Lessons
Class Introduction
01:51 2Document Set-Up
15:39 3Panels
11:46 4Toolbox
08:22 5The Adobe® Workspace
05:17 6Shortcuts
05:33 7Saving Files
05:37 8Guides
12:42Text Frames
08:13 10Shapes, Fill and Stoke
07:43 11Arranging and Modifying Shapes
08:31 12The Pen Tool: Drawing, Stroke and Fill
06:52 13The Pen Tool: Handles and Anchor Points
08:27 14Pencil, Smooth and Erase Tools
05:46 15Strokes and Arrows
13:33 16Importing Shapes from Adobe® Illustrator®
08:57 17Placing Graphics
08:05 18Placing PDFs
04:22 19Placing Multiple Files
06:14 20Frames: Fitting and Manipulating
07:28 21Specialty Frames
05:52 22The Links Panel
21:34 23High Quality Display
06:48 24Clipping Paths
13:08 25Transparency
09:41 26The Gap Tool
03:55 27Color & Swatches Panels Basics
16:38 28Eyedropper Tool
10:03 29Gradient Swatches
05:31 30Character Panel
23:38 31Paragraph Panel
15:09 32Spelling & Autocorrect
06:42 33Text Frame Options
08:10 34Printing and Exporting
16:16Lesson Info
High Quality Display
Alright, let's get our links panel back in order; I'm gonna reset my workspace, and that puts the links panel back over here where it belongs, and then I'm going to go back to our friend, the pie chart here, and one thing you might notice is I have some really weird patterning happening here. Right, that looks a little strange, and also, these guys, when we look at this, hopefully you can see, they're pretty pixelated, and I want to make sure that I can see my images as smoothly and clearly as I know they are. I know in Photoshop these photos looked fine, and this is an Illustrator file, which is Vector, which doesn't have any resolution. So, it should always look super crisp and clear, but it doesn't, and I need to change that. And what that is, is just the display, display quality, that you're looking at on your machine. And this is just for viewing on-screen, and the reason this might come in handy is again, I might be looking at that thinking, that's not I want, this, I don't want ...
this weird texture in this pie chart, and if my client were looking over my shoulder, they might think, that's not what I want it to look like. I wanted smooth colors, so I need to make sure that what I'm looking at is actually a little more accurate representation of what's going to be printed. So that, like I said, is my display preferences. And so, to set that, across the board for everything in your document, if nothing is selected, and you right click or control click anywhere on your page without selecting an item, come down to Display performance, and I can see that I have Fast, Typical, and High Quality. If I do Fast Display, all my images become gray squares, and that's actually great, and you can also see how jaggedy the type is; nothing looks really good because it's as low-res as it can be, and that's just great if you're just trying to quickly look at how something is laid out, and you want to speed up your machine. Now, I have a machine that's a couple years old, and it actually, I don't have to use this anymore at all, so most of the machines can handle it, but if you are having speed issues, performance issues, you might try turning that off, and turning it down to this, even, which doesn't help you if you're actually trying to position images, but if you're trying to check layout and see if the pages are in the right order, or whatever, it's a quick way to turn that off. I generally don't use that, but I do, however, use Typical Display almost all the time. And I'm gonna show you how we set what Typical and High actually is, but here's what we're going to do first. We're going to right click, and we're going to change it to High Quality Display. And when I do that, I get the nice, smooth colors here, and also, these people, their images look a little better. Maybe. Let's zoom in on that. Still not great quality. There we go. Just took a minute. You can see as I roll over it, it's thinking about it. So, it took a while, and because I turned it on for the entire document, that means that anytime I move the mouse it has to re-draw it each time. So, you might notice as I move something, and I let go, like, that doesn't look quite the same. You notice, it was black there? Let's see if I can get it to do it again. So, I've got black stripes underneath that orange stripe. That's not really what it looks like. There's actually transparency there. And because I have that High Quality on, while I'm scrolling, it's not re-drawing the transparency. It's gonna do that when I stop. So, I stop, and then it kind of clicks into place. So, it is a drain. Those pictures don't look great, either, as I'm scrolling in. As soon as I let go, it re-draws it to High Quality. But it can slow your machine down. So, what we're gonna do instead, is we're gonna right click. We're gonna bring Display Performance back to the Typical Display, but turn on and off individual items. So, maybe while I'm working on this page, I want to make sure that just this image is at High Quality. So, I'm gonna Control click, or Right click, and come back down to Display Performance, but because I have that image selected, it's only affecting this image. So now, I can use, instead of Use View Setting, which it's doing right now, I can turn this one on to High Quality. So, just this is set to High Quality. Everything else is still at that Typical Display. Alright, I'm gonna turn that back to match the High Quality. So, let's clear that object level display, there. And so now I know this is set back to the Typical Display. And I want to show you where those settings are. Because there's no reason to have vector images ever displaying less than High Quality. Because it's mathematical, it can figure it out on the fly. It doesn't slow anything down. So, I'm gonna change that. I'm gonna go up under the Preferences. So, it's InDesign, Preferences, or Edit Preferences on a PC. And I'm gonna come down to Display Performance. And first of all, it asks you, what's the default view? Well, Typical is a good setting to have. And I can tell it to preserve the object level display setting, which means that it stays no matter what I change this to. So, if I individually change an image, it stays. I'm also going to tell it what Typical is. Right now, Typical says that Raster should be in the center. It's not exactly better performance, but low quality, and it's not the inverse of that. It's not high quality, but worse performance. It's right in the middle. But Vector Graphics, we can move that all the way to the right. Vector Graphics can always be High Resolution. And then, Transparency, that's gonna be things like drop-shadows, how it displays that. We can leave that at that medium quality. So, usually I change Typical to slide the Vector Graphics over to High Resolution, so that they always show in High Resolution even on Typical settings. So, now, that always looks good. So, now, my images might still be pixelated, and that's fine. But my things like my illustrator files are nice and crisp and clear. Because most people actually won't notice that as much as they'll notice that weird patterning that's happening in there. And keep in mind, this is just for when I'm working on my screen. This has nothing to do with how things will look when I export them, or I print them. But I do get asked that question quite a bit. People freak out when their stuff suddenly looks pixelated and they know it was a perfectly good Photoshop file. So, be sure to turn that on and off as needed. I do that all day long. I might turn the entire thing on. If I have a lot of images and I just want to see everything look crisp and clear, all at once, I'll turn on High Quality, and then turn it back off when I don't need it.
Ratings and Reviews
Susan
Fantastic course. I have used Illustrator and photoshop, but learned when under tight deadlines. We are going to begin using inDesign to publish a more extensive multipage newsletter, and I wanted to build a better knowledge foundation of this tool, rather than just diving in. The course was comprehensive and I feel that I'll be able to make a better product after taking the course.
Terri
Have loved Erica since I was a baby designer. She is a great educator, and even though I have been using ID for about 8 years, I just changed from CS6 to CC. This was a great refresher as well as a mental upgrade to new options and effects.
Gilbert Beltran
I enjoyed these classes. Learned the Indesign toolbox and picked up a few smart tricks. Erica is great at keeping up the pace and being very clear and easy to follow.
Student Work
Related Classes
Adobe InDesign