
• Target Bitrate: 20 Mbps (keep an eye on the estimated file size)
• Max Bitrate: 20 Mbps

Audio Tab

• Codec: AAC
• Output Channels: Stereo
• Frequency: 48 kHz
• Audio Quality: High
• Bitrate: 128 (more if you reckon you can hear the difference)

The items I haven’t listed I don’t fully understand and wouldn’t want to mislead you to believing I have the settings correct but they should be fine by default.

Click Ok and it will load Adobe Media Encoder and queue it don’t render it yet, might as well use the queue, File > Export > Media… and we’ll do the Vimeo one at the same time.

720p Vimeo Ready

Okay, if you take a look at the Vimeo recommended settings you will see they’re using a Mac but you get the idea of what you need.

So in the Export Settings box you should use H.264, give it a name and destination and then:

Video Tab

• TV Standard: PAL video
• Frame Width & Height: 1280 x 720 pixels
• Frame Rate: 23.976
• Pixel Aspect Ratio: Widescreen 16:9
• Bitrate Encoding: VBR, 1 Pass
• Target Bitrate: 5 Mbps (or less)
• Max Bitrate: 5 Mbps (or less)

Audio Tab

• Codec: AAC
• Output Channels: Stereo
• Frequency: 48 kHz
• Audio Quality: High
• Bitrate: 128

Click Ok and it will be added to the Media Encoder, make sure the file names are different otherwise it will overwrite what it just rendered. Though this can be change in the Media Encoder itself.

Once you’ve done everything there’s nothing left but to click the Start Queue button and go find something else to do, how long it will take depends on your computer, the length of the video and the settings. When it’s finished have a look at the outputs and hopefully they’ll be lovely.

If not I can’t be of much help because I can’t troubleshoot it for you.

All that’s left is to upload it to Vimeo, but I don’t really need to tell you how as it’s all quite self-explanatory on the Vimeo website. Of course YouTube supports HD now as well and I imagine the Vimeo ready file will do just fine.

Thanks

Thanks for reading it all, hope it was useful and helps you create your stop motion masterpiece. You can see the animation I was working on in the tutorial on Vimeo.

So say you’re tracing the outline of an object using the Pen tool, because it’s a lot better than the Lasso for selection, and you draw out a large bézier curve and come across an abrupt change in direction. Normally if you clicked with the Pen tool after a large curve it would loop back round like it does below.

However if you Alt + Click on the last Pen tool point it resets the curve extrapolation and allows you to change direction and angle dramatically, letting it go round right angles and the like.

Alt + Click on the point to reset it

Now you can change the angle dramatically

I’m using Photoshop CS4 as ever but this works for all Photoshop Creative Suite editions.

Styles are simply predefined layer Blending Options that can be used to quickly apply a certain style you like, some people use them in tutorials to make it easier for the reader as well.

Styles can be found under Window in the title bar and come with a default selection of pretty awful styles.

Now the simplest way to create your own style is under the Blending Options menu which can be found by right clicking on a non-Background layer and choosing Blending Options… (or just double click it).

Now set what you want your style to be, be tasteful though, some more awful drop shadows and embosses are really not what the world needs. Once everything is set just click the New Style… button, give it a name and it will appear in the Styles palette with a little preview of what it does.

Also

There are other ways of transferring layer styles, you can drag them from layer to layer (Alt + Dragging duplicates the style) or you can right click on the layer and choose to Copy Layer Style or Clear Layer Style.

And there you have it, wasn’t joking when I said this would be a really quick quick look.

That’s all folks.

I’m using InDesign CS4 but these are only the basics so it should be fine in other versions as well.

InDesign is Adobe’s page layout software, in this quick look I’m going be covering the basics of setting up a page and doing your first layout with drop caps, text wrap and more.

Setting the page

When you first open InDesign you need to create your document and its guides, these are important as you can’t change them once it’s set up so get it right the first time.

These are the settings I’d recommend, you might want a larger margin, or less columns, but these are what I’m going to be using. It’s important to note the Bleed as this is vital if this is going to print. This will produce what you see below, at any point you can hit W to hide the guides and bleed.

Notes

• The bleed is important for printing purposes
• W - Hides guides and bleed for a clearer preview

Putting in the text

The main principle behind InDesign is boxes, if you want something in InDesign you’ve got to draw a box for it to be placed in. I’m only going to be looking at text boxes and picture boxes for a one page document.

Okay let’s get us some text, grab the Type Tool (T) and draw out a box, as you’re drawing the box it will automatically snap to column guides. I’m going to draw a box that covers all three columns. I’m going to fill it with some placeholder text, to generate some just go Type > Fill with Placeholder Text.

If you have a text document already typed up then you can use Ctrl + D to Place the text document into the text box, the document has to be currently formatted and saved as a compatible file. I’ll discuss the advantages of placing things later.

You’ll notice the text isn’t formatted into three columns. To do this go to Object > Text Frame Options… or Ctrl + B and this will bring up the Text Frame Options where you can change the formatting of the box.

We want three columns so increase the column number and match the gutter width you set up at the beginning (for me it’s 4 mm). Now with this all set up you can deselect the box (by Ctrl + Clicking outside of it), hit w and see what you’ve got so far.

If your text doesn’t fit then you can use Ctrl + Alt + C to automatically fit the box to the text, this will only adjust vertically, it won’t expand horizontally to fit.

Notes

• T — Type Tool, used to draw out boxes for you type in
• Type > Fill with Placeholder Text — Fills the text box with Lorem ipsum
• Ctrl + D - Place, used to place text or images inside boxes
• Ctrl + B — Text Frame options, used to add columns and more
• Ctrl + Click — Deselect the currently selected box, if clicked outside of it
• Ctrl + Alt + C — Fit box to text vertically

Formatting the text

So InDesign usually defaults to Times New Roman, I’ve cheated and already changed it to Museo but now it’s time to go into more complex formatting.

These are the two main text formatting palettes (Ctrl + T should make them appear if hidden), you’ll recognise most of these options from Photoshop but there are some different ones. I always prefer Hyphenate turned off but that’s personal preference.

Drop Caps

Selected the first letter of the paragraph and increase the highlighted option to the desired number, in this case the number of lines and this will produce a nice big drop cap.

Notes

• Ctrl + T — Show the Character and Paragraph tool palette

Putting in a photo

Layouts are a bit boring if there’s no imagery so now we’re going to put in a photo. Same deal as with the text, you’ve got to draw a box and then place the photo inside it. So grab the Rectangle Frame Tool (F), draw a box and Ctrl + D to place an image, find the image you want and then it’s time to fit it to the frame.

Use Ctrl + Alt + Shift + E to fit it proportionally to the frame, or use the Direct Selection Tool (A) to select the photo and resize it yourself, remember to use Shift to resize it proportionally. Then if you’re happy with it use Ctrl + Alt + C to fit the box to the photo.

Don’t worry about the image quality, that’s just a preview and it doesn’t affect the print quality. If you want to see it at the highest quality then right click on the image > Display Performance > High Quality Display but this will slow down InDesign you have a lot of photos.

Text Wrap

This can be done by first finding the Text Wrap palette, use Ctrl + Alt + W to make it appear.

Now select the Wrap around Bounding box option (the one to the right of the default option) and now text will keep out of its way, increase the numbers beneath it if you want a larger margin.

Linking to images

The reason I said you should Place the image is so that it forms a link to the original file, this will mean that if you move it it will lose the link and need to be remade, but on the plus side any changes made to the image will be shown in InDesign as well when you refresh the image (under the Links palette tab).

Notes

• F — Rectangle Frame Tool, used to put images in
• A — Direct Selection Tool, to directly resize the image
• Ctrl + D — Place
• Ctrl + Alt + Shift + E — Resize the image proportionally to fit the box
• Ctrl + Alt + C — Fit the box to the content
• Ctrl + Alt + W — Text Wrap options

So there you have it, a brief introduction to InDesign.

That’s all folks.

This week I’m going to be quickly looking at some of the useful keyboard shortcuts you just have to know if you’re to use Photoshop quickly and efficiently.

This applies to all Photoshop versions as long as it has the function that has a shortcut to it.

Shortcuts are the key to saving time, if you can string more and more together it means less time rooting through menus and more time creating.

Lists are perhaps the best way to represent them all, I’m a Windows user so just change any Ctrl with a Cmd and you’ll have the Mac keyboard shortcuts, easy really. The information in the brackets represents when this shortcut is effective.

The number values I find are more convenient on the Numpad, but work fine on the top row.

View

• Spacebar and hold (all times unless typing) — Allows you to click and pan like the Hand tool
• Ctrl + = (all times) — Zooms into the centre of the screen
• Ctrl + - (all times) — Zooms out of the centre of the screen
• Alt + Scroll wheel (all times) — Zooms in/out to where the mouse cursor is
• h + Left Click (all times unless typing)  - Fits canvas to screen temporarily, zooms back in when released
• Ctrl + 0 (all times) — Fit canvas to screen
• Ctrl + 1 (all times) — Zooms to 100%
• f (all times unless typing) - Cycles through viewing modes
• Tab (all times unless typing) — Hides all palettes
• Ctrl + 2–5 (all times) — Channel selector 2 — RGB, 3 — Red, 4 — Green, 5 — Blue

Colour Swatch

• x (all times unless typing) — Switches foreground and background colour
• d (all times unless typing) — Resets colours to default black and white
• Alt and hold (with the most tools) — Allows you grab a colour like the Eyedropper tool

Editing

• [ (any tool that has a brush size) — Decreases Brush size
• ] (any tool that has a brush size) — Increases Brush size
• q (all times unless typing) — Edit in Quick Mask mode
• Number 1–0 — Sets the opacity value of your brush/gradient/bucket/eraser if you have that tool selected and the layer opacity if the layer is selected, 1 = 10%, 25 = 25%, 00 = 100%
• Alt + Dragging — Duplicates what you dragging whether it’s a layer style, layer mask or the layer itself

Also

As I remember more I’ll probably add them in, but they are the main ones I can remember that aren’t immediately apparent.

That’s all folks.

I’m using Photoshop CS4 as ever. Not so sure about how long this feature has been in Photoshop.

Snapshots are part of the History palette and can make a temporary save of a document’s current state which is remembered for as long as the document no matter how many History States you have set.

You will find the Snapshot button in the History palette, at the bottom, in the middle of the three buttons. When this button is clicked Photoshop creates a Snapshot of the current state of the document, saving where the layers are, how they’re arranged, appearance etc.

This Snapshot will appear at the top of the History palette next to the starting Snapshot which Photoshop autmatically creates whenever a document is opened.

You can right click on it and rename it, delete, create a new one and delete the History.

Remember, this is only temporary. When saved Photoshop only saves what the document currently looks like and gets rid of any Snapshots. But they stick around for as long as the document is open, even if Photoshop has lost that History state.

Also

Using Snapshots also allows you to use the History Brush Tool, it uses an existing Snapshot to paint from but I’m not going to go into the details of that.

If you want to increase the number of History States Photoshop uses you can change it under Edit > Preferences… > Performance…

That’s all folks.