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In this tutorial I will show you how to create realistic shadows in photoshop using one technique (as always in Photoshop, there is more than one way to skin a photo)

I will be using the same shape I was using in the Illustrator tutorial to demonstrate the techniques in this one. To get it into Photoshop I just copied and pasted it in as a Smart Object. (For more on Smart Objects, check out this previous tutorial)

 

Ah, but wait, it still has that previous dummy shadow. Let’s remove that by double clicking on the layer icon to open it up in Illustrator, delete the shadow and save. Done! The shape auto updates in Photoshop without its shadow.

 

Now for the shadow. Woah! Don’t go reach for the shadow effect in layer styles; we will not be using that for a poor replacement of a 3D shadow. Instead duplicate the layer you would like a shadow of. To duplicate a layer with speed, drag and drop the layer over the new layer button. Before I can use my shadow layer I need to rasterize it as Photoshop cannot apply the deformations we will be making to smart objects. To do this I right-click the layer and select Rasterize Layer.

Now to make it look a little like a shadow before moving it into place. Cmd/Ctrl click the layer icon on your shadow layer. This selects the contents. Now go to Edit -> Fill (or Shift + F5) and fill the layer with black. Finally use Cmd/Ctrl + D to deselect everything.

Now go to Edit -> Free Transform -> Distort. You will see your familiar transform hangers appear – but these are special. Try grabbing and moving the corner points. You will see Photoshop lets you deform like never before! Once you have finished experimenting press Esc to cancel the tool, and then load it again from the edit menu.

You need to think carefully from where the light is coming from as this can make or break the effect. My abstract background offers no clues to the location of the light, but the highlight on the shape itself suggests the main light source is in front of the shape and to the right. This would send the shadow backwards (into the picture) and slightly to the left. I grabbed the top hangers and moved the into the background like so.

In most situations you will want to ensure that the top two points are sitting horizontally, and the bottom two points are also horizontally. Also, do not move the points that connect the shadow with the object. Think about a real life shadow, the close it is to the object it is, the less distorted it is.

Once you have your shadow in the correct place, press enter to accept the deformation. It is good, but still not quite right. Lets start by blurring the edges of the shadow. Go to Filter -> Blur -> Guassian Blur. You probably want a Radius of about 4 pixels, but see what works for you.

Ok it is getting there, but still not right. Most shadows fade as they get further from the object casting them. Take the layer Fill of your shadow to 0%, it can be found below the layer opacity in the layers palette. Now double click on your shadow layer to open up the Layer Styles. Now select the Gradient Overlay row. Next click on the gradient to open the Gradient Editor. If your Foreground colour was set to black you will be able to select the second preset gradient, otherwise quickly create one that goes from solid black to 100% transparent black.Then press OK to close the Gradient Editor.

Now we don’t want our shadow to fade completely away, so change the scale to 150%. You may also need to change the angle of the gradient to fit with your shadow. Now press OK to close the Layer Styles panel.

It is almost there! Lastly we need to replicate the increased fade you get in the parts of the shadow that are most distant. For that we need to convert it for Smart Filters. Go to Edit -> Convert For Smart Filters. This allows us mask off parts of a filter using layer masks that will now come with any filters we apply. We are going to be sing our friend the Gaussian Blur again so press Cmd/Ctrl + F (This applies the last used filter again) or go up to Filter -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur. You probably want similar settings to last time.

Your Shadow layer in the palette probably looks something like this now.

You will notice the Layer mask which can be hidden or shown, but also an eye next to the gaussian blur. Yep, your filter is still editable much like Layer Styles were. Just double click the filter to re-open its settings box and edit it. But we don’t need that so click on the filter’s layer mask so select it. Now grab the gradient tool and ensure it is set to a simple black to white gradient. Lastly, drag from the base of the shadow to the end.

This will mask off the gaussian blur gradually so it mostly effects the furthest parts of the shadow – replicating a real shadow. The effect is subtle but useful.

Lastly, I made some small changes to the original vector shape to enhance the shadow effect.

Well done! You’ve have just created your own realistic shadow.

Another often overlooked aspect of most Creative Suite apps is their ability to store preset panel combinations. Adobe call these workspaces and they can be extremely useful for rapidly loading specific panel sets or just carrying out general tidying up.

Workspaces can be found in two locations: under the View>Workspaces drop down menu or, in the Application bar on the right hand side.

InDesign workspace switcher

I this example I’m using InDesign. The current workspace (Essentials) is displayed in the application bar next to the search field. Click on the downward triangle to see a list of preset workspaces (this is known as the workspace switcher).

InDesign Essentials workspace panels

The essentials workspace doesn’t really have enough panels for even basic work with InDesign. Try selecting Advanced from the list, this causes InDesign to refresh and show some new panels.

InDesign Advanced workspace panels

The Advanced workspace contains more useful panels for general InDesign work and I recommend using this one as a default rather than Essentials.

Adobe supplies various preset workspaces to get you started. Their names should tell you all you need to know about what to expect. When you try a new workspace, be sure to check the menus as well as many Adobe workspaces make use of menu highlighting and some actually hide certain menu options.

As well as using the preset workspaces, you can make your own. Make visible any panels you wish to use. Drag and organise them on the screen to the location and order you find most useful. Remember that the toolbar and control panels can also be moved by dragging the double row of tiny dots.

Random arrangement of InDesign panels

Go to the workspace switcher and select New Workspace.

InDesign save workspace dialogue box

 

Type in a name.

Any custom workspaces you have created will appear at the top of the switcher list.

When you reselect Essentials this time, you may find it retains the customisations you made for your custom workspace. This is because you started with this workspace in the first place. To revert this, go back to the workspace switcher and select Reset Essentials (or whatever your starting workspace was). InDesign will now reload the panels in their default arrangement.

All the major Creative Suite apps are extremely complex and feature far too many functions to display at once. Workspaces give you complete control over what is displayed and when. You only need to see the panels you need right now.

Let’s start at the end; or even the middle. You might be working on a piece of artwork in Adobe Illustrator but then decide the colours need to be changed. Perhaps something is the wrong tone; perhaps all the places a certain colour appears need to be changed to a completely different colour; or maybe the entire artwork needs to be changed! Do not fret and don’t go reaching for your swatches! We will not be needing those. Instead we will be making use of Illustrator’s ‘Re-colour Artwork’ tool.

As an example for this tutorial I will be using this shape. Changing its colours would be simple enough, it is just a case of selecting the parts and then selecting a new colour from the swatch. However, the re-colour artwork tool is incredibly powerful and much faster.

 

I do not like the pink colour in this flowing shape, and would rather it be green. So to begin I select everything using ctrl/cmd + A. Next I press the Re-colour Artwork button in the main panel at the top of Illustrator.

The recolour artwork panel will appear. It shows all the colours that were in the shapes we selected. The main section of the panel (with the list of colours) is split into two parts. The current part shows the current colours on the left and the new colours on the right. You can drag and drop colours from the left onto the right and Illustrator will show you a preview. This is useful for swapping colours around and experimenting a little.

Below is an example of what happens when you do this. However, for this tutorial we are going to leave the colours untouched and click on the ‘Edit’ tab. (If you did experiement, just click the button with the eyedropper and paper – it is at the top of the panel. This resets the colours.)

You should see something like this (below) A classic colour wheel with some spots and lines.

The spots represent each colour in your artwork and where it sits on the wheel. By default, the lines connecting the spots to the centre of the wheel should be dotted (unlinked); if they are solid click the unlink button (which looks like a chain). Now you can click and drag the spots around. Re-colour artwork is truly a powerful and fast way of adjusting your artwork.

By clicking and dragging colours around you can recolour all selected parts of the artwork! The ‘recolor’ tick box at the bottom of the page acts like a preview button – but if you want to commit changes ensure it is ticked before you press OK.

Something else to try is dragging while the colours are linked. Press the Link button (should currently be a broken chain icon) Now when you drag the spots they will all move together. This enables your to change the hue of the whole artwork at once. Also you will notice a brightness slider directly below the wheel. This is very useful lightening or darkening the artwork all at once. The sliders at the bottom are used for fine tuning the currently selected colour spot.

Now I have my flowing shape the colours I want, I press OK and the changes are commited! The image below demonstrates just how the Re-colour artwork tool can be used to adjust your artwork. Creating the image below from the shape above took no more than 30 seconds.

I created many copies of the shape and arranged them in an interesting scene; but I don’t want them all the same colour. Each shape is one group and so I only have to click on the shape to select all its components. Then I click the Re-colour artwork button.

Illustrator knows what colours work well together and it generates a colour guide with ‘harmony colours’ based on the colours of the currently selected artwork. These can be found under the drop-down at the top of the panel. To change the colours, just select a new set from the drop down. The new colours can then be fine tuned with the re-colour artwork tool.

Enjoy your new found Illustrator skills; now go and recolour the world!

In the previous masking tutorial (found here) we looked at how to use some of Photoshops masking tools. But now we will look at a new kind of mask, the Clipping Mask.

So let’s start playing with this tool. Here I have a background and a line of text. What I would love is for the background texture to fill only the text area. This can be done with standard masks in just a few clicks, but with two clicks it can be one with clipping masks.

(1st click) Move text under the texture.

(2nd click) Alt/Option click between the layers. Done!

When you alt click between the layers, photoshop clips the top layer to the one below – effectively cutting our texture to the shape of the text. You can also very easily move the texture just by moving its layer, the clipping mask will update itself.

It doesn’t just work with text, it works with anything. Below is an example of an image clipped to a shape.

It gets even more useful when you combine this with adjustment layers. You can get an adjustment layer such as black & white to clip to another layer using the same technique – place adjustment layer directly above the layer you want it to effect, and then alt/option click between them. In the example below I flattened the dinosaur layers first. (You can’t apply clipping masks to groups)

You can even use standard masks in combination with this technique. Here I used the mask attached to the adjustment layer to put some of the colour back into the dinosaur in certain areas.

And lastly, the great thing about these masks is they are completely non-destructive meaning you can undo everything very easily, or hide the masks to show people how you made the image. To remove a clipping mask simply alt/option click between the two layers again.

So you’ve got your hands on a shiny new iPad? Or perhaps Santa left you with some money that would go towards apps on iTunes? Or maybe you really just want something to enhance your workflow.  It doesn’t matter, this app needs to be checked out.
Imagine Adobe Illustrator, strip it down to its core features and add a layer of touch controls tuned for the iPad – now you have Inkpad. With some time you can create some beautiful vector works. I use it for only smaller pieces but, as shown below, the developers show below a mushroom drawn entirely from the app. In this post I will be discussing the pros and cons of this very interesting app as an enhancement to your workflow.

Firstly, what is it? Inkpad is an app for creating and editing vector artwork on The iPad. It gives you a tool palette with the pen tool and some basic shapes. You can create and edit paths in pretty much the same way you would in illustrator on a desktop. You also get a colour palette with which you can store your colour scheme. Furthermore, gradients, fills and shadows are available.

The app doesn’t stop there, it hides some powerful features in its crafted interface, features such as masks and pathfinder tools (eg. Unite / Intersect etc), import & export SVG files and layers. Exploring the app reveals these features tucked away in the three menus at the bottom left of the screen. I sometimes feel these could be turned into friendlier interface buttons with a more careful design for the sake of speed as the menus are quite full; remembering where a certain tool is can be difficult, especially for infrequent users.
I do love the fact you can import and export SVG files. This is a feature many had waited for in an update after the app launched; but now it is here it means you can start a project on illustrator, view it and make small edits on the iPad and then transfer it back via email, iTunes or Dropbox and continue it on the Adobe package. (or any vector program that opens SVG’s)
So what can you do with it? The vector drawing tools are quite powerful. The classic pen tool is available (without it, would it truly be a vector creation program?) you draw out as many points as you need and alter the handles as you go or afterwards with the arrow tool. The app also enables you to break the handles for sharp join for two curves through a clever use of multitouch. Furthermore, point addition tools, scissors, join and outline tools are all available. The app includes an extensive font library that you can add to through iTunes. Oh, and you can convert text to shapes too. It sure isn’t short on useful features.
But does it work? You might think that using a touch screen for detailed vector artwork might not be great from an accuracy point of view; you’d be right. A finger on the screen really isn’t great but the app does what it can to help you out with some auto alignment. You can also setup a grid with snapping options, but that isn’t always ideal. I find this app best for creating smaller ‘plans’ or ideas that can be taken to a desktop machine and expanded upon properly. Alternatively, it can be used for making smaller changes to files imported from the computer, but really it is better the other way around.

It handles performance very well. I’m using the original iPad and it renders the graphics out quickly. The only slow moments are when you resize or zoom the screen, it turns the artwork into an outline for speed and then redraws it properly; but this really isn’t a problem as it happens almost instantly.
I highly recommend this app. If you can get around the fact you won’t be working with the accuracy you are used to and need to spend a little more time adjusting your pen drawn paths, it is for working with when a computer is just out of arms reach. Import/export options, layers, powerful vector tools and portability; not bad for £5.49.

Here’s another interesting DPS generated iPad app I downloaded recently. Boxoffice is a movie industry weekly magazine. It features the usual range of industry news & gossip, celebrity interviews and film previews. I think the Boxoffice design team has made very interesting use of the features of DPS to make an engaging and genuinely entertaining app.

Boxoffice cover 1

Boxoffice makes use of DPS’s horizontal and vertical layouts to create two entirely different covers for each edition. Just rotate to switch between them. This theme is repeated in various locations in the magazine.

Boxoffice cover 2

Inside there’s a live tweets page displaying the tweets of Boxoffice staff writers.

Boxoffice tweets page

The editorial pages are presented and structured and make good use of DPS features such as swipable picture galleries to create interactive content.

Swipeable content

Another smart feature is the use of buttons to create interactive quizzes. Readers hit a button to answer the question and are rewarded with a cheeky pop up!

Boxoffice interactive quiz

Buttons are also cleverly utilised to add commentaries to objects such as movie posters and, in one particularly inventive feature, to create your own exploitation movie title!

Boxoffice button poster

Boxoffice interactive poster

Boxoffice also utilises plenty of video so you can check out trailers of forthcoming moves and there are plenty of links to external web pages and twitter feeds.

All in all, Boxoffice achieves a great deal by clever use of DPS’s interactive features which is no small achievement given the hectic, weekly production schedule. I also like the way the interactivity doesn’t overwhelm the publication with shouty and distracting sound and video, the way some other apps do. Best of all each issue is only 69p.

Boxoffice is available now in the app store.

When you are recording (in either manual or automatic mode) and you perform a drag-and-drop operation, Captivate creates a special Full Motion Recording (FMR) slide.  This slide has a small black camcorder icon (I actually think it looks more like a bugle!) beneath it in the resulting Filmstrip.  Instead of a static screenshot, its background is an animation that shows the drag-and-drop action.

In Captivate 5.x, you may notice some rather strange things happening to the mouse position and movement within the two slides that precede and follow the FMR slide:

• In the slide that follows the FMR slide, the mouse movement starts from the top left-hand corner, and there is no way to drag this starting position to elsewhere on the slide.  You actually want the mouse to start from the position that it moved to during the drag-and-drop action.  The solution is to Show the mouse on the FMR slide, and to move the mouse object to the final position of the drag-and-drop action.  You can then Hide the mouse on this slide again.  After doing this, you will find that the mouse magically now starts from this position on the following slide.
• In the slide that precedes the FMR slide, you may find that the mouse is hidden, and that you need to Show it.  Even then, you will need to correct the mouse movement by dragging the mouse to the starting point of the drag-and-drop action.  You can’t do this by using the “Align to Next Slide” option, and I believe the only way to do it is by eye.  You may find it useful to switch back and forth between this slide and the FMR slide, adjusting the position of the mouse until it matches the starting mouse position on the FMR slide.

If you take the time to do the above adjustments carefully, you will find that drag-and-drop actions blend seamlessly with the mouse movement on the preceding and following slides in your software demonstrations.

-Matthew

 

In this post I am continuing my foray into Easel.js. Here I am now actually displaying and animating pictures. So this post is about JavaScript animation – using EaselJS pt 2. We will be making this…

EaselJS animation v1

 

…and it will be the car that is moving across the screen.

Again you need to make up a simple html5 page and link to the easljs library…

<script src=”easel.js”></script>

First you need to create a stage and link it to your canvas element…

var page = document.getElementById(“canvas”);
var stage = new Stage(page);

Here my canvas element has an id of canvas. The stage variable will hold all of my items to view and animate, and it is linked to the canvas element by Stage(page). Now I can start adding images. The images I use , of course, can just be replaced by any image you wish. To use easeljs to show an image… var sun= new Bitmap(“sun.png”); Just create a new variable and make it a new Bitmap object, with the url of your image inside. Once you have your image you can adjust its x and y properties, and its scale properties…

tree1.scaleX = tree1.scaleY = 0.4;
tree1.x = 100;
tree1.y = 100;

again, this will be familiar to those of you who know ActionScript 3. To finally see the image we need to use addChild()…

stage.addChild(sun);

 …this last is vital, as without it we have setup our image, position, size, etc, but we will not see it until we use addChild(). We can then repeat this as many times as we like for each image we wish. However, before we run this we need to do a couple more things. First we need to set the frame rate, and also we need to tell easeljs to update the canvas as we are moving objects. This is done like so…

Ticker.setFPS(60);
Ticker.addListener(window);

 The last line tells easeljs to look for a function called tick, and it is within this function that we update our canvas…

function tick()
{
stage.update();
carMan.x-=1;
}

I am not doing anything fancy with the animation, just changing x by 1 pixel, but it looks pretty good. In further posts I will discuss more advanced movement, easing, etc, but for now I think it works pretty well. You do not have to write too much code, and it all fits together very nicely. Here is the full code for the example…

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang=”en”>
<head>
<meta charset=”utf-8″ />
<title>easel_test</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”" />
<meta name=”author” content=”alex” />
<script src=”easel.js”></script>
<script>

var stage;
var page;
var carMan;

function init()
{
page = document.getElementById(“canvas”);
stage = new Stage(page);

var sun= new Bitmap(“sun.png”);
sun.scaleX = sun.scaleY = 0.15;
stage.addChild(sun);

var  tree1= new Bitmap(“tree1.png”);
tree1.scaleX = tree1.scaleY = 0.4;

tree1.regY = tree1.image.height;
tree1.y = 300;

stage.addChild(tree1);

var  tree2= new Bitmap(“tree2.png”);
tree2.scaleX = tree2.scaleY = 0.4;

tree2.regY = tree2.image.height;
tree2.y = 305;
tree2.x = 300;
stage.addChild(tree2);

carMan= new Bitmap(“carman.png”);
carMan.scaleX = carMan.scaleY = 0.1;
carMan.regY = carMan.image.height;
carMan.y = 308;
carMan.x = 1000;
stage.addChild(carMan);

Ticker.setFPS(60);
Ticker.addListener(window);
//looking for a function called Tick
}

function tick()

{
stage.update();
carMan.x-=1;
}

</script>

<style>
body
{
background-color: rgba(209,146,95,1);
}

#canvas
{
background-color: rgba(235,217,118,0.3);
border-color:rgba(200,146,95,1);
border-style: solid;
border-width: 1px;
}
</style>
</head>

<body onload=”init();”>
<div>
<header>
<h1>easel_test</h1>
</header>
<nav>
<p>
<a href=”/”>Home</a>
</p>
<p>
<a href=”/contact”>Contact</a>
</p>
</nav>

<canvas id=”canvas” width=”1024″ height=”300″></canvas>

<footer>
<p>
..by alexS
</p>
</footer>
</div>
</body>
</html>

Have a play with the code and see what you can come up with!

If Ps is already making the most of the available RAM and you are happy with the other settings we looked at in part 1 but still need even more out of Photoshop, perhaps this next section will be of use to you.

Some quick tips:

- Quit other applications and then restart Photoshop. This will increase the RAM available to it.

- Also, close any images you are not working on.

- Ensure you have at least 1GB of free disk space while Photoshop is running. (This is required as Scratch Disk Space and the more available, the better)

- Work in 8-bit mode when you can. Photoshop can do more to an 8-bit image faster than a 16 or 32. However, if converting down to an 8-bit you will lose image data. Choose wisely: quality or performance.

- Purge the history and clipboard information. This will free up RAM. Edit > Purge > All.

- Careful use of layers. Flattening groups of layers will increase image redraw times and decrease overall file size.

- Ensure your OS is updated. Essential, but often overlooked.

(Windows) – Run disk cleanup occasionally. This will delete temporary files left behind after system crashes.

(Mac) – Let the machine run maintenance scripts. Not common knowledge, but the Mac OS will clean itself of temporary files and unused data files to optimise the system automatically. It will attempt to do this at 3:15 on a saturday morning and 5:30 on the 1st of every month. In OS X 10.5 and earlier, if the system is asleep at these times the scripts won’t run. In Lion (10.6), the scripts run when the computer is next turned on if it could not run during the times specified. The apple support doc here gives details on how to manually run the maintenance. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2319

- Defragment the drive you are using. This is not just a Photoshop performance tip but a general system one.

Do you hunger for more??? Ok, a few more details about scratch disk space and efficiency then. Adobe recommends you use a large, fast disk for Scratch disk space. (The disk you use can be specified in the preferences panel seen earlier) Removable drives have slow data transfer times and so should be avoided. You may be considering a Solid State Drive. Running Photoshop from a SSD will enable the program to start up in seconds, perhaps almost instantly. However, unless you also specify the SSD be used as a Scratch Disk, you will not see any other improvements. Read-write and data transfer times are faster on SSDs than standard Hard drives so when Scratch Disk space is required, Photoshop can make use of them faster, However, RAM is still even faster so the best thing to do is max out your RAM before you consider SSDs.

The efficiency indicator is at the bottom of any open Photoshop document. If you cannot see it, click the little arrow pointing right and choose efficiency from the menu. (you will have to be in windowed mode to see it) When Ps is purely using RAM (and therefore at its fastest) the efficiency is 100%. Anything below indicates the Scratch Disk Space is being used. If you are commonly seeing values below 90% and Photoshop is making use of all your available RAM then perhaps consider upgrading the RAM in the computer. To try and increase efficiency you must decrease the size of your file and close other open files. Things like reducing the number of layers via merging will also help. To see the size of the file your are working on, go back to that arrow and click document sizes. The number on the left is the open file size (How much space in RAM and Scratch Disk it takes up) and the number on the right is the saved file size.

So the overview: The best things you can do to get the most from Photoshop is; ensure it has access to all of your RAM, ensure there is lots of available Hard Drive Space, run 64-bit Photoshop on a 64-bit OS, and finally, keep an eye on the efficiency indicator.

 

Ok, I couldn’t resist one more tip. This is for anyone who is a frequent user of Bridge and finds that now they are lacking in Hard Drive Space. Bridge keeps a cache of all the images and thumbnails you see while working in the program. While these keep it nice and responsive, they use huge amounts of disk space. In the preferences panel for Bridge, click Cache from the left hand menu. In the bottom half of the screen you will see some useful managing controls. Compact cache will reduce the cache size but not remove it completely. Purge cache will delete it entirely and when you do so you can watch your free space rocket up. If you use Bridge a lot you may notice 1-2GBs are freed. Of course, as you use bridge the cache will be re-created, but it does allow for unused cache items to be cleared out that would otherwise be wasting precious space.

Object styles provide an extremely useful way of easily applying a consistent set of formatting properties to objects in Adobe Captivate 5.x. Styles include settings that affect the appearance of the object (colour, text alignment, caption type, etc.). They do not include size or position settings, callout styles, or an other settings relating to the behaviour of the object (such as Success Action). Thus, there are no styles for Click Boxes (because they have no appearance — by definition they are invisible).

It is possible to override styles by applying additional formatting (for example, bold) and this is occasionally useful. When you do this, you see a + sign beside the style name at the top of the Properties pane.

My experience of working with styles has made me aware of two important issues that you may need to watch out for:

• When you override a style’s formatting for a specific object, this stops the formatting of the object changing as a result of subsequent changes to the underlying style

• If you import a set of styles (.cps), then any objects that have a style of the same name of one of the imported styles is reformatted to match the imported style — even if the style has been overridden. In other words, when you import styles you can potentially lose all your style overrides. This actually provides a way of quickly removing the overrides from all your objects. Export the styles to a .cps file, and then immediately import the .cps file. The imported styles are applied to all objects, and all style overrides are removed.

I should mention again before I finish that styles are probably my favourite new feature in Captivate 5.x

-Matthew

Animating with JavaScript is relatively easy, however if you are used to ActionScript 3 it can be particularly painful to go back to learn how JavaScript does things, compared to how AS3 does things. Enter EaselJS. This is a new JavaScript library that aims to make animating and controlling objects within a web page easy – particularly if you are used to AS3.

It is built by Grant Skinner and can be found here…

http://easeljs.com/

In this series of tutorials I aim to investigate JavaScript animation using EaselJS and see just exactly how easy it is to use and what it can do. At the moment my development environment is AptanaStudio3, but you can of course use DreamWeaver or any other IDE that you wish.

First download EaselJS and find the easel.js file (it should be in the lib folder) and install that in the directory of your choice. Then create a new html file and open it up. I will be creating html5 pages, and using the canvas tag, so all my animation and drawing will be done within a canvas tag with the id of canvas. For today’s post I will just create some text and insert it into my element, but in further posts I will bring in graphics and start to animate them. Bear in mend that EaselJS is built to deliberately mimic (loosely) ActionScript’s display list.

Within your html page link to the easel.js file…

<script src=“easel.js”></script>

Within your html add the following…

<canvas id=“canvas” width=“1024″ height=“768″></canvas>

Now, when I first started playing around with this, I initially put a css rule like so…

#canvas
{
background-color: rgba(235,217,118,0.3);
width:1024px;
height:768px;
}

…and I left out the inline styling. This had the unfortunate effect of scaling all the canvas elements and making them look awful. So put your width and height inline and your objects will display fine.

Once you have set your html page you just have to write something like…

<script>

function init()
{
var canvas = document.getElementById(“canvas”);
var text = new Text(“Hello!”,”bold 12pt Courier”,”#fff”);
var stage = new Stage(canvas);
stage.addChild(text);
text.y = 50.5;
text.x = 10.5;
stage.update();
}

</script>

This function I called from the body using onload…

<body onload=“init();”>

…and here is the result…

easel test1

Nothing complicated, but very easy to create. Just a couple of points though…

1] We are creating pixels, not vectors
2] As a result this is not text, it is not selectable and they are not objects that we can control – it is just one block of pixels.

Looking at the JavaScript code you can see how similar it is to AS3. First we have to get the element that we are writing in using getElementById, and then we create a new Text object. Again the options are very straightforward. For the full documentation check here…

http://easeljs.com/docs/Text.html

As you can see the Text object has three [optional] arguments – the text to display, the font to display, and the colour to use. What is nice is that you can use standard CSS for the font and colour arguments. Once you have set up the Text object, just create a stage, and pass it the canvas id, telling EaselJS that the stage is the canvas element. Once all that is done you display the Text object by using addChild(). The stage before means add the child to the stage, and within the parentheses is the object to add, our text object. Obviously you can do this multiple times and you can also position the text object by using its x and y properties.

All-in-all I find this library very easy to use, particularly as I have a lot of AS3 experience and it quite often drives me nuts trying to find a way in JavaScript to do what I normally do in AS3. The library is easy to use, and, especially when we come to animation, fun. Later on in this series we will also cover SoundJS and TweenJS, two sister libraries for playing with sounds and tweening.

In the next post of this series I will show you how to load graphics into the canvas element and animate them.

In the first part of this article I described how to create and share content between Illustrator and Photoshop. Now we’ll take the artwork and use it in Illustrator and InDesign.

After clicking ok to apply my 3D adjustments I can now save the logo for use in other applications. If I were using a traditional export format such as EPS and TIFF, I’d have to flatten my Photoshop document. This would reduce the file size but it would also make editing my various text, smart object and 3D layers impossible. As most Adobe apps understand each other’s native formats, saving as TIFF and EPS are not necessary and, therefore, neither is flattening.

I want to have a transparent background so I ensure the background, white layer of the document is turned off I then save it as a PSD file with embedded profile. This will preserve the layers and transparency settings with no decrease in quality while remaining fully editable by Photoshop.

To use the logo in Illustrator I create a new document then select File > Place.

Illustrator place file dialogue box

I make sure to deselect the Link checkbox, linking an image reduces its editable options though increases the Illustrator document size. A Photoshop Import Options dialogue box is displayed. The choices I make here will have an impact on how I can use the logo. To retain maximum control and flexibility I select Convert Layers to Objects as well as Import Hidden Layers. This will make each layer of the PSD accessible in the Illustrator document, including any that currently have visibility turned off.

Illustrator Photoshop Import Options dialogue box

On checking my Layers pane I can see that the PSD file has been imported with layers as separate elements. I can now isolate these as necessary.

Illustrator Layers panel

To use the Logo in an InDesign document, I select File>Place and make sure to check the Show Import Options checkbox.

Place PSD to InDesign

InDesign displays the Image Import Options dialogue box. From here I can see what layers are present in the file and I can alter the visibility by checking and unchecking the eyeball icons. A preview thumbnail is provided in the corner of the dialogue box.

InDesign import options dialogue box

After clicking OK, the logo can be scaled and positioned on the page. The gradient background I have created in InDesign reveals that the background of the logo has retained its transparent setting.

Logo on InDesign page

I can adjust the layer settings of the logo at any time by selecting the object and then Object>Object Layer Options. This displays the Object Layer options pane once again. I can now adjust the layer visibility and preview the results right on the page.

InDesign Object Layer Options menu

InDesign Object layer options dialogue box

 

By saving the logo in a layered, native format, I can access all the layers by simply clicking the visibility icons in either the Illustrator or InDesign layers panels. By using a flat format, such as EPS or TIFF, I’d have to save a new file for each variation, then import each one. If I want to change the logo, I can simply edit it and re-save from the original and update it in the layout application. This flexibility in copying and pasting content between apps as well as saving in native file formats makes working with Adobe Creative Suite files much quicker and more efficient than constantly saving versions in inefficient formats.

 

“My computer has 60 gigaflops of RAM but Photoshop still can’t handle huge file!”

Finding that Photoshop is not quite running right and making use of the vast amounts of computing power you have stored in that shiny metal box? Hopefully these tips will help out.

Firstly how does Photoshop use the available computer power? A brief look at this will help us better understand how to optimise the system. When Ps is processing your images it will do so using RAM. However, when RAM is in short supply it will have to switch to using any available Hard Drive space (known as scratch disk) to continue working on your image. However, scratch disk space is significantly slower than RAM.

Unfortunately you cannot just put more RAM into the computer and see Ps speed up (also RAM can be expensive.) There are certain limitations Ps has when it comes to how much RAM it can use; which many may not be aware of.

32-bit Photoshop on Windows 32-bit, can only take advantage of 1.7GB of your RAM.

32-bit Photoshop on Windows 64-bit OS, can only take advantage of 3.2GB of your RAM.

64-bit Photoshop on Windows 64-bit OS can use as much RAM as you have.

These only apply to CS4 and CS5. If you are using a Mac, these values differ slightly as the OS is 64-bit. Furthermore, Adobe only released a 32-bit version of CS4, whereas there are 32 and 64-bit versions of CS5.

CS4 Ps on a Mac can only use 3GB of RAM. CS5 (32-bit) can use even less – 2.1GB of RAM. CS5 (64-bit) can use as much RAM as you have.

So thats the end of the RAM guide… or is it? You may have a 64-bit OS and Creative Suite, but Photoshop still isn’t quite running right. Well lets dive into the preferences pane. Open Photoshop and go to Edit > Preferences > Performance (Or Photoshop > Preferences > Performance on a Mac) You will see this brilliant window pop-up:

 

The main top-left box is the important one. This tells Photoshop how much of the available RAM you will allow it to use. (The available RAM is dictated by the 32/64-bit guide above) In almost all situations you will want Photoshop to make use of everything it can. As previously discussed, RAM is faster than Scratch Disk so what are you waiting for? Drag that slider to the right.

While we are here in the preferences let’s take a quick look at some other optimisations. Take a gander at the top-left box in the panel. There are three options for cache levels. You should use Tall and Thin if you generally edit small, multi-layered images and have not much RAM.Big and Flat is the opposite; large images (potentially hundreds of megapixels) with not as many layers. Default is in between. If you see yourself fitting into one of the extremes, click the button most relevant to your work.

Cache levels are also an interesting optimisation point. Higher cache levels enables Photoshop to store more levels cached image information. This results in slower loading of saved files, but improved performance while actually working on an image. Adobe say that if you are working with images of roughly 1 megapixel then stick to a cache level of 1 or 2. Alternatively; if you work with files of roughly 10 megapixels or more then change the cache levels to above 4.

Cache Tile Size is the amount of data or ’tiles’ that Photoshop can work on at any time. If you have ever been working on a large image and apply a CPU heavy effect, you will probably have seen tiles in action – Photoshop updates and redraws the image as a series of tiles. It works on one at a time and with this preference you can set the size of the tiles. Larger tiles are generally more efficient, especially when it comes to complex effects such as filters like Gaussian blur and sharpening. However, these take longer to re-draw. If you tend to make only smaller changes like painting strokes it is much better to set the tile size lower.

Now press OK and close Photoshop down completely. The changes will take effect the next time you open it.

 

 

Chances are, if you use one Adobe application, you use two or even more. As each has unique features and functions, it’s often necessary to transfer data between apps to get the results you want. Years ago it was necessary to save data in flat, exchange formats such as EPS and TIFF to get this done. Though many people still use this approach it is now very inefficient and time consuming and restricts the capacity to use layers, transparency and other effects. This two-part article presents a quick overview of some of the flexible ways to exchange data in CS5.

I am creating a logo for a fictional design company, Design Shop. I want to create an interesting background pattern. Using Illustrator’s Dot Pattern Vector Pack (accessible from the Symbols panel), I select Vector Pack 12, a circular, halftone dot pattern.

Dot pattern created in Illustrator

After scaling it to the required size I copy it and switch to Photoshop where I create a new document and select Paste. NB selecting File>Place  would give the same result.

Pasting Illustrator object into Photoshop

Recognising the Illustrator vector element, Photoshop offers me several choices when pasting. In this case I’m using the default choice, Smart Object. Photoshop places the object on a new layer and activates Transformation mode. After scaling the object to fit, I accept the transformation by hitting Return/Enter. The layer is titled Vector Smart Object and it cannot be edited with regular Photoshop tools.

I add some type by selecting the Type tool and making some typeface size and colour choices. The word Design is added as a text layer.

Photoshop Text layer

To create the next word I want to use Illustrator’s brush styles. Switching back to Illustrator I create the next word in contrasting typeface and colour and then convert it to outlines (Type>Create outlines). Keeping the object selected I open the Brushes pane.

 

Text created with Illustrator

I’m looking for something more artistic than the default styles displayed so I open the Artistic chalk, charcoal brushes library from the Brushes panel menu. Though I can’t change the library panel, I can test the look of each brush by double clicking the style which adds it to the Brushes panel and applies it to the selected object.

Illustrator brush effect

After some experimentation I find an interesting option and copy the object.

Switching back to Photoshop I paste the object again, accepting the Smart Object default. Once again, Photoshop adds the object as a Vector Smart Object layer and I can scale and transform it.

Vector text object pasted into Photoshop

Looking at the combination of layers I decide to edit the colour of the background dots. Double clicking the layer causes Photoshop to hand-off the object to the source application, Illustrator.

Photoshop Edit Vector Smart Object notification

On clicking OK, the object is opened as a new Illustrator document titled Vector Smart Object. This is a new document, completely separate from the one I used to create the dots in the first step. I select the dot pattern and make it editable by clicking the Release button displayed in the options bar. This releases it from being a symbol and I can now select the dots and apply a new colour fill to them.

Edited Vector Smart Object

To update the original Photoshop document, I only have to save the file after completing the changes. Photoshop recognises the change and immediately updates the object.

I decide to change the brush effect on the’ shop’ text so I repeat the last step with the other Vector layer. This time I change the fill of the text to white.

Updated brush effect

After updating the document again I decide to create an alternative effect using Photoshop’s Repoussé 3D effect. After duplicating the Design text layer, I change to the 3D Workspace and select create 3D Repoussé object. This rasterises my duplicate text layer and displays the Repoussé panel.

Photoshop Repoussé options panel

I can now make changes to the all the 3D aspects of the shape. It’s easy to get carried away with the range of options in this pane and it’s usually best to make a few, small adjustments. Remember that 3D effects can take a lot of memory to render, the more complex the effects,the longer it will take Photoshop to create them after you hit OK.

In the next article, I will discuss how to save the final logo and look at options for importing it into both Illustrator and InDesign.

With all the focus on new kinds of dynamic electronic publishing, it’s easy to forget that printing still plays a major part in design and communication. Most of us have to create printed material and making sure colours are consistent and accurate, pictures are sharp and documents are technically correct is a big part of getting that right.

Here’s a checklist of digital pre-press essentials for print production.

1) Calibrate monitors and adjust lights and other visual distractions (such as strong colours on walls, coloured desktop patterns, strong natural light sources) so you can be confident you’re seeing the most accurate colours onscreen.

2) Make sure all your Creative Suite applications are using the same colour set up and policies. All Adobe applications use colour management to define and reference colours. You can synchronise all CSapps by using Bridge. Go to Edit>Creative Suite Colour Settings. Choose a pre-set that matches your location and print process: Europe General Purpose 2 if you’re outputting to European Printing standards or Europe Pre-press 2 if you have higher quality requirements and don’t mind being pestered with notifications from applications. Then click Apply and all your CS apps will be configured to use the same settings. Note that, if theses settings defaulted to North American settings, your colours are being defined for US Newspaper printing and your CS has probably been installed with the wrong default language.

3) Digitise pictures using RGB colour mode and don’t convert to CMYK too early. Though all images have to be converted to CMYK eventually, the change is irreversible and reduces quality. Wait until you are completely finished with all colour and tonal adjustments before converting to CMYK. Avoid switching back and forward between RGB and CMYK as the change is destructive and should be done as little as possible.

4) When working with images, keep a high resolution, RGB original complete with all layers, masks, paths etc. Make a copy for each output (print, web etc) and flatten, resize and convert the copy to the correct colour mode. You can always generate another version from an RGB master file.

5) Use Photoshop Gamut warning feature to highlight pixel areas that will change colour when converted to CMYK, you can then adjust hue, saturation etc to your satisfaction while being confident about how they will be converted to CMYK.

6) Use InDesign and Illustrator Separation Preview panels to show how your documents will separate into CMYK. These also display overprinting attributes so you can check when colours are printing on top of each other correctly.

7) If you have applied transparency or even just a drop shadow, use InDesign’s Flattener Preview to predict how flattening will affect your document.

87) Use InDesign’s Live Pre-flight tool to automatically check for pre-press issues such as image resolution and colour space, bleed and trim hazards, overprinting issues and more.

9) Make sure you chose the correct PDF preset when creating your print ready PDF. Some presets downsample image resolution and convert colour to sRGB, others convert to CMYK, some support transparency and others don’t. If in doubt, consult with your print shop or, better still, ask them for a custom preset so you can make the PDF to their specification.

10) User Acrobat to verify colours, resolution, bleeds and rich blacks in any PDF prior to sending out to print.

Adobe recently released a new patch (7.07) for their Presenter product, which is bundled alongside Captivate within the Adobe eLearning Suite.  Presenter is an add-in for PowerPoint that enables you to add audio, video, and quiz questions into PowerPoint slide shows, and to publish them in Flash format for deployment to a web server or LMS.

The significance of the new patch for Captivate developers is that, for the first time, Presenter supports ActionScript 3 — which means that you can now embed a Captivate 5.x movie (.swf file) within a Presenter slide.  If you tried doing this with the version of Presenter (7.06) that is included within the Adobe eLearning Suite 2.5, the result would have been a rather disconcerting flashing screen accompanied by a rapid clicking sound.

The Presenter 7.07 patch is free to download and install for anyone who has an existing Presenter 7 or eLearning Suite license.  However, if you have the eLearning Suite, you must complete the following steps to install the patch successfully:

1. Uninstall your current version of Presenter (you can do this by running uninstall for the eLearning Suite, and choosing only to remove Presenter).
2. Download and install the trial version of Presenter 7.07.  You can access it from the following page:http://www.adobe.com/products/presenter/Do not attempt to enter your eLearning Suite license number when you install Presenter 7.07 as this will not work.  Choose to install it as a trial.
3. Run your eLearning Suite installer again, and choose to install Presenter.  This will activate a licensed version of Presenter, and will not revert Presenter back to 7.06 again.

-Matthew