Lessons

Lesson Info

The Little Stuff: Cropping, PDFs, Proof Setup

We're going to start off the day with a session I call the little stuff, which is all the little stuff hiding in fighter shop that nobody ever talks about, but it's a really useful and so let's just dive in and look at all the little stuff we confined in photo shop that's going to fill in the gaps between all the big stuff we talked about on all the other sessions in photoshopped mastery, so first thing I'm going to dio is let's say we need to scan a good number of images and we just have a bunch of family photos were going to throw on a scanner there small images so we can fit for five on the scanner at one time and we want to do them quickly. Well, if that's the case, you might end up with a bunch of images like this I don't know about you, but I don't feel like spending the time to get everything straight if I get it perfectly straight. And then I closed my scanner lid that wind from closing lin's probably going to knock it out of out of, you know, alignment with we're supposed to b...

e so let's say we gang up a bunch of images, threw him on the flatbed scanner, hit the scan button and this popped open and photo shop well, if you go to the file menu and you come down to a believe it's an automate there's a control in here called crop in straitened photos and if I use crop and straightened photos it assumes that what we have is a document with multiple images and that what's surrounding the images is the lid of your scanner so if I choose crop and straightened photos that's what we get it'll take a moment for it to analyse the picture but it just tried toe isolate each individual image from that gang scan and if it was at an angle it attempted to straighten in it it's not absolutely perfect in that this end result I can see in the upper left corner in the lower right it didn't perfectly straight in it but it did a whole bunch to it there and if I just look we have in the left side of my tabs we have the original picture then we have a bunch of tabs going off to the right that shows what it got out of that original pictures so just remember the average colonel contained four photos and remember that they weren't really perfectly straight especially they wanted a lower right now let's look at the end result it gave me these separate documents now where it cropped each image and an attempted to straighten each image so it could save me a tremendous amount of time I imagine you have that shoebox in your basement full of family photos you want to get him all digitised instead of scanning them one at a time and being really careful putting them down on the bed of the scanner why not just scan them all that this mini is you can fit on the scanner bed at the same time who cares if they're straight or not just make sure they don't overlap each other and then once you get that you go up to the file menu choose automate and we have crop and straightened photos now I don't know what version of photo shop that was added in because that's been in there I don't know forever well not quite forever but it's been in there for a very long time but I think it could be a little bit on the helpful side depending on what you need to do but there's more that's so cool so I had to throw that I've never I've never seen that and I got you on the first one you did on the first one nutty right hey, may I ask a quick question please certainly there was a question from yesterday that asked do you approach processing scanned photos like that any different any differently than you do like digital photos? Some what I try to help the process a little bit if the photo if I want to reproduce the way the photo actually looks when I hold it in my hand er then what I'll do is when I put it on the scanner I'll put along with it right next to it a grey reference I have something that's called a y balle card but you don't have to use that brand why bell card is a little gray plastic card that's got gray and also have I think a little black and white on it and I set that right next to the photo when I scan it and then if I color correct, I don't color correct the photo I color correct that little gray reference because what it'll do who is just show me what my scanner did to the picture did my scanner shift the color and the picture towards yellow oh or anything like that or towards orange or whatever it is in color correcting that little gray card is going to make it so the photo looks the way it did when I held it in my hand. Now if the photo itself had issues beyond that, then I wouldn't do that instead I would color correct the photo itself, but it could be nice like for instance, if I remember going to skansen artwork, I always put a great reference next to it s o that I'm color correcting for what either my cameras doing or my scanner is doing and not what's actually in the picture because I want the picture to represent what I saw in my eyes so I don't know that that's that's great advice thinks that's part of it all right? So second feature is let's say that I have this image and if I come in here in choose image size, this particular image is forty eight megabytes in size and I want to send this off to a client and get their comments. I don't want to send him a forty eight meg file. I want to send him a file that's easy tio email and that agnes email back and forth and have no issues getting my comments. But I don't want to degrade this picture when it comes to my original my original has some layers over here this has made completely in photo shop I have a layer with just some fake brushed metal. I have layer with this gear like thing I got a letter with the little middle dad and a layer with this outer ring, its own mainly created with what's notice layer stiles where you khun nube, evelyn boss, and in that type of stuff so I'm going to take this image in, I'm going to save it. I'm just going to save as in the file for meant that I'm going to use is one called photoshopped! Pdf. Even his pdf files before you get your camera manuals, you get all sorts of things in pdf file format. Well, I'm going to say this to my desktop and I'm just going to call it notes so I can remember because I want somebody to add notes I'm not going to give them the layers because I want them to just comment on the images a hole and by not including the laters that's one thing that's going on do the file size now when I click save it should in a moment come up with some options for my pdf in this original image, the resolution of the image was three hundred because it was good for printing and when somebody was going to comment about it, they don't need a file that huge. So what I'm gonna do in here is on the left side there's some categories in one of them is compression I'm going to tell it to down sample any images to seventy two pixels per inch that's the resolution just generically used for onscreen use so that you're not gonna have a file big enough to print instead it's going to reduce the amount of information you give me a much smaller file size by bringing the resolution down is three hundred and the actual file bringing it down seventy two also here it says I can choose different kinds of compression I'm gonna choose j peg because that usually delivers are pretty small file and I'm going to say, give me medium quality, which is getting again contribute to a small file size now I'm just gonna hit safe pdf and it just is saving their semi hard drive. It'll take a few minutes because its scaling down the image in the process and it could take a little while. I see a progress bar on the lower left once it's done saving that image, I could email it off to somebody else and we'll go and look at what the file sizes, but it should be considerably smaller than the original, which is around forty. What was at forty eight makes, I think, and so just take a moment for it to finish. Okay, now I'm going to go and look on my desktop on my desktop is one here I call it notes it's, a pdf file and I'm going to type command. I wanna macintosh to get info about it and how big is it? It's, two hundred sixty six k that's pretty darn small that's overly easy, tio email or upload to a website, right? So that's the filing in a supply to the client, what I'm gonna have the client do is take that file and they can open it using it our acrobat or hear amount of mack the mac comes with a application called preview which is like the default application for just viewing pdf files and it comes free on the on the the max everybody should have it well within the preview app and by the way, if you double click on it, it opens in another program if you're gonna matches right click on the icon for the file and there's a choice called open with or it'll give you a list of programs so I could open it just in case it opens it in some odd program now if I go up to I think it's either going to be the view menu or probably the tools menu there's a choice under the tools menu if I go under annotate and rotate which is note and you'll have a similar choice if you're adobe acrobat as well if I choose that we're going to get a little bar up at the top here which have little editing controls and it's going to highlight the note icon if you look at the top of my screen you see it's kind of highlighted in blue now I can add notes to this image maybe I click up here in the upper left corner a little note pick pops up calica post it note and I can say anyway I'm just gonna typing out then I'll click somewhere else in the image the first time I click I'll be dismissing the last note the second time I click I should be adding a new one actually the second time it didn't work off click a third time just click however many times it takes to get another one and I could just continue doing that clicking each time all right and I get all those now after adding those notes if I'm the client I could do this in a program comes free with my computer file was tiny wasn't it I'm just going to go to the file menu and stay safe and therefore it should save the notes into the file and I'll close that in quick preview so now that same file that I have supplied the client the pdf they could e mail back to me if I get info on the file it's two hundred and fifty four k I remember what it was before but it if it went up it all it went up by a couple k because all it did was add some text now I return to photo shop and I opened my original layered file the one that's high resolutions remember had a resolution of three hundred file size is like forty eight meg's that kind of stuff well I got this file and I want to see the client's notes and see where within this document they were commenting so I'm going to go up to the file menu and see if I can remember where it's hidden by blessing is going to be under import and I'm going to say let's import some notes now what I'm going to feed photo shop is just that pdf on some doing file important notes and on my desktop I have that notes file sitting there I hit open and now can you see the little yellow things on my image those air the notes and so if I want to read the client's notes I can come in here and look at any of these and in fact there's a notes panel I think I actually have it open uh let me see if I go to the window menu there's a notes panel here and also there'll be a notes tool and it'll take me a moment to remember where the heck the notes tool is because I never use it from within photo shop instead I always use it from within acrobat and it's hidden underneath one of these tools it's probably like under the crop or under the eyedropper there it isthe eyedropper. So with that tool I could add notes myself and if I want to add notes myself where people were goingto get this like multiple people, all of my company and the upper left eye canavan author name so they can tell who wrote the notes I can also choose a different color for my notes so that I could have read notes that air for me yellow notes that air from somewhere else, that type of thing and if I come in here and click on any of these notes, I'm going to be able to tell who it was that authored it uh, I'm going over here in the notes tab be able to read the note and I could just click between these if I would like to also in the notes little panel there's little arrow keys so if you don't wanna have to manually click on the little notes because sometimes it's hard to tell which ones have you gone through? Which ones haven't you you can just use the arrow keys that air down here, it tells you the total number of notes and you could switch through each one with that let's say you've dealt with one of the notes like this one just talks about this area looking shiny and it's not really an instruction for me to do anything so I could go and hit the trash. Can I come over here? And that note would be removed so as I'm you know, finishing the type of changes that are asking for like this one said to make the middle thing larger, so a type command tea to transform and maybe bring that up a little bit in size then I could delete that note and then keep doing that until I get rid of all notes, but the main thing that was nice about it is I was able to re import the notes that the client put in. They got a two hundred some k file, which was tiny, and I was able to import it into this, which I think was a forty eight megabyte hi resolution layered file. You don't need to supply the client with that high rez layered stuff if all you're looking to dio is get them to add notes, you can also add your own notes here before you exported as a pdf maybe you have questions for the client, you're going to put a bunch of notes in there in them when they're in let's, say, acrobat, they could look at those notes and they could add their own or add comments to it and that but again, I don't know what version of photo shop was added, but it's been in there for quite a few years now just remember, I went to the file menu and I chose safehouse. I use photoshopped pdf file format, and if you want your file size to go down in the compression settings, make sure you choose j peg, maybe medium quality and lower the resolution of the file that way you're going to get a much smaller uh size but wait there's more not more about notes just more in general if your graphic designer and you're designing packaging or a website or anything else there's an issue and that is that especially if you're female there's an issue that is on ly one half of one percent as far as I know the females are color blind, but fully eight percent of males are and so if you're female, you probably conceived fine as faras colors go, but some of your audience won't be able to see colors the same way you do and so if you're going to end up doing the design, you might want to consider what that design that how it's going to be interpreted by somebody who's color blind and so if we would like to do that here's ah little sign that my wife karen made I forced her to use the particular colors I did she wouldn't wouldn't do this is a design choice, but I'm going to go and show you give you some idea of what this would look like to someone who was color blind. If I go to the view menu there's a choice called proof set up and within the proof setup menu there are two choices for color blindness these two right here I believe and I'm no expert on this whatsoever that the top choices for people that doesn't don't have red receptors in their eyes because your eyes sensitive red, green and blue light, and if you didn't have the ability to perceive the red light, I believe that would be this type of color blindness. The other type is it? If you don't have receptors for green light, so I'm going to choose one of these, and when I do it's gonna change my view of the picture, and if I switch between the two, I can see what this sign would look like two each time type of color blind person now it's not an exact view of what it looks like to them, but it gives you some sense for how difficult might be to see the difference in colors. And so what I might want to do is, after I'm done with the design, I might want to switch between those two particular settings and see if there's any part of my design that's really hard to read, and if so, I might want to choose different colors. Ah, you could leave this turned on, or if you want to toggle it on and off, once you've chosen the type you'd like to preview out of these two choices, then to toggle that view on and off there's, a choice appear called proof colors, which has a keyboard shortcut of command, why? So proof set up means what kind of thing are we gonna preview? And then the proof colors controlled toggles the preview honor off so I could type command why to see before and after before and after. And then maybe I decide with that preview on, I could come in and say, well, what color of text might want to use an alternate as an alternative if I was using green for for some reason, maybe I want to use a darker green and see if that's going to separate better in that particular type of preview command. Why to say here is what it looks like. Two people that don't have an issue with color, vision and here's what it looked like with so it's, just kind of nice to have. Once you're done with that, just make sure the proof colors choice is turned off. There's no check box next to it, and then your viewing the image as, uh you actually is.