Adobe Creative Suite CS4 - Design Premium

INDESIGN CS4

InDesign is intended to be used for page layout designs of single or multiple pages with a rich graphical content. If you think about it, that is just what a wedding album is! We have long pondered whether InDesign would make a good album-design tool and concluded that the answer is 'yes' if you wish to move away from 'straight' pictures in an album. Obviously if the range you offer is for albums with slip-in photographs, InDesign will be of little use. Alternatively if you wish to create album designs with complex, sophisticated graphic content, then InDesign might just be what you are looking for. The 'sophisticated' graphic elements can take the form of lettering, drop shadows, borders, and swirly motifs and swashes. You should recognise immediately that all these things can be done in Photoshop, the question is whether you can get an edge in either timing or sophistication using InDesign. Potentially, one area where InDesign scores is for the placement of multiple images onto a backdrop spread. Here the Photoshop photographer/designer can find themselves adjusting the layered, individual images up and down in scale – devastating pixels along the way! Although Smart Layers in Photoshop get over this, there are overheads on the file size and some compromises. Using InDesign you can 'collect' a bunch of images in Adobe Bridge and then 'fire' them into pre-set content boxes on an InDesign template. This is the work of (literally) seconds – just a single mouse click. Now you can resize as many times as you like, up, down and rotation, as the linked file is only rescaled once (for flattening to print or perhaps to create a PDF.).

The conundrum for the theme of this InDesign versus Photoshop debate is this. Does the speed with which you can place images (seconds) matter if you then spend 30 minutes pushing and pulling images around the page? Well, if Photoshop was better for doing this you would find magazine designers using Photoshop to design their pages – and they do not! Take the example in which you have decided that one photograph, on a page of many, has to go. In Photoshop you have to open the file (which, with as many as 10 Smart Objects may be quite large), identify the correct layer, delete it, re-import the replacement image to a new layer, scale it and make it a Smart Object, then apply any Styles such as drop shadow and borders. Now with InDesign you quite simply drag the replacement file from Bridge and drop it into the box to replace the original. You may need to know a couple of keystroke shortcuts to fit a new crop but that is all. It is undoubtedly more efficient, but the question arises in regard to the difference in overall time to complete the album. Cropping is certainly easier using InDesign, you always drop the entire image into place then drag the container box to crop to taste – in Photoshop you either have to pre-crop the image or 'crop' the view using masks; both have their disadvantages.

Pushing the Design About

In the album design above (courtesy of Martin Taylor) the large monochrome image has been dropped in, as a backdrop. The four smaller pictures have then been dropped on top into pre-prepared boxes, each complete with stokes and drop shadows, in the themed colours. The adjustments you might consider are as follows, and remember this is not the last word in page design, simply an exercise, we have even made the strokes a little too large so that you can see them:

A. Shift the image to reveal the groom's right eye.
B. Push the vertical shot to the right and possibly reduce its size to nestle between the faces of the couple without obscuring them.
C. Push this image upwards to reveal more of the bride's tiara. If you decide that this is 'breaking the grid' too much then try it in the
same place, but reduce the scale.
D. 'Crop' the image by simply pulling the left hand container border to the right. This does not actually crop the image, only hides it. Using
the Direct Select tool would allow you to move the entire image about within the boundaries of the box.

The strokes, drop shadows, bevels, etc, can be added globally or on an individual basis by use of the Eye Dropper tool to transfer 'object properties'.

Finally, if you really like your layout you can do a 'copy all' then go to the master pages, make a new master, then 'Paste in Place' to drop the images and all their styles. Then you can use the Direct Select tool to select and then delete the contents of the boxes to leave just the skeleton outline. This Master Page may be called up and used as often as you choose. If, for your next album, you have a different colour theme, all you do is change the Master Pages and start your new album. You may also make an entire InDesign document into a template for subsequent projects. If you have a business logo, signature or some form of advertising plate (discrete please) this may be dragged into the Library panel for drag and drop use, it could also be built into a master page.

Bear in mind that this little 'show round' only scratches the surface of what you can do and that all operations also have shortcuts so that your working speed will be even faster.

CREATIVE SUITE CS4 KEY POINTS

The benefits of 64-bit operation might be a reason to upgrade for many photographers. A need to open RAW files will drive many up from CS2.

A wedding photographer has to decide whether the additional expenditure on the other elements of the software justifies the additional expense, a cost which carries both monetary and time implications. We remain puzzled as to the outcome of a fight between Photoshop and InDesign for album page layout and certainly cannot estimate the time it would take someone to become proficient at both Photoshop and InDesign. Making a wedding album is not as daunting as creating a whole magazine to hand off for production on a big printing press! We migrated to InDesign for the production of Professional Imagemaker in about four hours, but came from years of experience on both PageMaker and QuarkXpress. It would be interesting to test our readership for interest in a one-day seminar on graphic design, perhaps at Convention 2010, in which the options could be demonstrated and explored, something for the future perhaps.

We have always held the view that there is an additional income stream for commercial photographers in creating brochures, reports and stationery. This does bring in a need for good writing and copy-editing skills, but in the current financial climate you need to look to turn a penny from many different areas and potential clients out there might be looking for a less expensive turn-key operation for their publicity material!

Possible InDesign Workflow

1. Make a new document. In this case we have two A4 landscape pages as our double page spread and a 24 page total. We have set a 3mm
bleed (consult your lab if printing 'off-site').
2. If you already have a Kuler swatch set as your colour theme, load the .ASE file into the Color Swatch panel.
3. This screen grab shows a basic two screen set-up. On the right, Adobe Bridge holds all the source files which have all been colour graded, sharpened and converted to JPEGs or TIFFs or PSD files. You might also sort them, grade and/or label them in Bridge if you have spent time organising your 'pictorial story thread'.

4. The size and position of each image and its bounding box. They are fully adjustable, including rotation, as many times as you choose, without any additional loss of quality. If you Alt-Double click an image from within InDesign it is opened in Photoshop where it may be adjusted or toned, etc. Then, when you save the file in Photoshop, the InDesign link is automatically updated.

5. Note that RAW files cannot be placed directly into InDesign.
6. The final operation is to export your InDesign project as a single, multi-page PDF at printing resolution.

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