Lessons

Lesson Info

Links Panel and Package

In photo shop, if you open an image and maybe you open a second image and you grab something from that image and you drag it over into your first image, you're actually dragging pixels, right? You're moving over the pixels and placing them in that document in the line does not operate that way, which is really nice for a number of reasons. What it does instead is it links to the file on your hard drive, so wherever it is that you pulled that file from in order to place it in your document, it is linked in other words, it's not actually in your document in that sense in design is kind of more like light room in the sense that, you know, light room is managing your images in the catalogue, but they're relieved on your hard drive, and it has that link in design is kind of the same way, so that means a couple of things. One, it keeps your file size small because your images are not in the document, they're not embedded unless you choose to embed them, which is something else, but most the ...

time, you're probably not doing that, they're linked so there's a whole panel that in design has for managing lynx and guess what? It's called the links panel it's probably open in your dock by default because it's also a pretty important one if it's not of course like all the other panels are almost all the other panels you confined them under the window menu under links right here so what this is showing me is that in this document I've got sixty eight links so it's telling me exactly how many I have which I think's really handy because sometimes people will ask me how many photos do you typically include in an album and I always say I don't count I have no idea well instead of me having to count if I wanted to know for some reason I don't have to count I could just look in my links panel and it shows me you've got sixty eight links awesome so it's keeping track of how many links I have it's also telling me what paige there on so this little number over here is saying this image number two fifty eight is on page one um and that means I could jump around within my documents so if I'm looking at this and I'm going hey what where is this image? What is that and where is it if I click on it and then come down here to the bottom of the links panel? This little icon right here is going to take me to that link within my documents so if I have a question about one of my images and maybe I'm not sure how a used it or what the heck it's doing there where is that I can click on it and then click this button and it'll go straight to it um that's really handy another thing that I can dio is maybe I'm like I don't know where this image is on my hard drive like I don't even remember where I got that from ify right click on the image I can say reveal and finder and it will pull up finder and show me exactly where that document iss which is handy also um another thing that's really needs if you expand the bottom of your links panel I don't think it does this by default but there's this little arrow down here at the very bottom and if I open this it's going to pop this open and it gives me a ton more information about that image so sometimes people like let's go to this one because it's larger on the spread so I'm going to space bar drag hold down space far and drag tio scoot over so let's look at this image here when I click on it within the document by the way, I'm using this tool right here and we'll talk more about these as we move forward but this right here is the selection tool so use it to select stuff so if I click right here it's going to pull up that link in my links panel and then I might be wondering what's the print resolution of this image at the size in this document well I don't have to try to figure it out are just cross my fingers I can actually look in the links panel with the selected and it'll show me down here that the effective pp I for this image used this way is three hundred and seventy four pixels print so I'm fine right? Of course most of us are probably fine these days because the camera's air so high rez we don't have to really worry about it but in case you were designing some huge print piece and you were really scaling your image is really large you could always check your resolution here and actually what we'll talk about later is something called the preflight panel you can actually tell in design toe warn you if any of your images have been scaled so large that their resolution drops below whatever point you want you can set it where you want so in design could warn me if I scaled it too big or if I was using a low res image that wasn't really going to work it could warning so that's a little bit about how the links panel operates and just kind of keeps track of all the things that we have here um one of the other things that's really handy is a custom keyboard shortcut that I've put together and I'll show you some of those recommended changes in the preferences in a minute but just so you kind of understand what it is and how it works, you can take any image within your document and with it selected, I created this can't handy dandy keyboard shortcut, which is commander control down arrow and when I press it, look what just happened it opened in photo shop that was a really great facial expression her john does drops I know it's too bad we used to have, like, a close up of that. Oh, yes, that was awesome. So with this handy dandy that's a custom keyboard shortcut, so I'll show you how you do that, but with that little circuit it's going toe pop, open that image in your chosen editor. So in this case, this is a jpeg image, so it's going to open it and photo shop if I don't have illustrator open, but if I it would open it, I guess I don't know how. How long does that take? If I pop over to let's, go to the pages panel in this document something that may have been built, none of this oh, this is illustrator if I go here and click on this and go back to my links panel now you can see it's going to pop open illustrator which hopefully is really fast right yes it's updating um so whether it's an illustrator file and here we are now an illustrator so whether it's an illustrator file or j peg or ptsd or whatever kind of file you put in there you can have it open in the editor for that document and it's it's really great and the neat thing is let's go back to photo shop let's say we do something to this document what can we do that you'll see let's just grab our brush wei would never really do this but we'll just pretend there's a smiley face okay now let's say I saved this oh cringe and let's go back to in design and go back to this um file and we see that it's got this little triangle here normally would update by itself this means that we've edited this document outside of in design so the triangle means we've edited it I think it's because I didn't close it and photo shop okay god alright we'll close it um now updates you see that so it updated automatically because I opened I am went to photo shop and altered it and saved it and when you close it it will automatically put the new version in here now if it didn't as it did earlier when it had that little yellow triangle um if you need to manually refresh it then you would just come down to this little button here this little circular button that's the refresh button and that will update the preview so if for some reason it doesn't auto update you could do it yourself but if you went from in design to the other software and back it should auto update as we saw so now I have permanently scarred that image that's great hope the client loves it ok s o that's a little bit about how links works another thing you should know is when you save your document you are saving the indesign document which is great but it doesn't include the images so if I was going to give you my file melissa, I was like, hey take this smiley face awesome album that I made and do something with it I'm if I on ly gave you the indesign document the file you wouldn't have any of these images so when you open it it's in design would pop up and yell at you and say, hey, you're missing links for all your this whole thing on dh you'd be kinda screwed like you couldn't actually do much with it you would see the little preview so you would look at it and think on your screen you'd be like what they're all here I see it but in your links panel you would have question marks so instead of a nice, healthy clear area here, you would have a whole column of really scary looking red question marks and it would be telling you, it's all missing you know, just like in light room if you move something on your hard drive, light room freaks out and says, well, you're missing links so what do you do in order to save your file with all of your images there's two things you can do, you can pack it your document to do that you come up to the file menu and you choose package very nice it's going to give you a little summary of things basically you would just go ahead and click package it says it has to save it okay, save it it's going teo give you the opportunity to include printing instructions, but probably this is kind of a feel like a little bit of a throwback to the the good old days of earlier ofyour probably no one's going to read this some printers might if you're really packaging this for a printer, but these days you're probably sending them a pdf. So any way you could type here if you wanted I'm going to hit continue now it's going to save it, I'm going to put this on my desktop and we'll just call this album package and it's going tio when they do this it's gonna warn me it's also going to package funds so it's going to make copies of all of those graphics from wherever they are on our hard drive or egg sternal drives or wherever it is that they are it's going to copy them into a folder with the indesign file and that's what I would send you and it would also package fonts so there's some minimal type in here so it's goingto package the fonz and I really did this, didn't I so it's going to package all sixty whatever links that we had on then I'll show you what that looks like. The other thing that you can dio is if you don't want to package it you couldn't just copy all of the links and I'll show you that in a minute wow, maybe I should just cancel this let's see if it at least did some of it so I can show you what's funny care is compared to the good old days I know it's way would mean right we would package for you in court my hand yeah, yeah, yeah that's right at the time. Oh, I know. So for those of you who are like, what does that mean package my hand that meant that you had to, like, go find all of your images and copy and paste them into your its the folder by yourself and then you had to go find all your fonts and copy and paste them so is the nightmare so we canceled this so I don't know that it's really gonna work but um yeah I didn't because I cancel it okay we'll do it with a smaller document this one doesn't have a cz many images oh here's the missing there's some of them are missing so here's what it looks like when they're missing see that scary looking red question marks right so you'd have to re link it by selecting it and then clicking this link button and then you redirect it oh yes I remember where that is and you go find that file I don't know where those are so they're just missing but let's try packaging this so we can hopefully this one will be a little faster so go back to file package package yes save yes text okay just top package example package yes, yes, yes it warns you about all kinds of things like it's saying hey, you're missing some files and I'm like yeah I don't care and it's being hey, we can only package fonts that are licensed for you know you can't do that with fonts you dont have rights too and blah blah blah all right, so what we already you know that that's just kind of standard practice stuff okay desktop modified here it is package example. So what happens when you package this one? It makes a whole new folder in the folder. It puts the text instructions that we blew off because probably no one's reading them but they could if you needed that you could put in instructions there um and then we have our document fonts so any fonts that appear within the wow I have a lot of fun. Apparently those bonds have all been copied into the font file and we have links so here's all of graphic links, whether they're p stds or j pegs or I even pasted in some pdf so there's all kinds of different things and they're they're all in the links panel erin the links folder and then here's the actual document what's confusing about this, I think is that now when I look at the document in design, the one that I have open here is the original one it's not the one I just packaged. So sometimes I get confused because then I'll make edits and I have my original one and then I have the tidy little package one that I made for melissa, so usually when I package something, I'll go and delete my original and then just if I update or edit anything, I edit the packaged one so that it's always consistent another thing that you could d'oh if you don't want to go the package route, you can also go to your links panel and if you click and shift, click to select all of your links and then you come up to the menu and you go to utilities you, khun sake, copy links two and then you're just making your own, you know? Then I could go to whatever folder I want. We'll go in here and make a new folder, and we'll call it my links and I could hit choose. And now it's going to copy everything that it can besides the ones that are missing so you can actually copy links into your own folder that way. Well, so that's, kind of my my latest way that I like to deal with it because I like I said, I don't like that it makes a copy of your indesign file. I don't know if you ever have that problem, but then I would update the document and realize it's the wrong version, not a big fan either. Yeah, so it's nice if I'm really done and I'm just like, all right, well, let's, go here you go, but otherwise I like to just I prefer to just copy links this way, of course, that doesn't do your funds. So you need your images and your fonts. If you're going to take that document and give it to anyone, toe work on. Or if you're going to take it to another computer, toe, work on or send it to the printer or something like that.