Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Nigel and Jenny Chapman are internationally well-known authors of major text books on new media technologies, computing and Web design.

Nigel Chapman was a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at University College London until he became a full-time freelance writer and Web developer.

Jenny Chapman is an award-winning animation and video artist, Web designer and visiting Lecturer in new media animation at Edinburgh College of Art.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Digital Media Tools is a clearly focused and highly accessible introduction to the major software tools used for creating digital graphics, web animation and web pages, suitable for course use or self-study. Its unique approach provides substantial chapter-by-chapter coverage of each of the industry-leading applications and uses practical and engaging exercises to help you gain a clear understanding of each tool and feature. Based on the authors' extensive experience in both using and teaching these tools, this book provides a comprehensive insight into both the technology and the theory underpinning its use in everyday practice.

The third edition of this very successful textbook has been completely revised to provide fully up to date coverage of the latest (CS3) versions of Photoshop, Flash, Illustrator and Dreamweaver, along with new coverage of Bridge and chapters devoted to interface features and shared concepts. Fully updated and extended with numerous new illustrations and examples, learning features and web resources (available on the brand new companion site), this book is a complete introduction to this vital range of software tools.

Also by Nigel and Jenny Chapman:

Web Design is a core text for undergraduate and masters courses that provides a complete introduction to every aspect of the building of web pages and web sites. It provides a deep and thorough introduction to web technology, markup, stylesheets, web graphics, web animation and embedded video, client-side scripting, web applications, usability, accessibility, page design and site design. Full coverage of HTTP, XHTML, CSS, Javascript and the DOM is provided, and the use of web standards is emphasized throughout. At all times, the focus remains on good practice, underpinned by sound principles. Supported by exercises, assignments and summaries, it is ideal for course use or self-study, and represents a complete overview of web design.

Also available: Digital Multimedia, a core text for undergraduate and masters courses in multimedia, covering the basic principles of each media type – text, graphics, audio, animation and video. A perfect companion to Digital Media Tools.

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Digital Media Tools

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

In This Chapter

* Working on Windows and Mac OS X platforms

* File, Edit and Help menus and commands

* Panel groups, docks and workspaces

* Panel controls

* Tools panel, Options bar and Control panel

* Layers, Navigator and History panels

* Automating repetitive tasks

* Rulers, grids and guides

Panel Groups and Docks

Panels are usually combined into panel groups. For instance, Figure 2.9 shows a panel group containing three panels. The group as a whole can be treated more or less like an ordinary window. You can drag the grey area surrounding the tabs to move it around the screen, minimize it (as shown at the bottom of Figure 2.9) or close it using the - and x controls in the top right-hand corner, or resize it by dragging out its bottom right corner. Note that these are not the standard system window controls, but are specific to Adobe's user interface. The individual panels are revealed by clicking on the tabs along the top of the window to bring them to the front of the group.

The arrangement of panels into groups is not fixed. You can customize your workspace in any of the applications in this book by dragging panels out of their groups by their tabs. If you drag a panel so that it is over the grey area at the top of a different group, a blue outline appears around the new group; if you then drop the panel it joins the group. If you drop the panel in an empty space away from any group, it appears in a group of its own. In this way you can organize your panels so that their grouping reflects the way you like to work with them.

You can close individual panels that you are not using by clicking the x control in the panel's tab; you can also control their visibility using the Window menu, which is available in all the applications in this book. This menu has an entry for each panel and for any open document windows. If a panel is currently visible, there will be a tick next to it in the Window menu. Selecting a ticked entry closes the panel and removes the tick. Selecting a panel without a tick opens it. However, you should note that if you close or open a panel using a menu command, its entire group will close or open, contrary to what you might expect. Selecting any currently closed panel from the Window menu will therefore open the whole panel group that it was last a part of.

In Photoshop and Illustrator you can hide all the open panels at once - including the Tools panel - by pressing the tab key, and then bring them all back by pressing tab again. Pressing shift-tab hides (or reveals) all open panels except the Tools and Options/Control bar; this can be very useful if you need some extra screen space but also need to retain the tools and controls for working on a document.

Panel groups are further organized into docks and stacks.

A dock is a set of panel groups that are arranged vertically; docks themselves are arranged next to each other, usually with the rightmost fixed at the right-hand edge of your screen. Any other docks are placed up against their neighbour. If you refer back to Figure 2.2 you will see two docks to the right of the main image; Figure 2.10 shows them in greater detail. The dock on the right consists of three panel groups. The dock to its left only shows as a set of icons. This is because it has been collapsed, which simply means that it has been reduced to this minimal form to save screen space. In fact, there is an intermediate collapsed form, shown in Figure 2.11, where the palettes in the dock are reduced to icons with their names beside them. For beginners, this collapsed form may be the best option for docks, since it makes finding a particular panel easy, while not taking up much space. When you are familiar with the panels' icons, you may prefer to collapse right down to just the icons, freeing up a little more screen space. In either of the collapsed forms, broad horizontal dividers separate groups within the dock, as, for instance, above the Brushes panel in Figure 2.11.

But how do you collapse a dock? If it is in its expanded form, like the right-hand dock in Figure 2.10, there will be a pair of arrowheads pointing right in the top right corner. Clicking on these will collapse the dock to icons and names. To collapse it fully, drag the pair of vertical lines in the top left corner. The names' area will shrink as you do so, the names becoming abbreviated, until there is no room for even the first letter, at which point the dock will snap down to a set of icons. (This may sound awkward, but is straightforward in practice.)

If a dock is collapsed, you reveal a panel by clicking on its icon. It will fly out from the dock, as shown in Figure 2.12. To put it back, click on the icon again, or click on any other panel's icon. In a collapsed dock, the arrows in the top right corner point to the left, and clicking on them expands the whole dock.

In all three programs that use the standard panels there is a checkbox somewhere in the preference settings labelled Auto-Collapse Icon Panels (Auto-Collapse Icon Palettes in Photoshop). If you tick this checkbox, panels will always revert to their collapsed form as soon as you click away from them, for example, when you select a tool or place a cursor on your document.

Reorganizing entire docks is conceptually simple but may take practice. If you drag an undocked panel group or a single panel to one edge of the screen or to the edge of another dock, you will see a bright blue vertical line appear down that edge, as in Figure 2.13. If you now drop the panel group, it will become a new dock next to the existing one. Note, though, that the left edge of the screen is usually occupied by the Tools panel, described later. Placing a dock on the left of the screen will push the Tools panel out of the way, but it is possible to add a dock to its right, even though the Tools panel is not a dock itself and cannot be grouped with other panels.

If, instead of dragging a panel group to the edge of a dock, you drag it right over an existing dock, a blue outline will appear around the panel group your cursor is over, as in Figure 2.14, and dropping the panel group at that point will add all its panels to the outlined group. If you drop the group between groups in the dock, or at the top or bottom of the dock, it will be added as a group. You can remove groups or individual panels from a dock just by dragging them out.

The final possibility for organizing panels is as a stack, which, like a dock, consists of several panel groups arranged vertically, but it is not attached to the edge of the screen and, importantly, it cannot be collapsed. To add a panel group to an existing stack, drag it to the bottom of the stack. When a horizontal blue line appears at the bottom, as it does under the Histogram panel in Figure 2.15, drop the panel group. You can make a new stack from two panel groups. Stacks behave as if the panel groups in them are glued together, so you can drag the whole stack about the screen as a unit and close all the panels in it at once using the stack's x control. If you minimize the stack, all the panel groups are minimized, as shown in Figure 2.16.

TRY THIS

Practise using and organizing panels. In any application, bring each panel in a group to the front. Drag one panel out of a group and drop it into a different group. See what happens if you drag a panel out of a group and then back in.

Hide and reveal individual panels and note what happens to the groups. Hide all the panels, noting which interface elements remain.

Collapse the dock to icons and names, then just to icons. Practise revealing individual panels that are in the collapsed dock.

Remove several panels from the dock and combine them into a stack. Practise minimizing the stack.

Workspaces

The facilities just described give you considerable freedom in how you arrange panels. Some people will be happy to use ad hoc panel arrangements and change them from day to day, but others may prefer to be more systematic. A workspace is a named arrangement of panels. The names of all available workspaces appear on the Window>Workspace sub-menu. If you select a name from this sub-menu, the panels will move to the positions that constitute the corresponding workspace. (Even Dreamweaver has a similar facility in the Window>Workspace Layout menu.)

Each program provides one or more pre-defined workspaces. You can define your own and save it for future use, simply by arranging the panels in a way you like, and selecting Save Workspace ... from the Window>Workspace sub-menu. (Save Current ... in Flash or Dreamweaver.)

It would make sense to save custom workspaces if you share your computer with other people and want to make sure that programs are set up the way you like them. You may also find it useful to have custom workspaces for different types of job - this is the rationale behind the pre-defined workspaces in Photoshop, for example. For many of us, though, the default workspaces are the most useful, because selecting one of these immediately tidies up any mess made by moving panels around in an undisciplined manner. (A workspace in Photoshop includes keyboard short-cuts and menus, so changing workspaces may change these as well as the configuration of the panels. A warning message appears when this happens.)

TRY THIS

Tidy up after the previous exercise by choosing the default workspace.

Switch between the pre-defined workspaces in each application. See if you can work out the logic behind each arrangement.

Make your own arrangement of the panels in one program and save this workspace. Switch to a default and then back again to your own workspace.

Panel Controls

In the top right-hand corner of every expanded panel you will find a small symbol consisting of three horizontal line with a downward-pointing triangle to their left. Clicking on this causes a pop-up menu, known as the panel menu to appear, as in Figure 2.17. Here you can find commands that are related to the functions performed by the controls on the panel. Sometimes, these are duplicates of commands found on the main menu bar, or controls on the panel itself. In other cases, the panel menu provides the only way of carrying out some operations. The function of the panel menu is to group together all the relevant operations in one place. Because the panel menu is attached to the panel itself, functions and options relevant to the panel can be accessed with a small movement of the cursor, which is quicker, more convenient and less likely to contribute to repetitive strain injuries than having to use the main menu bar.

Chapter Two

In This Chapter

* Browsing media files in different workspaces

* Viewing slide shows of images

* Organizing your files and folders

* Using other programs' tools from inside Bridge

* Adding your own ratings, labels and keywords to files

* Adding standard metadata

* Retrieving and sorting files

* Creating collections

Rotating

When taking photographs, you will sometimes turn the camera on its side to take a picture in portrait orientation. When Bridge displays such a picture, it shows it on its side, in landscape orientation. You can rotate images in JPEG, TIFF and Photoshop formats clockwise or anti-clockwise, in 90 increments, using the buttons at the top right of the browser window, or the rotate commands on the Edit menu. Rotating an image only affects the way thumbnails and previews are displayed in Bridge, it doesn't actually change the data in the image file. It does, however, cause the image to be displayed in its rotated state if you open it in Photoshop.

Slide Shows

Instead of looking at all the images in a folder at once, you can choose Slideshow from the View menu. This causes the images in the current folder to be displayed as a slide show, which takes over the entire screen. Everything else is hidden, including the menu bar. Various keys can be used as slide show controls. For basic operation, press the space bar to start and pause the show, and press the escape key to stop the show and return to the browser window.

The slide show can be displayed in several different ways. Pressing L while it is playing, or choosing Slideshow Options ... from the View menu, brings up the dialogue shown in Figure 3.8, which allows you to change some aspects of the display. There are three possibilities for the way in which the image is fitted to the screen: the image can be centred, with a border on all sides, it can be scaled to fill as much of the screen or window as possible while maintaining its aspect ratio, or it can be scaled to fill the whole screen area - this may cause some of the image to be cut off.

By default, each image is displayed for five seconds. You can choose a different duration or select Manual from the Slide Duration pop-up menu. In the latter case, you move on to the next slide by pressing the space bar or right-arrow key. By default, the slide shows stops after the last image has been displayed. If the Repeat Slideshow checkbox is ticked, it will go back to the first and repeat indefinitely until you explicitly stop it. The transition used to move from one slide to the next can also be changed using the pop-up menu at the bottom of the Slideshow Options dialogue. The default Dissolve is probably the easiest on the eye, while None is more austere. The other transitions are probably best avoided, as is the Zoom Back And Forth option, which seems designed to make you feel seasick. The speed of transitions is set using the Transition Speed slider in the Slideshow Options dialogue.

If the currently selected folder includes PDF files comprising more than one page, the slide show will display the pages of each file in order. Some additional navigation keys are available for such files. Pressing h during a slide show will show you a list of these, together with one or two additional options, which should be self-explanatory. Among these you will see some commands for simple editing and annotating from within a slide show. We will return to these later in the context of Bridge's annotation features.

TRY THIS

Run a slide show of all the images in one of your folders. Try altering the duration of each slide until you find a suitable speed for the show. Experiment with the different display options, noting any cropping that occurs when the slides fill the screen or window.

Compact Mode

A final option for displaying the browser window is Bridge's compact mode. In this mode, which can be selected from the View menu or by clicking on the icon in the top right corner of the browser window, everything except the thumbnails and basic navigation controls is hidden, as shown in Figure 3.9 (irrespective of which workspace is being used in the full browser window). The compact window can be resized by dragging out the bottom right-hand corner in the usual way. A panel menu with some useful commands is added at the top right corner.

By default, in compact mode, the Bridge window floats over any other open windows on your computer screen. This is convenient (if you have a big enough screen): it ensures that the browser is visible all the time, no matter which program you are actively working on. Photoshop and Illustrator users may find it useful to have a floating browser window to select files from, instead of relying on the normal file open dialogues. If you prefer the compact view to behave like an ordinary window, so that it is obscured when another program is at the front, deselect Compact Window Always On Top in the panel menu.

Some commands on the View menu still work in compact mode. For instance, the View>Show Thumbnails Only command has been used in Figure 3.9 to hide file information and display only the image thumbnails. A subset of the relevant View menu commands appears in the View sub-menu of the panel menu. You can also sort the displayed files, and use the slider at the bottom of the compact mode window to change the size of thumbnails. Filter settings are respected in compact mode, so only files that would be displayed in full mode are visible.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Digital Media Toolsby Nigel Chapman Jenny Chapman Copyright © 2007 by Nigel Chapman and Jenny Chapman. Excerpted by permission.
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