dekeStuff

Hey gang,

Meant to have this post up bright and early Monday morning, but the punative Internet gods conspired against me and robbed me of my usual beloved-martini-in-hand 3am site access. Jerks.

Anyhoo, as promised, more detailed information about the "Stretching a Photo in Illustrator" trick from last week's dekePod. Remember her?

(Image ©2008 Andrzej Burak. Used by permission of iStockphoto.)

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More and more of my graphically inclined authors are choosing the option to create their chapters in InDesign. Problem is, InDesign doesn't (really) have the two things an editor needs to communicate effectively within the document during the editing process: trackable changes and efficient comments. For the latter, there's the Notes palette, but unfortunately that hasn't improved since we learned to hack it into CS2. It still has an impossibly hard-to-select reference point and a weird sense of order. (If you are still using InDesign CS2 and would like to know how to get the Notes palette, check out this InDesign Secret.) I came up with a system for creating comments with anchored objects that the dekeTeam is still using today, even after the Notes palette became a regular cast member in CS3, because my anchored comment system works better. Here's how we do it. (Oh, and I'm using a draft of the upcoming Illustrator One-on-One book so you're getting a miniscule sneak peak here for what it's worth. Nothing but the best for you people.)

By the way, as far as tracked changes goes, yes, I know about InCopy. I've used the InCopy plugin effectively, but it adds another layer of complexity (and another $250 a person to the process). I've actually had authors simply tell me it wasn't going to happen. InCopy seems ideal for collaboration in real-time, say, on a magazine project, but in the book world, chapters go linearly to each person and we rarely work across the same server, which ultimately makes InCopy more cumbersome than it needs to be. What I really need is to be able to track changes, a la InCopy, in the regular old InDesign Story Editor. I've whined about this incessantly to Michael Ninness, our beloved friend and InDesign Product Manager. I truly believe he'll make sure it happens one day, just to shut me up. Read more » 

To help you make sense of the most recent episode of dekePod, I've written up a discussion of how I modified the colors of my backyard in the Lab mode. Although it flies by in the video, the technique is not particularly difficult. I don't use Curves or masking or anything terribly complicated. Just Levels and -- brace yourself -- Brightness/Contrast. In Photoshop CS3, Brightness/Contrast has not only turned into a respectable command, but it has been elevated to pro status when combined with Lab. And it remains as easy as ever to use.

Some portions of this article have been excerpted from my upcoming article, "Don't Fear the Lab Mode," which will run in the September, 2008 issue of Photoshop User magazine. So as not to diminish the impact of that article (as well as the two that will follow it), I have purposely made the steps here brief, illustrated with thumbnail-resolution imagery. You should still be able to follow along, but you'll have lots more to look forward to in Photoshop User. Read more » 

I believe it was three weeks ago that I began to tell you good folks about how to transform this:

into the glam phantom-of-an-illustration witnessed below using Illustrator's Transparency functions. The danger is that virtually every effect I'm applying falls outside the boundaries of the professional print standard PostScript, meaning that there's a high chance that this artwork might exhibit errors when you receive 10,000 copies back from your commercial print house. Which is a real heartbreaker, as anyone who's encountered such blunders knows. Doubly so, because each and every heartbreak can be anticipated and eliminated with the help of Photoshop.

By the end of Part 1, I had transformed my son Sammy (shown here during his early days of smooth and impeccable baldness) into the near masterwork seen below. In this final part, I will add several details with the help of Illustrator's blend modes. Then I'll mask the entire illustration and ship it off to Photoshop for final rasterization. As much as it may pain you -- at least philosophically -- to convert your razor-sharp vectors into resolution-dependent pixels, this Photoshop provides a practical, no surprises = no tears solution.

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I realize I owe you lovers of the graphic arts a Part 2 to my Illustrator Transparency, Photoshop Resolve article. And I'll get to it, don't you fret. But this week I got a wild hair up my nose. I say "nose" knowing full well that Colleen will give me crap for censoring myself. (Compare this to dekePod, where I vigilantly defend my every naughty utterance). But you see, this week, I have to self-censor because, this week, I'm givin' it up for the children. The wee little vulnerable, innocent, pure-as-driven-snow children. Who in the case of my boys already know most the choice bits of wayward vocabulary (as well as some of the advanced combos), but also know better than to employ them in public.

As those of you who are familiar with my stuff know, I'm not a photographer. So you won't find me proselytizing on such topics as aperture and focal length. But I am a graphic artist and I do have an eye for framing and composition, which is where this article comes in.

Lately, I've been experimenting with the low-angle "hero" shot. By way of contrast, consider the image below. It shows my seven-year-old, Max, building sand trees using a sculptural variation of the Jack-the-dripper technique. For those interested in such things, the technique involves extremely fine, wet sand which is then squeezed though the palm and occasionally whipped at a target, as we see Max doing here. (He's actually amazingly deft at it. I know, I'm the dad so I would say that. But he's as good as me, and I rock at sand trees.) 

The image nicely conveys a moment of dynamic energy. But the story is told from my perspective, the perspective of an adult. Read more »