[Mike Gondek]

I have tried 3 of the plug-ins from Corel, Extensis and some after effects plug ins. None of them come close to the masking utilities on a Hel, Scitex or crossfield platform that give you the edge you need.

For mac or PC the best quality is to manually create a density mask using Photoshop’s layer mask tools. I cover them extensively in “Photoshop for Digital Video”, adn these techniques are the same for high resolution print files.

[Mike Gondek]

Sometimes you are lucky, and the documetn may still ask you for the font you need saying it is missing, because it is in a character style or stray point. Most likley you will call the client and ask them “What the Font?” and will get a resposne “I Dunno”.

You will need to recreate the type and we have to do this all the time (so you are not alone).

Luckily you can go to http://www.myfonts.com, and click on what the font tab. You will need to upload a bitmapped version fo the typefont you wish to identify, confirm that the letters are correct, and you will then get back the results of the closest matches.

[Mike Gondek]

IN Phtohsop I alwasy create patterns using an adjustemnt layer (icon at teh bottom middle of the layers palette taht is half black/white).

You can put you cursor in the percentage box to selctec the value, then use the cursor up or down key to adjust the size like a keyboard command.

The beauty of using adjustment layers is that you can always easily edit the scale of your pattern or the position by drag and dropping while you have the adjustment layer window open.

[Mike Gondek]

I have good news for you in that you shoudl be abel to fix this. Where you need to change the settings is in the print driver, and below are the instruction for Windows XP

Start >> Printer & Faxes
Right click on Adobe PDF, Choose Properties
On General Tab Click Printing Preferences
Click Edit on your standard Setting (You may need to wait 20 seconds for the next window to pop up up)
Click on Images folder (and change your dpi here)

[Mike Gondek]

1) Photoshop does not have a scale command where you can enter the percentage of a page. The best help I can offer is view >> new guide >> and input 90% horizontal (do 1 more hor adn 2 more vertical to get a box). You would then have to manually scale to get the layer to fit inside the box.

2)Record Shift Ctrl J or the bring to front command into your action.

[Mike Gondek]

Object >> Crop Area >> Make

You can use teh save as command to make a PDF from Illustrator.

If you are needing smaller PDF files for emailing, then you will want to print to the PDF Writer, whcih uses the Distiller fi you have the full version of Acrobat on your machine.

[Mike Gondek]

Never upres your files, they will only get larger with no or quality improvemnt sthat are not visibel to the human eye.

Ask whomever will be printing your files what their minimal and optimalor max dpi requirments are andtry and fall between there. Our 72dpi prints look great of our HP5000s and anything over 150 dpi is extra data that does not improve the detail. For a lamba or lightbox print you can go up to 200 dpi.

Would have to disagree about Genuine Fractals. All those programs including Extensis Pxl Smartscale are placebo’s and testing at various sizes/images/settings shows no visible improvement. Yes the images look slightly differetn as if someone applied a median to them, but not better. If anyone can prove me wrong, please send files and let us know what you have found.

In my book “photoshop for Digital Video”, I have some printed samples that compare these programs against photoshop bicubic interpolation, and you can judge for yourself if there is a difference. The images do not look any better and in my opinion the reason GF or Extensis do not print a before/after image on the back of their box.

[Mike Gondek]

You image might be in CMYK. Deinterlace does work though on 8 or 16 bit images.

Is the command available if you try to use it on the image it gets stuck on in the action?

[Mike Gondek]

The pen tool is an excellent tool for vector masks(hard edge), but you will need to create bitmapped density masks for items such a sperating the phothgraph of a model with long hari form a background.

In my book “Photoshop for Digital Video” you get a series of interactive tutorials that will build your skills from simple items to a chimpanzee which has lots of hair.

For now you will want to explore the convert point tool which is one of the tools options of the pen tool if you click and hold on that swatch in the tools palette.

[Mike Gondek]

Would be great if appearance had visibility icons and the ability to change stroke weight there.

There is no way to temporarily turn off the effect. The only adice I can offer is to in the 3D Effect turn off shading(everything shuodl go much faster), then turn it back on when done.