One of the things we’re most commonly asked on our InDesign Training courses is how to improve workflow and save time using InDesign. One of the best ways to do this is to create and use InDesign Templates. This is especially useful if you’re creating very similar InDesign documents over and over, and don’t want to have to start from scratch each time.
In this simple InDesign training tutorial, we show you how to create InDesign Templates using InDesign CS5
Here is a list of 10 useful time saving tips to use in Adobe Illustrator. Some of these tips may mean you have to break from your normal use of Illustrator, but getting use to them can be very rewarding in the long run. You may already know a few of these tips, or you may have some more to suggest, if you do then please leave your tip in the comments section below.
New to Illustrator and want to learn more… come along to our Illustrator Training course here in Brighton, Sussex. If you already know a bit about Illustrator and want a more advanced course we can offer you a private Advanced Illustrator Training session with your own tailored course outline, call us on 01273 622272 for more details. We also offer Photoshop Training, InDesign Training and other Print Design Training.
10 Time Saving Tips for Illustrator
1 – Save and Load your Custom Colour Swatches
Do you find yourself constantly searching for your usual colours or just overwhelmed with the number of available colours when you only need 3 or 4? You need to create yourself a custom swatch. Creating one could save you lots of time in the future and can be easily switched if your colour needs change. Here’s how to do it… Read the rest of "Illustrator Training: Top 10 Time Saving Tips"
Most photographers will store their images on one or more external devices, and may switch between computers. This can cause problems when the Lightroom catalog does cannot recognise the current drive letter assigned to your portable drive.When this happens it is common for all the folders in your Lightroom collection are “missing” requiring you to locate each folder individually in turn on the disk so that Lightroom can relocate your images.
If, like me,you have hundreds of folders in Lightroom this can become frustrating and time consuming.
Solve the Problem of Missing Images and Folders in Lightroom
The solution;
Create one major directory or folder in which all your other folders on your external storage device are located.
Add this folder to your Lightroom catalogue so that it becomes your root folder.
Then if the folders are ever reported as being missing you can quickly locate this root folder and Lightroom will automatically find all the other missing folders that are contained within this one.
Adode Lightroom find missing folders and images
To create your main directory or root folder
Make sure that you locate all the folders of images in your Lightroom catalogue in a single folder on your external drive.
Make sure that there is at least one image in your root folder
Return to Lightroom and import the root folder you have just created into Lightroom.
Once imported you can remove the image from Lightroom and from the disk if desired. Once the folder has appeared in the Lightroom catalogue it will stay there even if it’s empty.
When you move your external drive to another computer, if it is not recognized by your Lightroom catalogue you can simply select the root folder in Lightroom and locate it on the disk. All the other folders below this in the hierarchy will then be automatically found.
When you add a new page you can now change the page size and orientation of the page. If you have images or text on the page next to it, you can bleed it over onto the new page without distorting it. You can also move layers up and down the list depending on which image/ text you want to be on top.
Spanning and Splitting –
If you have a big title or words that don’t fit in one column it can look really messy, but now you can change the text setting to span across two columns using the ‘Span 2’ tool. Now if you have a list of text and there is still a lot of blank space you can now fill that by using the ‘Split2’ tool to turn it into 2 columns of text within one frame. Both of these are very useful as it means you don’t need to make yet again another frame, simple but very handy.
Gap Tool –
As you move around the borders and white space in InDesign you will notice an arrow pointing between the gaps. If you click and hold the mouse, then drag left, right, up or down, depending on what you want to do, you can increase or decrease the amount of space different frames have. If you have ‘Auto-Fit’ turned on then when you re-size frames, the content will re-size itself to fit in the re-shaped frame. You can change just one gap between frames by holding down the shift key as well as clicking and dragging the space.
Mini Bridge –
Mini Bridge takes the main functions of Big Bridge and makes it available in the program rather than having to switch outside of the program to another application. Now with Mini Bridge you can go through your folders to find and add an image. If there was an image you want to use from a previous InDesign document but can’t remember where you saved it you can now search through the documents images. Find the InDesign document, right click it and click on Show Linked Files, now Mini Bridge will create thumbnails for all the images within that document.
Interactive Documents –
The biggest of all the new features is that InDesign now has the ability to create interactive documents. You can make animations in flash and transport them into InDesign and you can do it the other way as well, although the InDesign animation creator obviously isn’t as good. But you can make fairly complex animations if you group other objects and animations together using the sequencing options.
Use quick selection on any object, for example a person. Normally you would loose edge definition and hair would end up looking very jagged. The quick selection tool was never designed for both hard and soft edges, but now we have a solution. Refine Edge command is the new god. It has Edge Detection which has better definition and goes out further than before. It also includes a new Refine tool which allows you to go over the extra bits that you have missed in your selection and Photoshop does the rest!
Content Aware –
If you lasso an object, for example a person in a field, then hit delete you don’t just automatically delete the person and get the standard white background. Now when you hit the delete button Photoshop brings up a new option asking if you want to just delete or whether you want Photoshop to fill in the background with what would have been there if the person wasn’t there.
Healing Brush Content Aware –
When you would usually use the healing brush on your photos sometimes you still get blurred parts when old Photoshop couldn’t handle the different tones and textures. Now when you use the Healing Brush Tool you have the added option of selecting Content Aware which does a much better job of replacing parts that you wanted to remove over all textures and contrasts.
Puppet Warp –
Select an object, for example a person again, using the same process as before and select them and place them on a new layer. Now if you select Puppet Warp from the menu and your person will have a set grid on them. Select a certain part of a person, for example if they have their arms down by their side, select the hand, elbow and shoulder. You can now pivot those points so that the person now is waving or pointing, or just generally going in a different direction.
Noise Reduction –
The new noise reduction capabilities are superb. If you have taken a photo with a lot of grain and noise in it then try out the new Noise Reduction. Changing the sliders on the Luminescence and Colour Detail selection can reduce the amount of noise substantially without loosing detail in the actual image.
HDR Pro –
If you select some images you have taken of the same thing, with different exposures, then you can put them into the new HDR Pro Tool. Once selected and the tool has composed them all together you can then play with various adjustment sliders. You can also set your own Custom Presets which you can use over and over again, for example you like them to be saturated or with higher contrast, you can set it all to whatever you desire. You can also put an HDR effect on a single photo, playing with all the different effects and sharpness. I know this isn’t real HDR, but it allow you to simulate the great properties of the HDR style with shots you wish you’d taken in HDR.
Learn how to use Photoshop to remove blemishes from your photographs.
So you have taken the best photograph EVER, but there is a tiny bird in the background, dust on the lens or a spot on your face that just wouldn’t go away that day. With Photoshop you can remove these small blemishes with a few simple steps…
YouTube is the second most important search engine in the world according to Search Engine Watch. High ranked video in Youtube can often mean first page positions in Google’s universal search results. So in effect we need to answer two questions.
Would you like a good looking Twitter Background for your business? Would you like a Twitter Background that lets you show more information than the mini profile, like the URL of your website, Linkedin and Facebook details, maybe your Flickr account and your email and telephone number?
Well you can!
Download our free Twitter background template PSD file, fill in the blanks and you will have a twitter background just like ours @SBTtraining. Incidentally if you are just starting out using Social Networking for your business you would benefit from attending our Social Networking Training course.
How to create your Free Twitter Background
If you are good with Photoshop you can fiddle with the colours by creating your own styles for the box and line at top. I have made them grey to go with most colour schemes. I think that patterned backgrounds can be quite distracting, so I chose black and white for ours. Desaturating and fading images can also work if your design is looking too garish. You can find ideas for your free Twitter background by looking for free desktop wallpaper.
Open and unzip the PSD file called twitterbackground.zip
Find or create a backgound image and paste it into the layer called “put your backgound image here”
Find an image, portrait, logo or whatever you like and paste it into the layer called “Put an image or your logo here”
Fill in your contact details
Save as jpg around 75% quality
Log into Twitter
Click on Settings from the top menu
Click on Design from the submenu
Click on Change Background Image ( bottom left of page) and a browse for files dialog box will appear
Find and select your new twitter backgound jpg
Save
Once you have created your background don’t forget to mention it in our comments below with a link to your new Twitter page, you may even get a few followers as a result.
One of the things we’re most commonly asked on our InDesign Training courses is how to improve workflow and save time using InDesign. One of the best ways to do this is to create and use InDesign Templates. This is especially useful if you’re creating very similar InDesign documents over and over, and don’t want to have to start from scratch each time.
Read the rest of "InDesign Training Tutorial: Creating Templates in InDesign CS5"
Here is a list of 10 useful time saving tips to use in Adobe Illustrator. Some of these tips may mean you have to break from your normal use of Illustrator, but getting use to them can be very rewarding in the long run. You may already know a few of these tips, or you may have some more to suggest, if you do then please leave your tip in the comments section below.
