What are some small things you have learned/found out by accident you can do and had no idea? Im sure there are many things some of us do on a daily basis that others have no idea about. Today I discovered, while importing multiple images into InDesign, Clicking and dragging while placing and clicking the arrow keys can import all the photos you have selected into a neat format of your choice. Choosing the amount of rows and columns you would like with the arrow keys.
I hope this isn’t a relatively common thing people use and i haven’t just embarrassed myself.
Awesome! I didn’t knew about that one too! Sweet trick.
I discovered today about ‘‘non-printing’’ object in indesign. I was aware you could do this in illustrator, i just never could find it on Indesign until today…
Need a placed photo thats part of a PDF, or multiple photos in a PDF? When you open the PDF in Photoshop, It defaults to rasterizing the whole page, instead select “image” instead of “page” at the top of the dialogue window, voila, images only.
InDesign
Placing other InDesign layouts into an existing Layout like you would a photo.
Using GREP in find/change is insanely useful on long documents. Can take some time to get the hang of it. But once you wrap your head around it, its useful.
“Fake” duotones can be created by placing a black and white PSD or TIF file. Place the file and use the direct selection tool to select the placed image, notice the fill is black, change it to any other color.
Find and change for types of formatted text, not content. Bring up the dialogue box and click in the find format box. You can search for anything from character styles, paragraph styles, character colors, font size, etc. then click in the replace box and change whatever you want. For example, you can find all underlined text, and change it to a different font and color.
Have a PDF that someone didn’t outline the fonts, but you need them outlined? Place the PDF in Illustrator (not open, place), then click on the PDF, and choose Object/Flatten Transparency from the top menu, make sure that the “Convert All text to Outlines” box is checked and say OK. Voila, outlined font, even if you didn’t own the font.
Those are just a few that come to mind. I’m sure there are more though.
In photoshop, modifier keys can do magical things.
few off the top of my head:
•Options + Click menu items will bring up the menu’s window with the last used parameters
•Option + Click to create a new mask will create an inverted mask
•Option + Click on a mask itself will enter mask-only view for fine tuning of your mask
•Option + Click new Layer will bring up layer options before the layer is created
•Option + Click between layers in the layer palette will ‘group’ the layer above to the layer below
•Command + Click on a layer’s preview in the layer palette will create a select of that layer’s pixels
•Command + Shift/Option + Click on multiple layer previews will allow you to add/subtract/invert selections
•And every tool in photoshop responds to these modifier keys in different ways
InDesign – Do you like to manually type in X / Y coordinates or the size for items? With the item selected, rather than mousing up to the coordinates, hit Command + 6 to highlight the X.
Can’t find that menu command or you’re working quick and just want to quickly access almost any feature. Type cmnd-enter (ctrl-enter on PC) and it brings up the quick apply box, type a partial phrase such as “flip” and choose flip horizontal or flip vertical and hit enter. Done.
Illustrator
Is it practical? I don’t know, but holding the “~” key down when you’re drawing a line or shape goes into a spirograph sort of effect. Works with other modifiers such as holding down option to center the shape or line.
Photshop
After you apply any filter, coloring effect, etc. you can choose edit/fade from the top menu and change the “opacity” (intensity) of the effect as well as the blending mode of the adjustment. NOTE: you can also essentially do this in a non-destructive way by creating a smart object out of a layer and applying a filter to it there (which you can then readjust later),
You can open up any format image TIF, JPEG, whatever as camera raw to fine tune it if you prefer to that way. Just choose file/open form the photoshop menu, browse to your file, select it, but click options and choose camera raw as the format. Fine tune to your heart’s desire.
What are some small things you have learned/found out by accident you can do and had no idea? Im sure there are many things some of us do on a daily basis that others have no idea about. Today I discovered, while importing multiple images into InDesign, Clicking and dragging while placing and clicking the arrow keys can import all the photos you have selected into a neat format of your choice. Choosing the amount of rows and columns you would like with the arrow keys.
I hope this isn’t a relatively common thing people use and i haven’t just embarrassed myself.
Thank you my issue has been solved.
Moderator edit: I just removed two spam links from your latest post — one to a free movie site and the other to an iffy tech company of some kind. Your first post was great and you’ve earned the benefit of the doubt. Care to explain?
Not so much a trick but interesting to know in InDesign.
Let’s say you want a rectangle with an exact size like 50mmX35mm
You create this box by using the frame tool and click on your page and fill in the dimensions.
Change the width of the stroke to 10pt and have a at look your dimensions they will change although you haven’t changed the dimensions of your rectangle. How is that possible?
InDesign includes by default the stroke width in the dimensions of a frame. Illustrator doesn’t do this dimensions are dimensions.
Can this be fixed? It isn’t a preference or any other preset.
With no document open and your control panel active go to the flyout of the control’three little lines at the right of the control panel and uncheck the option “dimensions include stroke weights”.
When I had CreativeLive instructor Jason Hoppe on my podcast to talk about InDesign tricks and best practices that we each use, one that he mentioned that I was unaware of was with tables: being able to select a row or a column and then option-click and drag and duplicate it, or select it and move it to a different position. He discovered it by accident. I keep forgetting to try that one out.
With the clone stamp, most people aren’t aware that there is a dedicated palette for it that allows you flip horizontally or vertically what you are cloning (or rotate it) as well as scale what you’re cloning up or down. Just click window/clone source from the top menu
While in the case of a horizon or some other key, Photoshop now has a built in “straighten layer” feature. If you use the ruler tool to draw any straight line on your image (such as drawing it along the edge of a box, or what not, you can then go to image/rotation/arbitrary from the top menu and click ok in the dialogue that comes up and your image will rotate to align to the edge you drew with the ruler
InDesign
Object Effects can be applied to the frame and the content. So, if you place an image or a logo, etc. you can apply a drop shadow (for example) to the placed item and a gradient feather to the frame.
Use find/change to copy text into an anything form your clipboard (including photos, copied shapes, icons, etc.). The trick is to use cmnd-c or ctrl-c to copy your icon/logo/photo first, then in the find/change dialogue box choose under change “other” form the flyout menu and select clipboard contents unformatted. Why would you do this? Well, if you had a situation like I did where I had to create about 800 name tags for an event and there were 3 or 4 special “icons” on some name tags to indicate achievements or specialties of that individual, then after the mail merge I was able to search for a “code” that I pre-designed to appear in a certain spot on my layout and replaced with those icons.
Sometimes you use a text wrap, but it affects other pieces of text nearby that you might not want it to. If it does that, and as long as those other pieces of text are in separate text boxes, bring up your text frame options and click the “ignore text wrap” box.
If you are possibly doing mockups of logos on a single item, and you’ve mocked them up on separate layers in Photoshop. Place the PSD in Indesign then right click on the placed PSD and choose object layer options to turn on and off the layers you want to show up.
Illustrator
This is not just Illustrator, but MOST measurement boxes across Adobe applications will let you perform math functions. So, if you have a shape in illustrator and you want to divide its width by 5 for example and teh dialogue shows the width as a “difficult to divide in your head” numebr such as 7.235, just add “/5” after it and hit enter, it will change 7.235 to 1.447. So / to divide, * to multiply and of course + and -.
Not sure how useful this is, if you switch to outline view in Illustrator and then double click into a compound shape or grouped object, etc. you can switch back to normal preview to see the item you’ve isolated in full color mode while the rest of your work remains in outline view.
I’ve seen most people not being aware of this. When using Type on a path, bring up the type/type on a path options in order to align the type to everything from the ascender, descender, center of the path, as well as to flip the direction on the path to name a few.
If you use patterns, you can scale, shear or rotate the pattern separately by clicking the transform pattern check box rather than the default transform objects checkbox
Here’s one for PhotoShop.
If you use Layer Masks like I do (and you should), double click on the layer mask icon in the layer popout and you get to adjust and fine tune all kinds of things;
Through blind exploring I reversed the order of a transparency mask and used a raster image over a colored object to create a monotone effect that is editable i.e. red, blue, yellow monotone.
here’s an InDesign tip i learned from a co-worker: sometimes when you justify text, you get weird spacing issues (esp. full justification or on short lines). however, if you change your default paragraph settings (paragraph tab/three lines in right top corner/justification) to this, it will help mitigate this (see attached).
InDesign & Illustrator – I found this one yesterday by accident. You can pull a vertical guide from the horizontal ruler and a horizontal guide from the vertical ruler by holding down the option key while pulling. Not earth shattering, but it can save you a little time pushing your mouse around.
That’s a new one on me and very useful for placing grids of logos etc. I will definitely be using this.
