APOGEE PHOTO MAGAZINE: Do Photographers and PageMaker Really Mix

Do Photographers and PageMaker Really Mix?

By Paul W. Faust

More and more photographers are adding desktop publishing programs to their list of photographic tools, but how do you know if you need them? For the moment, cost will probably be your deciding factor, but eventually the computer will be as common a photographic tool as lens filters have been for decades. Programs like Adobe Photoshop are presently the most popular choice, but page layout programs like Adobe PageMaker are coming in a close second.

If you think a program like PageMaker is just for design firms that distribute fancy product catalogs or monthly newsletters, think again. A photographer, or any artist for that matter, can use PageMaker to create promotional flyers to represent his/her business and/or service. In fact, a flyer may be the simplest kind of page the program can produce. For example, in my photography and writing business, I need both business cards and forms for record keeping. The records I must track range from mileage logs for my photo trips (a tax deduction) to notations about my stock photo sales, logs about the query letters I’ve mailed and had answered, lists of the articles and photos I’ve submitted, and copies of my promotional materials. I also track personal records such as auto and home maintenance logs. One of the best things about making custom log pages is that you can use one page layout to record many different items. All you have to do is change the heading text, and a brand new page is finished in seconds.

For photographers, programs like PageMaker are a must--especially if you intend to sell your work. The savings you collect by making your own brochures can pay for a layout program in short order. If you have someone else do the job, not only do you have to pay labor and layout costs, but you also have to pay a printer to produce the final material. With minimums of around two hundred fifty or five hundred sheets per run, you’ve already paid more than half the cost of buying your own program. If you do the job, you need to print only as many pages as you need at that time. One of my main layouts consists of my portfolio sample pages. How do you enlist someone to print just a few of them? (I send portfolio pages to the Library of Congress for copyright registration. This ability alone saves me more money than what the program costs.)

My page layout program of choice is Adobe PageMaker. What can it do? A good example would be the kind of brochures you receive in the mail. They contain text blocks that are illustrated with graphic images. All of these images have to be manipulated into the proper position, and it’s the page layout program that does the job by using edit tools that can move, rotate, crop, skew, group, resize, and mask each separate part. But that’s just the beginning. PageMaker will let you work on one page at a time or a whole set of pages, and you can manipulate many other page layout features from web-ready files--from inserting borders to making foldout pages. A tri-fold setup gives you six page faces to work with on one letter-size page (or even larger). (See below)

This is my promo brochure for digital imaging and photo restoration work. Each side has three sections that fold into a 3x8 inch brochure. This side shows the finished restoration in one panel. The original, almost black, photo to be restored is printed on the back. When folded, they open up next to each other to show the before and after samples. This is one of the easy sales pieces that can be created using PageMaker-7.

You don’t have to do all of the work in PageMaker, however. Photo images can be scanned and worked on in a graphics program like Photoshop or using a drawing program like Illustrator. Then, you can combine them all in PageMaker to finish the page. You can import from clip-art collections or from a Kodak Photo CD, and all images and text can be fully edited. If you have a text font that’s too dark for the area you want to put it in front of, you can reverse it to have white letters on a black background. If you have text that doesn’t fit a certain space, you can wrap it around the area next to it—perhaps a photo.

The latest version of PageMaker, PageMaker-7, has a greater ability to import native Adobe files, as well as added conversion support for Microsoft Word and QuarkXPress files. All of that means greater speed in working on your pages. On the technical side, other new features include “Data Merge,” which allows you to import data based .csv and .txt files. There’s also an enhanced PDF (Portable Document Format) export feature that permits you to import or create, edit, and view Adobe PDF files--all from inside PageMaker-7. A new native Adobe support allows you to preserve original Photoshop and Illustrator layers in a single compound file, eliminating the need to manage multiple versions of flattened files. That means you can work with only one file no matter how many layers you’ve created in it. This new feature alone can save you an untold amount of work time. PageMaker-7 comes with over fifty new fonts. It’s Windows and Mac ready, and educators enjoy special pricing. The street price for the regular version of PageMaker is $499 US ($79 for upgrades). In addition, PageMaker-7 comes in an Adobe Publishing Collection that includes PageMaker-7, Photoshop-6, Illustrator-9, and Acrobat-5.

System requirements:

Mac OS = PowerMac; system 8.6 or later; 16-MB Ram; 100-MB disk space, and a CD drive.
Windows OS = Pentium processor; Windows 98, NT, 2000, or ME; 32-MB Ram; 175-MB of disk space; and a CD drive.

For more information on Adobe products call 408/536-6040 or check out their Website at www.adobe.com