APOGEE PHOTO MAGAZINE: Photographers and DTP

Apogee Photo Magazine

Photographers and DTP – (Desktop Publishing)

By Paul W. Faust

Many photographers at first may think, "What would I want with a desktop publishing program?" Well, if the only thing you ever do with your images is to use them for your own personal pleasure, or to show to your friends, then you probably never will want, or use one. It certainly would never pay for itself. However, if you do anything else with your images, such as submitting them to publishers, or other photography buyers, then coming up with ways to show those images will be essential. Therefore, the DTP page layout programs are the only way to go.

Adobe InDesign In the past, Adobe PageMaker was the top of the line, but that program is no longer available, and will soon not be supported. But fear not, Adobe has replaced it with the new InDesign CS. This software takes page design to all new levels, combining extraordinary production power and creative freedom, along with innovative cross-media support. Through its total integration with Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat software, this latest upgrade from InDesign 2.0 will help you produce pages quickly, and output them reliably.

It does not matter if you only want to produce a single page photo sample, or full multi-page documents, InDesign will handle it all for you. The main features of interest to most photographers will be:

Improved performance. For faster screen redraw and overall responsiveness when zooming, scrolling with the Hand tool, importing Adobe Photoshop® files, wrapping text, printing, and exporting Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) files.
Unlimited undos. Experiment freely and retrace unlimited steps using the Undo and Redo commands.
Flexible workspace management. Take advantage of numerous workspace enhancements, such as the new Control palette and custom workspaces, to tailor your work environment to your needs.
Transparency. Apply editable drop shadows, feathering, and other transparency settings. Maintain soft edges when placing transparent Photoshop files.
Advanced typographical controls. Produce professional typography with ease using the Paragraph Composer, optical kerning and margin alignment, dynamic text preview, and other advanced type features.

If you also have a business that could use other types of DTP pages, you will benefit from these other features as well. They include:

Enhanced support for Photoshop (.PSD) files. Place and print native Photoshop CS files, including duotones, tritones, and quadtones, as well as PSD and TIFF files that contain spot channels.
Native Illustrator file support. Import native Adobe Illustrator® files or copy and paste them into InDesign as editable objects.
Direct export of Adobe PDF files. Export Adobe Acrobat® 6.0, 5.0, and 4.0 files directly from InDesign for electronic reviews and high-end printing. Maintain layers in exported Acrobat 6.0 files.
Package for GoLive command. Easily re-purpose InDesign layouts and assets for reuse as Web pages with the new Package for GoLive® command.
Tables. Import styled Microsoft Word and Excel tables or tab-delimited text files, and then refine them with table formatting such as color fills in alternating rows.

I have used DTP programs ever since I first bought a computer, and they have enabled me to make up more types of photo and business pages than I could even begin to count. Some of those include a whole host of sample pages of my images, which I used to send out to publishers, as well as assignment invoices, payment notices, business letterheads, photo restoration brochures, and my business cards which have all been created with them. Go check out what someone else will charge you to design and produce just a couple of these items and you can see how fast one of these programs will pay for itself.

One of many photo brochures I have created over the years to show samples of my various images available for publication.

For those people who already have a copy of the old PageMaker, there is also a version just for you. Adobe InDesign CS PageMaker Edition consists of the full version of InDesign CS plus a PageMaker Plug-in Pack, which adds some of the most popular tools found in the "old standard" PageMaker program. To install Adobe InDesign CS PageMaker Edition, you will need to provide a valid Adobe PageMaker serial number during the installation process. If all you need is the standard InDesign version you will get its own serial number for that one. InDesign CS PageMaker Edition Upgrade retails for US$349.00. The standard InDesign CS retails for US$699 for a new version, and the upgrade is US$169.

For those who have never used a page layout program and are worried that it will be too hard to learn, that problem is also taken care of. A company called "Total Training" has everything you will need to learn InDesign from front to back. They produce DVD training videos for every major Adobe software, and the one for InDesign contains 4 training disks, plus one project disk with all of the files you will need to do the work, should you not already have ones to use. The training is easy enough for anyone to use and learn from, and each lesson has controls so that you can stop its progress, reverse it, and also skip for a later time any chapters you do not need right away. These training disks are by far the easiest ones I have used to date, and the only ones I would recommend to anyone who wants to learn the software program. The InDesign set is 12 hours long and retails for US$249. For more information on this set, and their other training sets, you can go to: www.totaltraining.com