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.