Contrary to popular belief, print is not dead! With all the interest in online publishing, the good old medium of print is still alive and well. The problem is getting the color just right. Take some advice from Claudia McCue
Contrary to popular belief, print is not dead! With all the interest in online publishing here in the 21st century, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that information is still widely disseminated through the good old medium of print.
The advent of desktop publishing granted new levels of power and control to the layout artist and graphic designer, but it hasn’t made the process of getting the perfect print foolproof.
Sometimes managing the disparate elements of fonts, images, colors, and more, while dealing with the quirks of page-layout applications makes even the bravest designer and production editor long for the hands-on days of moveable type. Creating a great layout on your monitor is only half the battle; how do you make it work on paper? Print production expert Claudia McCue takes on the challenge of putting ink to paper, offering clear, authoritative guidance to print professionals and anyone else who has been frustrated by the obstacles of getting electronic documents to print perfectly.
This new edition of Claudia’s classic book is now fully Adobe-centric, and shows readers how to use the different applications in the Adobe Creative Suite 4 together to create and produce great print documents. Use Photoshop and Illustrator to create raster and vector images, and combine them with text in InDesign to create eye-catching yet readable page layouts. Learn the ins and outs of fonts, and gain a better understanding of how ink and paper work together. Finally, ‘prefilight’ or prepare your job for submission to a printer to make sure the printing process goes off without a hitch.
Adobe Photoshop, Creative Suite, Plug-ins
Real World Print Production with Adobe Creative Suite
By Claudia McCue
READ : Preparing Raster Images – Whether you acquire an image from a scanner, a digital camera, a royalty-free CD with 1,000,000 images, or a stock photography vendor, it’s made out of pixels. Even though pictures on your monitor look like smooth transitions of color, zoom in sufficiently and you’ll see all the little square pixels that actually make up the image …
See Claudia’s Blog and articles:
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?! Missing Plug-Ins in Photoshop CS4
Photoshop’s “Smart Object” and “Smart Filter” options provide the ultimate in flexibility: in essence, you store an unchanged version of the pixel or vector data in the pantry (embedded in the file), and Photoshop can always use that information as a fresh starting point for edits and transforms. Smart Objects and Smart Filters: Maybe smarter than you think
If you’ve ever had to silhouette a girl with windblown hair, you know what a challenge it can be to create the perfect mask. I’ve always used channels, duplicating the best one and using Levels, Curves and judicious handwork to create a mask. As long as the subject has some contrast with the background, there’s hope, but, even then, it can be time-consuming. EZ Does It. Really
Claudia McCue is a nationally recognized consultant, trainer, and graphic arts production expert. Combining more than 20 years of real-world production experience — from paste-up through early electronic prepress to current Mac- and PC-based systems — she specializes in teaching both creative and production professionals. Her national client base includes printers, design firms, agencies and in-house marketing departments. She is the author of “Real World Print Production with Adobe Creative Suite Applications” (Peachpit Press, 2009), and a frequent presenter at graphic arts conferences, including the InDesign and Creative Suite conferences. She is an Adobe Certified Instructor for InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat