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Working with Images Q&A

One of things that we had earlier was the folks really wanted to know if we could see you draw the box grid again because they it happened so fast and they missed it. Oh, that's, because in design makes it so easy goes like that. You better? Okay, let's do that while you're doing that, I'll take a peek here, okay? So let's redraw the grid really quickly, so I'm just going to use the rectangle frame tools so f for frame, and I'm just going to click and drag with my mouth. Nothing will happen. I have to keep holding my mouth right if I let go it's game over, so don't do that so click and drag keep holding your mouse down, and then you use the up hero and the right arrow add columns and rows and the down arrow and the left arrow to reduce the number of columns and rose, and then, you know, you can shape it how you want and when you're happy with it, you just let go and then everything turns into frames. If you want to just those gaps, you grab the gap tool and you can just move them all, ...

or if you hold shift, you can isolate, you know, so you could like, I don't know, what is that? That's not even attractive but you get the idea so you can like move things around and you could just take a boring grid and then you can make it really interesting pretty easily um with the gap tool and you khun merge things again if I want to merge these two frames I'm going to use the selection tool to drag a selection across them to select both of them I'll open my pathfinder panel I'm gonna add them together this button right here and then I'm going to click this button right below it to merge them into a single frame so it's just really easy way to get things going with your layouts and if you select your images first like in bridge on dh then dragged them all over you can even have the images plopping in automatically which really speed things up awesome and I'm a gill says can you control the space between the frames and how do you just that yes so the space between the frames is governed by whatever setting you have under your layout margins and columns it's governed by your gutter setting right here so you'd want to change that before you draw the grid um and then it will adjust so for example let's just get rid of this whole grid and we'll go upto layout uh margins and columns and let's make this gutter I don't know let's make it bigger so you can see, we'll make it a half inch that's crazy but you can see it easily so I'll click okay and now I'll switch may rectangle frame tool and now when I dragged this you see the gutters are much larger um and so let me go with you graphic ng how do I connect the image boxes to move them or change the gap between them once they're drawn can you change the gap? Oh, yeah and can we show that? Yes. So once you let's change this oh, you mean the gap between yeah, well, you have to then just click and move the frame individually right? But you could use the gap tool teo still move the gap so we'll just now it's like making me crazy that it's so big let's put it to an eighth of an inch lots of nice eyes on dh if you do this if you change that setting without any documents open then that will just forever be your grid setting. So if you are like a lot of people like an eighth of an inch is a size. So if that's you then just change it with no documents open and then any grid you ever make will have an eighth of an inch, so I set mine back to an eighth of an inch and I'm going to click and drag andi see, those gaps are smaller, and then even after you have images in them, if you want to move that you can with the gap tool or if you want to increase that, you know, then you can just grab the frame and move it, move the gap like manually how you want it. There is a way to do it on the fly, but I never do it, so I can't remember what it is and it's like I thought it was space bar something greater than and less than ah, no, there is one that you do. There is something I don't know it's probably in, like, the dhobi keyboard shortcut that I put the link. Teo, I never remember because I never use that, but it is possible I just usually have it set to an eighth of an inch and then I like that consistent space. Um, but one thing, I guess you could do it. Let me just see, now that I'm talking about this, if I make, like, let's, make three columns like this one thing you could do if you get it drawn and then you're like, oh, I just needed to, like, stretch a little further or something if I marquis select over these two guys and then like movies a little more then let's group them so I'm going to group these two objects by pressing commander control g for group and l group these and all group these okay, so each uh column is group then I can select the whole thing and then go to my align panel and if I distribute the spacing it'll reach you know it will distribute the spacing between them so if I'm like okay, I want I want more space between them I could spread him out like this go to my align panel and distribute and get more spacing that way um and then you could un group everything and then you know, move these down a swell so there's a lot of different options but there is a keyboard shortcut for doing it on the fly but I just I never remember it love the aline tool from jim isn't ptsd or is psd the preferred format for photos and in design and we noticed that you were bringing in j pegs earlier today wait let's talk a little bit about that yeah let's do talk about that that is an excellent question okay, so the preferred format is really going to depend on what you're doing for example when I'm designing albums for wedding clients I'm dragging in j pegs because their images are j pegs rate that's what's been exported after I go through and do my like soft proofing using light room whatever I export j pegs and that's what I drag into the documents in this case of the beach example this is a psd because it has layers and because I was showing you that you khun control and manipulate the layer visibility and indesign s o it really just depends what you're doing. You know, if this if this graphic was something that I built for another project and then it lives in a psd format and then I want to use it here I might as well use it in the psd format so I don't have to rebuild something like I wouldn't need to make it a j peg just to put it and in design that'd be silly s oh, I could just place the psd foam. The nice thing about placing the layered psd is I can control the visibility of the layers if the document that I'm placing has an alfa channel, then I could read the alpha channel you can't save alfa channels and j pegs, so if we go back to the citrus example with thes these little fruit slices detect edges works really well for this example, but in other examples I think in our text one we have an example where I did save an alfa channel that's where I put it for the text example so the detective edges to remove the white background works really well here, but if it didn't have this um object was more complicated or I needed a different kind of masking then I would have done that in photo shop and I would have saved it as a psd or a tiff something where I can save an alpha channel on dh then I could read the alfa channel in in design so really is just going to depend on what your needs are if you need to have an alfa channel for something than making off a channel, save it within your document and then please that document so you can please e p s a psd tiff j peg whatever you can place all of those within in design and some of them just come with bonus features like being able to read layers are alfa channels it really just depends what your purpose is but there's nothing wrong with j pegs yeah I just want to put that out there sometimes I think when you're I don't know I now this is the whole debate the checkroom can go crazy but I don't know I feel like in my world the pendulum has swung both ways as faras like when rock came out it was like oh my gosh raws amazing and now that we're shooting with twenty five megapixel cameras and war you really have to weigh the raw you know benefit and sometimes you're really just fine with j peg so I would like to suggest that the world rid themselves of their fear j pegs because they're just dandy on their much layer wheat and they work just as well for these purposes. So speaking of which, teresa marie had a question and no one hundred percent clear on it, but I'm going to ask it so any tips for making j peg exports out of in design better quality? It seems like the same exported in design and photoshopped look different with photos being a better quality, any thoughts about that? Ok, well, I guess I can I'll show you j port day, peg export option's perfect. Um, I'll show you that, but one thing that you might want to take a look at if you're having problems with your j peg exports from in design is you might want to check your color settings so that is under edit color settings and I can't I don't pretend to tell you what your color setting should be let's just say that right now I can't tell you what they should be, but I can tell you that this is where if you're having a problem with them, you might want to come check s o that's under edit color settings and down here you know you can choose like these are different preset by default it's set to north america general purpose to at least here in north america but if you want to specify you know which rgb profile that you want to work in you khun select that here or your c m y k profile you khun tell it how you want to manage color. This is basically the same window you would find in photo shop or any of the other applications and you khun synchronize them across all of your different adobe apse, so to do that you would use bridge and you can tell it to synchronize, but if you're having problems with color, come here and see if something is gone awry and check with your you know, printer or lab or whoever is producing your stuff, but I can tell you that I export my wedding album j pegs straight out of in design, so to do that you would just go up to file and shoes export and we're going to do this hopefully later this afternoon to but we'll do a quick preview now, so I'm just going to say this to my desktop because I put everything on my desktop and you know, you do it too, so uh I'm just going to put it on my desktop, I'm actually going to make a folder, we'll just call it jay indesign j pegs um we'll put it in here for for matt, I'm going to choose j peg and this is only one page document so that's really quick and easy but over here then in my export j peg dialogue options um I can choose pages and all of that here is where the quality situation comes into play so I would want to make sure that the quality is set to maximum and depending on my project you know when I'm exporting like if I'm building keynote presentations and in design and then I'm exporting them for keynote I am building them to be whatever resolution so I would just export it seventy two pixels per inch but if I am exporting for print it's from one of my album vendors then I'm going to bump that to three hundred so maximum quality three hundred peopie eye for the resolution and then I'm going to embed the color profile um if I have bleeds you have to turn this on here to include the bleeds otherwise we'll be sending it without a bleed and if you need a bleed that's a problem if you don't need to bleed then it doesn't matter and then I'm gonna hit export and that's it so it's going to make this whole layout now into a jpeg so we can see that um let's just go back teo bridge and we'll go to my desktop and jay in design where are you uh oh goodness indesign j picks there it is so here is the j peg no, and it looks great. I mean, this is how I make all my albums. It depends on your vendor, you know, some vendors wanted. Pdf, so I would export. Pdf. But a lot of my benders just want j pegs. So I do all the design here, and I export j paxson. They look great.