by David Blatner

[Note from AM: Many months ago, during one of our InDesignSecrets.com videocasts, I kidded David (Blatner, my co-host) because he still had some graphics in EPS format on his computer. Someone recently wrote us asking why I was making fun of his EPS images, and David wrote a great explanation, which follows.]

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Adobe doesn’t ship printed manuals with their software anymore, at least, not with the Creative Suite applications. Instead, you use the Help > [program_name] Help command in each individual program, which opens either the new local Adobe Help AIR application, or your default browser. Either one brings you the main online help files for that program, “live” as they are hosted on Adobe’s web site.

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I have a gripe about Photoshop's Canvas Size dialog box (Image > Canvas Size), the feature you use to increase the editable area in an image. We're up to version 53 now, I believe, and there's still no Preview button. Not even in the Super Extended Extra Mega version.

Oh sure, it can count how many thousands of paramecium with three antennae are in a slide, but preview the amount of canvas I want to add to an image? Beyond its abilities.

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Not including the single-key shortcuts for items in the Tools palette, here are the Adobe Photoshop keyboard shortcuts I find most useful. It says "Top Ten" but there's actually a bunch more that I included in each item, variations of the main one. Did I leave your favorite(s) out of the list? E-mail me and I'll include them in an upcoming issue.

To keep things simple, I'll use Mac shortcut keys. If you're on Windows, just think "Control key" when I say "Command" and "Alt" when I say "Option."

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One of the first concepts that print designers learn is "bleed." If you want the final printed work to have artwork that appears to print right up to the edge of the paper — that "bleeds" off the edge — you need to place it so that its edges overlap the edges of the layout page, typically an overlap of at least 9 points (.125 inches) on each bleeding edge.

When the job is printed on oversized paper and cropped to the final page size (the page size specified in the layout program), the trimming lops off the overlapping artwork, resulting in a nice bleed in thmore >

Like a number of other Adobe CS3 users, I was initially aghast at the suite's new icons when they first showed them to the world late last year.

Adobe Systems — the company with the legacy of some of the most creative icons in the history of interface design, from renditions of Venus de Milo to color-enhanced X-Ray photography of starfish and butterflies — this same company was *seriously* considering icons that were colored squares and two-letter program name mnemonics? Were they kidding?

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Back in November, Adobe asked me if I'd be interested in recording a bunch of video tutorials on InDesign CS3. Well, not Adobe itself; but a nice woman who *worked* for Adobe asked me.

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The big news this week in the world of digital design has to be Adobe's announcement of their new line-up of Creative Suite applications, dubbed CS3. I watched the live webcast of their launch shindig in New York City this week, even sat through the unplanned 20-minute "we're pausing for technical difficulties" portion when they were having A/V problems.

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If you're deeply into the field of digital design for print, web, mobile devices, or anything in-between, you should be visiting the Adobe Labs site regularly:

Adobe Labs
http://labs.adobe.com/

What's the Adobe Labs page about? Why, click the About page, dear: "Adobe Labs provides you with the opportunity to experience and evaluate new and emerging innovations, technologies, and products from Adobe."

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I think most Illustrator users have learned that there's a deceptively innocuous little command in the Effects menu that can ruin high-res output if not attended to: Document Raster Effects Settings. Artists who've been burned once by its default 72 ppi setting will never allow that to happen again.

Yet I think few users realize that the settings in this dialog box govern some other rasters generated by Illustrator, not just the ones from the Effect menu.more >