Accessing Photoshop PDF presets
Photoshop CS2 contains a variety of PDF presets that can be used to create specific types of PDFs. Let’s start by taking a closer look at the Adobe PDF Presets dialog.

STEP ONE:
Select Edit>Adobe PDF Presets. When the Adobe PDF Presets dialog appears, you’ll see a series of PDF presets including High Quality Print, PDF/X-1a:2001, PDF/X-3a:2002, Press Quality, and Smallest File Size. Also, any custom Adobe PDF presets you’ve already added to the Adobe PDF Settings folder will be visible in this list of Presets, such as “Taz US Sheetfed Coated” shown at the bottom of our example. (Note: The PDF/X settings are prepress-oriented Adobe PDF Pre-sets.)

STEP TWO:
Click on one of the presets (we chose High Quality Print in our exam-ple) and in the Preset Description, you can read a general description of the preset. To view a more detailed summary of the specific settings, scroll down the Preset Settings Summary.

Create a custom preset
You can also customize any of the included presets to create a new preset. Here’s a customized set of adjustments that I make to the standard PDF/X settings when pre-paring PDFs for prepress.

STEP ONE:
Click the New button in the Adobe PDF Preset dialog and in the Edit PDF Preset dialog that appears, click on the Standard pop-up menu and select PDF/X-1a:2003. (Note: The Compatibility pop-up menu on the right side of the dialog is automatically disabled and assigned a setting of PDF 1.3, the required compatibility for PDF/X.)

Click off the Optimize for Fast Web Preview checkbox because when it’s on, this setting activates page serving, which allows a PDF document to be served up one page at a time across the Internet. While this setting typically doesn’t have an impact one way or the other in prepress, there have been a few reported RIP conflicts, so I suggest you get in the habit of turning off this selection.

STEP TWO: Click on Compression in the list on the left-hand side of the Edit PDF Preset dialog. Then in the Options area, click on the downsampling pop-up menu, and select Do Not Downsample. The PDF/X default, which is to downsample any image with a resolution greater than 450 pixels/inch, may be a wise choice for files where you might be unsure of the incoming resolutions; however, I carefully control the resolution of my images and don’t want the PDF creation process to perform any downsampling, as it can soften them noticeably.

Now in the Compression pop-down menu, select None. Again, I prefer not to have the PDF creation process apply any image adjustments, such as applying lossy compression to my images.

If you’re working with 16 bit/channel images, leave the Convert 16 Bit/Channel Image to 8 Bits/Channel checkbox on, as most RIPs won’t handle 16-bit data. (Note: This option will be grayed out unless you have selected a Compatibility for either Ac-robat 6 or 7, which you can’t chose if you’ve selected one of the PDF/X standards.) Don’t click OK yet.

STEP THREE:
Now, click on Output on the left-hand side of the dialog. Under the Color area, the Destination pop-up menu will display the current Working CMYK color profile that you have selected in the Working Spaces section of the Color Set-tings dialog (Edit>Color Settings). Under the PDF/X area, click on the Output Intent Profile Name pop-up menu and select the output profile you want to be used to con-vert the image to CMYK—in our example, it’s U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2.

(Note: If you’re working with an RGB image in Photoshop and you save it as a PDF using an Adobe PDF Preset with a CMYK Destination Profile, Photoshop will convert the RGB image to CMYK using the designated Destination Profile. Photo-shop will also simplify the image by flattening it—applying and removing layers—and deleting any alpha channels present.)

There’s one more step before we’re done.

STEP FOUR:
Give your custom preset a name in the Preset field at the top of the dialog (we named ours My Preset US Web Coated). Now you can click OK. Your new Adobe PDF Preset will be added to the list of Presets in the Adobe PDF Preset dialog.

Finally, click Done to complete the PDF preset creation process.

Using PDF presets
Now let’s take a look at how to use our PDF preset.

STEP ONE:
Start with an RGB image (we used an image with layers and channels). Select File>Save As, then choose Photo-shop PDF from the Format pop-up menu. Leave the Alpha Channels and Layers checkboxes on, rename the File with “CMYK” at the end of the name, and then click Save. A warning dialog will appear stating that “the settings you chose in the Save Adobe PDF dialog can override your current settings in the Save As dialog.” Just click OK and the Save Adobe PDF dialog appears.

STEP TWO: From the Adobe PDF Preset pop-up menu, select the preset you’d like to use (we used the custom My Preset US Web Coated that we created above). Click Save PDF.

STEP THREE:
Now try to close the image. Photoshop will warn you that the file could not be saved completely and ask if you’d like to Save the document in a format that supports all its features.

Click the Save button and follow the Save process through again. (Note: This second resaving process can be avoided if you flatten the layers and remove the channels either manually or by unchecking them in the Save As dialog.)

STEP FOUR:
Open the new CMYK PDF file in Photoshop. Notice that all the layers have been flattened and the channels have been removed.

Creating and using PDF Presets will allow you to closely control the content and quality of your PDF files from Photoshop—especially useful if you want to create PDF/X-compliant PDFs right out of Photoshop.

Tip: RGB images with layers and alpha channels saved as RGB PDFs can be saved with the editable layers and channels intact in the PDF. Give it a try!

Options for leaving grayscale images in the dust

Beginning Photoshop users often create black-and-white images from their color files by converting them to grayscale (Image>Mode>Grayscale). This technique is quick and easy and can produce okay images, especially when Levels, Curves and/or Brightness/Contrast are also applied to the converted file.

Photoshop, however, offers several other methods for creating more dramatic black-and-white images with a greater tonal range. Let’s take a look at a few of these options, and then how to go beyond black-and-white images.

The Channel Mixer
I photographed this woman in Old Havana, Cuba, in 2000 with my Canon D30 and Canon 16–35mm lens. I love the way the color of the blue Chevy and the woman’s clothes complement each other. (I first saw the woman on the opposite side of the street from where the car was parked. I asked her to sit on the hood of the Chevy for the photo session.)

Compare these two black-and-white versions of the photograph of the woman. One was converted to grayscale mode; one was created using Channel Mixer (Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Channel Mixer). Which one do you feel looks more dramatic? The one you picked is not the grayscale image.

When we select Channel Mixer (as an Adjustment Layer, of course) and check the Monochrome box at the bottom of the dialog, we can control the Red, Green, and Blue Source Channels to fine-tune the image to our own creative vision. Here, the Channel Mixer settings are Red: +96%; Green: +14%; Blue: –10%.

Combine these settings, and you’ll get 100%. That was no accident. All three channels should not exceed 100%—because if you go over 100%, you’ll overexpose an image and if you go under 100%, you guessed it, you’ll underexpose an image. That said, who’s to say that you can’t tweak an image for a desired effect. (Note: At the bottom of the Channel Mixer dialog, you can also move the Constant slider to the left to darken the image and move it to the right to lighten the image. I never use the Constant slider.)

Play around with Channel Mixer once and you’ll never make a grayscale conversion again. For additional creativity, play around with Curves or Levels after using the Channel Mixer.

Speaking of playing around, if you apply the Channel Mixer as an Adjustment Layer, try fading the Opacity of that layer in the Layers palette. Here I reduced the Opacity to 62%. The once vibrant colors are now more subdued, and perhaps the picture looks a bit more creative.

Duotones
At first, this image may look like a black-and-white picture. Actually, it’s a duotone (Image>Mode>Grayscale then Image>Mode>Duotone). A true duotone is a black-and-white image to which another color is added. Duotone images are often used in magazines and books when a four-color page is not available, as well as for creating pictures with a different “look.” Duotones are also used for posters and in fine-art exhibits. Several of Ansel Adams’ posters are actually duotones.

Photoshop groups duotones along with tritones (three inks) and quadtones (that’s right, four inks!) in the Duotone Options dialog. The actual color of the ink is displayed, so it’s relatively easy to visualize how the color will affect the image. By default, Quadtone appears in the Type pop-up menu, so the first thing you need to do is change the Type to Duotone.

For the duotone image of my Cuban friend, I selected a duotone preset with a pre-built duotone curve as provided by Adobe. How did I do that? That’s easy. All we have to do is press the Load button in the Duotone Options dialog. After that, we get a Load dialog from which we can load additional colors. [Insert 9] Navigate to Adobe Photoshop CS/Presets/Duotones/Duotones/PANTONE(R) Duotones and select 478 brown (100%) bl 1. When you click load, Pantone 478 CVC will appear as Ink 2 in the Duotone Options dialog.

After applying that color, you can adjust the duotone curve to fine-tune the image. What’s really cool is that we can actually adjust the duotone curve simply by clicking on the small curve thumbnail to the left of the ink thumbnail. That brings up the Duotone Curve dialog, which is where we can make our adjustments.

Other options
Another way to create a customized black-and-white image in Photoshop is with the B/W Conversion filter in nik Color Efex Pro 2.0 (www.nikmultimedia.com). When you select this filter, you can quickly see the effect of different color filters on your picture. It’s just like putting a different color filter over a lens when shooting black-and-white film, only here you use a slider to simulate the filter’s effect. [Insert 11]
You can also adjust the brightness and contrast of the image. Of course, you can make additional adjustments in Photoshop by using the Fade command (Edit>Fade B/W Filter) to adjust the intensity of the effect, and also by using Curves or Levels.

Seeing in infrared
Compare the color image in this series to the other two images. One is a grayscale image. The much more dramatic image is an infrared image.

Several compact digital cameras offer an IR effect, and several Photoshop plug-ins offer an IR filter, including nik’s Color Efex Pro mentioned above. Personally, I believe the most realistic IR images are produced by IR-only cameras that have been converted by the IR Guy (www.irdigital.net).

The IR Guy converts the Canon D30, D60, 1D, and Digital Rebel, as well as the Nikon D100, to IR-only cameras. I took my converted D60 on a trip out west (this picture was taken in Bryce Canyon, Utah), and after viewing the pictures on my laptop each night, I actually started to “see” the landscapes in infrared.
For IR to work, you must shoot in RAW and use 16-bit depth. Straight out of an IR-converted camera, the pictures have a purple tint. To get the IR effect, you need to desaturate the image and then adjust Levels to your liking.

The black-and-white appeal
Enough tech talk; let’s chat for a moment about why we like black-and-white photography. Perhaps a black-and-white picture looks more creative than a color picture. Perhaps by removing the color from the scene and therefore removing some of the reality of the scene, the pictures let us use our imagination. Perhaps because the picture can’t use color to draw us into the scene, the subject becomes more interesting.

Perhaps it just looks cool.

Whatever the reason, I think you’ll have fun exploring the creative options of black-and-white photography.

I thought, “Well, this must be a fluke, because I know so many pros that are shooting RAW.” In fact, after a while you just assume everybody’s shooting RAW, so when you run across someone who isn’t, it kind of freaks you out. But then a few weeks later I was teaching a group of nearly 400 and when I asked the same question, only a fraction of the group raised their hands. It happened once again just a short time later, and I soon came to the very scary realization that (now get ready for this) “not everybody is shooting RAW.”

I know, I know, it sent me for a loop, too, and it’s only been within the past week that I could start recognizing smells and eating solid food again. Anyway, I thought the benefits of RAW were so plain, so compelling, and so, well…overwhelming, that I couldn’t imagine why at least these pros wouldn’t give it a shot. (Excuse the pun. Aw, what the heck, let the pun stand.)

THE RAW EVANGELIST
Well, after talking to some of these photographers myself, I learned firsthand why they’re not shooting RAW. They told me, point-blank, that nobody had really told them the advantages of shooting in RAW in a way that made sense to them. They had heard RAW created better quality images, and they knew their cameras could shoot in RAW, but almost without exception that was pretty much all they knew.

So, from that point on, rather than just saying, “Click this and click that,” I became somewhat of an evangelist for shooting in RAW, and I have to tell you—it really gets under your skin when you see “the light bulb come on” during that glorious moment when a photographer “gets” RAW. When it hits him how much power, control, and joy RAW can bring, he gets this big grin, and you get this big grin, and then you both start sobbing and hugging, and well…you get the idea.

Now, I have bad news and good news. The bad news is, I’m not going to give my RAW evangelistic speech here in this column. To do it right, I need to do it live. I need the whole incense thing, the flowing robes, and the live chicken sacrifice—the whole nine yards—to really do it justice. But the good news is that I will try to make a case as to why you should at least give RAW a chance, especially if you have Adobe Photoshop CS2 (if you’re still using Photoshop CS, the improvements to Camera Raw alone are worth the upgrade price).

I’m not going to give you the same tired reason that everyone has given as to why you should use RAW—the quality is better—because you’ve heard that to death, and it still hasn’t swayed most of you. I’m going to tackle this from a completely different angle. Ready?

BECAUSE IT’S EASIER
I think you should start shooting in RAW because it’s easier. Not just a little easier—much easier. If you shoot in RAW and use Photoshop CS2’s Camera Raw, you will get dramatically better-looking, better-balanced, and better color-corrected images every time. One of the main reasons it’s so easy is because you do all your corrections in one window. You adjust everything tonal—exposure, brightness, shadow, contrast—all within one window. Plus, you don’t have to use Levels or Curves; you’re just dragging sliders, and the adjustments have names that make sense to photographers, such as Exposure and White Balance. Think about it—it’s all in one nice big window—with a better histogram than you can get anyplace else in Photoshop. When you’re in Photoshop itself, you’re using all kinds of different tools—Curves, Levels, Hue/Saturation, filters, etc.—but in Camera Raw, it’s all there, right at your fingertips. And in most cases when you make your adjustments in Camera Raw, you don’t need to make any further tonal adjustments in Photoshop, unless you want to create some artistic effects.

But there’s another reason: Adjusting the exposure, brightness, shadows, and contrast has gotten even easier because now the process is pretty much automated. When you open a RAW image in Camera Raw, it looks at the EXIF data (embedded into your photo by your digital camera when you took the shot) and automatically corrects your photo based on the model of your camera, and I might add, it does a pretty darn good job. If you decide you want to tweak the automated correction, it’s as easy as moving a slider.

JUST GIVE IT A CHANCE
Once someone takes just a few minutes and shows you how to use Camera Raw, you’ll find that the whole thing just makes sense. It has a natural flow to it, and if you have a number of photos taken in similar lighting conditions, it can even automate the process of correcting your photos—you correct one, it corrects the rest for you. No actions to write or confusing batch processing scripts to figure out—it’s a no-brainer.

These are the types of things that nobody is talking about, because everybody is so focused on the sheer quality of RAW. Yes, the quality is great, and the advantages it brings are many, but I think the things I have mentioned above—the ease of correction, the automated correction, and batch processing—are nearly as compelling. RAW is certainly worth trying, because like me, you just might fall in love.

CLIENT: Shahasp Valentine – www.precieux.com

Shahasp Valentine is a San Francisco Bay Area jewelry designer whose main jewelry line, Precieux The Modern Artifacts Collection, is a series of handmade necklaces, earrings, and rings of precious metal clay, a material that contains micro-particles of pure silver or pure gold mixed with a clay binder. When fired at ultra-high temperatures, the clay burns away, leaving pure precious metal. Valentine also incorporates precious stones, such as rubies and sapphires, into her jewelry, which she sells wholesale to gift stores, jewelry stores, galleries, and other retail outlets, and to individuals over the Internet.

“The Modern Artifacts Collection is historically inspired and draws from all periods,” says Shahasp, whose pieces range from Renaissance and Victorian designs to styles derived from various religious symbols throughout history. Even though her handcrafted jewelry is new, it looks antique, like an heirloom handed down through generations.

Shahasp says it’s important that her line sheet reflect the antique quality of her jewelry. At the same time, it needs to be extremely legible and straightforward, so that storeowners can easily select the styles they want, figure out the wholesale prices, and place an order.

There are additional design challenges: Shahasp would like to be able to photocopy the line sheet. When she has only one or two information requests, she prints them out on her printer in color but when she attends a trade show, she sometimes makes up to 50 blackand- white photocopies to hand out to prospective buyers. Some of Shahasp’s collateral materials suggest the antique nature of her jewelry by using images of aged, cracked marble or faded logos and screens; however, she’s discovered that those things don’t photocopy well. So the challenge is to create a design that has the look she’s going for, works in black-and-white and in color, and reproduces well.

Another consideration is that she needs to be able to update the line sheet. Prices change, pieces get added to the collection, and other pieces get dropped. She wants to make text changes whenever needed.

We found three designers to give a new look to this jewelry designer’s line sheet.

After

DESIGNER: Calixto Flores – www.maxpictures.com

After reading about Shahasp and how she makes her jewelry, I wanted to maintain the artisan feeling reflected in her work and her original line sheet. I thought the line sheet could use a cleanup, so I focused on simplifying the fonts, organizing the information more clearly, and placing more emphasis on the jewelry.

The original line sheet used several fonts to show different types of information, but the result was more distracting than differentiating. I spent time trying to fi nd a font family that would have the right look and enough variety for the various kinds of information on the line sheet. Monotype Centaur seemed to fit the bill. Aligning the prices for the jewelry pieces and moving the stone type to the top of the listings also helped organize them.

To bring the jewelry to the forefront, I increased the size of the images and also cleaned up the images in Photoshop, erasing necklace links and increasing contrast for black-andwhite. To accommodate the larger jewelry images, I moved the earrings section to the back of the sheet, and to further emphasize the jewelry information, I placed the identity and contact elements in a frame along each side of the sheet.

Finally, the new layout is full-bleed, but functions well enough when printed on 8.5×11″ paper with margins. Time permitting, the line sheet could be output on 11×17″ and trimmed down.

ABOUT THE DESIGNER
Calixto Flores originally went to college to study computer science and engineering but became interested in graphic design when he saw someone creating a party flyer with MacDraw on an Apple Mac Plus.

Twenty years of in-house creative services and freelance production experience later, Calixto now designs full-time for the University of California, Berkeley. In his spare time, he works on independent documentary films at Max Pictures. See the results of his labors at www.maxpictures.com.

APPLICATIONS USED: InDesign 2 and Photoshop 7

After

DESIGNER: Joe Nicklo – www.nicklomedia.com

After viewing the original line sheet, I experimented with several different layouts until I decided that the best format to keep the layout uncluttered was landscape. I adopted a layout similar to that of the “before” line sheet and focused on the type. I chose Trajan Pro as the font for the product names and Helvetica Neue to ensure the legibility of the prices and descriptions.

I also decided to clean up Shahasp’s logo a bit and incorporate new typography. I knocked the logo down to two colors to give myself a color palette to work with for the rest of the line sheet.

To close off the layout and convey an “antique” look, I introduced a simple background image and footer that incorporated a screened photo of a Renaissance-style stone floor and then set the foreground to the color I used in the logo and product titles, to tie it all together.

ABOUT THE DESIGNER
The lead designer at an automotive performance parts manufacturer in Boca Raton, Florida, Joe Nicklo has been designing professionally for six years and he’s also a freelance logo designer. Joe attends the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, working toward his Bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design. In his spare time, he runs an online community for graphic designers at www.anticubicle.com. Joe enjoys all aspects of design but considers corporate identity to be his strong point. He’s grateful to many people for nurturing his talents but above all says “thanks to my father for fi rst putting Photoshop in my hands.”

APPLICATIONS USED: Adobe Creative Suite

After