Crunch Week - This is our final week to finish this year's yearbook. A number of photo sessions are scheduled. We have tracked those areas that we need to work on this week and they are listed on the class' white board. Try to keep this board up-to-date with anything that you feel could use improvement. We're trying to create the best book ever done at PIckering and we need everyone thinking and analyzing how we can improve over past issues.
Theory This Week - One area that we are going to be stressing this week is the concept of creating page layouts that will print and transfer well. This means using Preflight Profiles in InDesign. Download this preflight document and we'll be discussing how this profile can help us avoid pitfalls in getting our book to the publisher and saving time and money by avoiding mistakes.
Our Workflow - for creating pages must be consistent and mirrors what is done in industry. Here are the basic steps:
Theory This Week - One area that we are going to be stressing this week is the concept of creating page layouts that will print and transfer well. This means using Preflight Profiles in InDesign. Download this preflight document and we'll be discussing how this profile can help us avoid pitfalls in getting our book to the publisher and saving time and money by avoiding mistakes.
Our Workflow - for creating pages must be consistent and mirrors what is done in industry. Here are the basic steps:
- Copy images from the server to your computer. You can use Bridge to do this so that you're only copying those images that you will definitely use in your layouts. Pick the BEST images you can find. If you can't find them - take them!
- Create a separate folder for each page layout you'll be working on. Move all images, logos and graphics into the folder so that all items that go on a page are together in one place. This organization step is critical!
- Create a new InDesign Document - 8.5" x 11, .25" margins, .125" bleed, and if you're doing a two-page spread, create three pages in your document. This way we'll be able to see both the left and right side of the pages together.
- Create your layout. You can use and adapt the templates that are located on Tucker's Resources to get started. SAVE OFTEN - every five minutes is a good rule of thumb for saving.
- Place your original photos into graphic frames by selecting the frame then choosing File>Place
- Scale ALL images proportionally - you can set this to occur for all frames on your page by selecting all of them and choosing Object>Fitting>Frame Fitting Options>Fill Frame Proportionally. This will prevent us from stretching images. They don't look good using that method.
- The placed pictures are unedited at this point. They are not the correct resolution for printing. They might be light or dark or have a color cast. They are simply linked jpeg files at this point. The next steps are really important to get right.
- Determine the actual size of the images by clicking on them with the white arrow selection tool or clicking on the resize circle. Open Transform from the tool menu and mark down the width of the image. Make sure that you're not seeing the width of the frame when you do this.
- Control-click on the image and choose>edit with Photoshop. This will launch Photoshop and open the image you just sized in InDesign.
- Choose Image>Image Size. This will open a dialog box that you will use to resize the image. Use the width you marked down in InDesign and choose Auto… and select 133 line, best setting. Photoshop will reset the resolution so that it's perfect.
- Fix Color cast, lighten the image to bring out darker details if necessary using levels or brightness/contrast layer adjustments. Flatten the image down.
- Choose Filter>Sharpen>Smart Sharpen and set the sharpening to 80 with a radius of 1. If you click on the preview you will see a before/after of how details like hair and eyes really come into much better view.
- Choose Image>Mode>CMYK Color - this will allow our printer to separate the four process colors.
- Choose File>Save as and save as a tiff file.
- Return to InDesign and relink your edited photo to replace the jpeg file. Redo these steps for each image on your page making sure that you're getting the correct size for each image!
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