Athenia Design

I had this picture of some poached pears which I wanted to post on one of my blogs. The only problem was the bowl looked a bit messy. To make it look a bit better I thought I would clean it up a bit in photoshop. This is where the clone stamp tool is really useful. First you need to select a brush size from the brushes menu. Then you need to select the area you want to clone. I chose a clean area of the blue bowl. Next press alt to define the cloning area. The tool will basically copy this area so you can clone it to other areas. Now simply click over the areas you want to clean, in this case the red stains on the bowl. I also cleaned up the left hand side of the bowl where you can see a small chip. On this area I selected a smaller brush and cloned part of the rim and table, before clicking over the area with the chip to correct it. If you like the look of the recipe, it will shortly be appearing on my personal blog.

This is a very basic tip which can affect the quality of the printed publication. The difference between CMYK and RGB is as follows.

CMYK is made up of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. These are the colours that are used in the printing process. For example if you use a colour printer you will notice it usually has four cartridges one for each of these colours.

RGB is made up of Red, Green and Blue. These are the colours used by screen displays such as your monitor.

Basically all images that are to be used to for printed media should be in CMYK format and all images to be used for web format should be in RGB. You will notice that there are limitations with the range of colours that can be produced using CMYK, RGB colours often appear much brighter on the screen but these colours cannot be produced to the same brightness when printed.

I tend to use this option when I have some text that almost fits into a space but is over by one or two words. Rather than decrease the point size you can if you are careful squeeze the text a little so that it fits space but the type is no smaller. A word of warning though, don’t squeeze it too much because it will start to look ugly. From the style menu choose Horizontal/Vertical Shift. In the Scale box type in a value. I usually make it around 95 or 90%. Then click ok. What you have done is basically scale the text slightly to fit into the space.

When you are sending an Illustrator file to the printers it is usually best to convert the fonts to outlines. This means that even if the person you are sending the file does not have the fonts you have used installed they will still be able to print it. When you convert fonts to outlines, the program will look at the fonts as images rather than text thus fixing any upload errors that result when fonts are not embedded in your file.

Here is how to convert fonts to outlines in Adobe Illustrator
Select all text.
Click Type Menu> Type> Create Outlines
Text now has a blue outline.
Save a copy and re-upload.

My husband was doing some work in Photoshop the other day and wanted to accurately measure a point form the centre of the screen. The problem he had was that the ruler is automatically set to measure from the top left hand side of the document where you see the two rulers cross. If you want to measure from a different point, it works exactly the same as Quark. Just click on the point where the two rulers meet and then drag out until you reach the place you want your measurements to start. Then let go and the ruler origin will appear at that point as shown below.

I found this interesting website about a man who carves designs out of real eggs. How Cool is that? Two of his designs are pictured below.

One thing that never fails to frustrate me is when someone sends you a Quark file but does not collect the file for output. Basically the collect for output function finds and collects any pictures and fonts in your document so that when you send the file to someone else they have all the files they need. One thing I have noticed with new Quark users is that because they can see the pictures on screen when they have the Quark document open, they assume that another user will have the pictures. This is not the case, unless you actually send the individual picture files through with your Quark document the pictures cannot be reproduced or printed. The simplest way of doing this is to use the collect for output function from the file menu, to collect all the included pictures together. The same function will also alert you if there are pictures missing from the document which is useful. One thing to be careful about is ticking the collect fonts for output option as you might not be licensed to send the fonts onto another party. I find the easiest thing to do is use common fonts that most printers are already likely to have a license for, so the issue does not occur.