[Mike Gondek]

Not sure what mehtod you used to change the opacity, but you should use a layer mask and fill this with the tint of gray equal to the amount you want to fade back opacity.

This will give you better editiabliity, not destroyng the pixel data of the original photograph whcih still exists in the layer. You can then us color correction curves on the mask itself to change only the gray area of the mask if you have revisions to do.

[Mike Gondek]

Adobe has done things the right way and locked items created on the master page so that you cannot accidentally edit them in your actual pages. You need to hold down Shift Ctrl and click on the item, to unlock the text box on your actual page from the master page, you can then edit the text.

[Mike Gondek]

Try help >> updates and update your InDesign. That worked for me some time ago, and avoided having to reinstall the app. Also try to reset your InDesign prefs.

[Mike Gondek]

I was always wanting to make a Photoshop template for printing to an Epson DVD printer. I was thinking of printing to a PDF, and then opening that PDF in photoshop and using the samepage setup settings, to get the ink to center on the DVD.

I also found with those epson printers with the black tray, that you want to keep your right index finger pushing the tray against the wall of the printer (to the right) as your left hand dials the paper thickness setting to the final size prior to printing. That has made a major improvement in registration, for me as before then the tray often misregistered as the trya woudl slightly shift while the paper path was being chaneg to final setting (Thick I believe from a wide open setting)

[Mike Gondek]

Good Question.

Draw the star (for a 5 pointed star you will have to rotate it 180 degress so the point goes exactly down the middle), then draw rectangles for the shadow going straight below. Fill them with gradients alternating in degrees of direction. Once you have drawn one of these without any distortion select all and alt drag a copy as a backup.

Now select the rectangle shooting star trail of one of these, then double click the warp tool, and take the check marke off of simplify (this will help so when you distort, so that the lines dont get gaps between them). Hold down shift and alt and drag to make the brush size larger than the rectangle. Now brush a small distance over the middle of the rectangles to distort them. You may need to make some finer adjustments with smaller warp tools, or nudging with direct select tool, so your rectangle endpoints touch the start again.

Then drag another copy to make another distortion. Afterwards you can just rotate/scale/flip/recolor an existing copy of a distortion. to make another.

[Mike Gondek]

Photoshop has a zig zag filter, but that is totlaly different.

Since you have Illustrator, I would make your sawtooth siz zag in Illustrator and copy/paste that into photoshop. You can choose to paste this as a bitmap, or you can paste this as a path, and in the paths palettes use the stroke path command to add the stroke.

[Mike Gondek]

Photoshop’s free transform can get you perspective, but sounds like k you are trying to follow a curved path. If that is the case you need to pull bezier handles out of the 4 corners to curve them. In CS2 you will want to use:

edit >> transform >> warp

Start by usnig the presets to get you close to where you want to get. If you need to manually edit handles do so, but keep in mind that if you pull the besier on the top left handle down wards, you may need to also pul the top middle point about half the distance downwards (if you do not then you may distort your graphic to where it looks stretched out abnormally in the top left coner)

[Mike Gondek]

I assume this is a photoshop not illustrator question.

In the flyout menu for your type tool preset, choose replace tool preset, and choose a dummy art history.tpl rather than text.tpl. This will get repalce everything under your type tool preset with art history which has no text tool presets and will wipe it clean for you.

I have a feeling you loaded text.tpl at one point and all the minion & myriad text tool presets were loaded.

[Mike Gondek]

Use:
Object >> envelope distort >> make with warp (bulge might be the one to use or the default arc)

Since you need a few frames showing the text in diffent rotations, I suggestputting a rectangle slightly larger than your type with stroke/fill set to none. Then do your distortion upon the type and save a seperate file for each position of the type, go in and modfy the type, but leave the bounding box alone, and you will get the same amount of distortion.

[Mike Gondek]

If you have Illustrator 7, then you would need Adobe Streamline to do this. Otherwise you need CS2 with live trace.

You could do this in phothshop with make work path, and copy/paste that path into illustrator. Could be a lot of work if the logo has many colors ad is low res.