Claudia McCue

It was another one of those thoroughly snakebit jobs that go wrong at every step, but at its core is a mystery concerning how QuarkXPress treats an overprinting grayscale image in an exported PDF. “Regular” overprinting objects, such as text or boxes, display and print predictably. But grayscale images are handled differently, and this results in a misleading display in Acrobat, which leads to a surprise on press. And, as you know, “surprise” is not a good word in printing.

Here’s the timeline: Continue Reading »

If you’ve recently upgraded to CS4, you may wonder why you can’t find some familiar Photoshop plug-ins: hey, where’s Pattern Maker? And how about Extract?! A number of our old favorites are not installed by default: you’ll find them on the “Content” disk in your Creative Suite disks. If you obtained your software via download, you can also find the missing plug-ins, presets, and extensions here.

PDF Package and Web Gallery are now accessed through Bridge. I guess that makes sense, but you have to play detective to find the features. Choose the Output icon at the left end of the Bridge Application bar (the strip just under the menu items), or select the “OUPUT” workspace at the far right end of the Application bar to access the “Output to Web or PDF” function:

Output to Web or PDF

You’re probably expecting a dialog box, but instead, the righthand panel of Bridge changes to give you the Output options. At the top of the panel, choose the appropriate option, PDF or Web. The panel changes to display your options for PDF or Web output; they’re fairly intuitive.

In previous versions of Illustrator, selecting two or more objects and performing a Pathfinder operation (Add, Subtract, Intersect, etc.) would result in what’s called a Compound Path. The original shapes remained, but only the results of the Pathfinder operation would be visible. The Compound Path approach gave you the ability to “reclaim” the original shapes if you needed to.

Above: Pathfinder creating a Compound Path after a Subtract operation;
note the “leftover” original shapes. They’re not visible,
but they’re still accessible in Outline mode.

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But most users wanted the “pure” finished shape: holding down Option or Alt while clicking a Pathfinder option would eliminate the leftovers without making a Compound Path:

Above: Prior to Illustrator CS4, holding down Option (Mac) or Alt (PC)
while choosing a Pathfinder operation would give you an expanded result,
with the non-visible object fragments permanently deleted.
Neat, but what if you ever wanted the old stuff back?

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If you’re in the habit of holding down Option/Alt while performing a Pathfinder operation, you might want to change your habit when you upgrade to Illustrator CS4. Now, Pathfinder results are automatically expanded, with no modifier key necessary, and Option/Alt now has the opposite meaning: it now prevents expanding, and results in the creation of a compound path. So, if you want just the resulting shapes (with no leftovers), don’t press Option/Alt while performing a Pathfinder operation.

I do a lot of retouching, and I like to create contact sheets of all the images, for two reasons: it helps my client quickly find the correct image on disk, by referring to the contact sheet, and it lets me see all the images together so I can determine if they need more work. This is helpful when there are multiple shots of one environment — for example, a golf course — and I want to make sure the grass and sky color are consistent across the group of images.

I used to do contact sheets in Photoshop, but if a couple of images were kerscrewy, I had to fix them and either manually replace them in the giganto contact sheet image created by Photoshop, or regenerate the contact sheet. Big pain.

But all that changed with the introduction of Bridge with Creative Suite 1, and its ability to use a script to commandeer InDesign for the creation of contact sheets. I whooped out loud when I discovered it. To use it, I’d select a bunch of images in the Bridge window, and choose Tools>InDesign>Create InDesign Contact Sheet. InDesign cranked up, automatically placed images and included the filename below each one. When I modified an image, I just had to update the InDesign link. Much saner!

Thus, I was heartbroken that Bridge CS4 didn’t include it. Waaaaahhhh! Adobe apparently didn’t think the workflow automation scripts were useful (!). So I had to use an older version of Bridge to do my contact sheets; luckily, I never throw away old software (or much of anything else, if my garage is any indication).

But today, courtesy of my friend Bob Levine, I received joyous news: Bob Stucky, the creator of the Bridge CS2/3 Contact Sheet scripts, has brought it to life again. He’s charging a paltry $25 for the script (I’d pay more, but don’t tell Bob that), and I’m back in business. It’s an absolute lifesaver for me. If you’ve been slogging through the Photoshop approach to contact sheets, I highly recommend that you make life easier by letting InDesign do the heavy lifting.

Bob Stucky’s site is here: Creative Scripting. The Contact Sheet page throws up a missing link, but click the “Purchase Services and Scripts” link on the right side and then click the Add to Cart button to purchase.

Some people use those cheesy pine tree air fresheners hung from the rearview mirror. Not me. I went for the fully-organic, completely natural solution:

Of course, I’ll never get all those pine needles out of the upholstery…