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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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);

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.

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