Works pretty well actually. But there is something super importantthat gets lost in the translation: layers. Like if I have my images on one layerand my text on another, it all gets flattenedinto a single bit- mapped imagewhen you open it in Photoshop. There really ought to be a way to exportyour In. Design documents in a way thatretains your different objects on different layers. And it turns out that you sort of canusing one of two work- arounds. One takes a little bit of labor,and the other one is a really cool free script,but it's only for the Mac. Let me show you the first method. First, I want to point out that here in my layers panel,I have three layers. In order for either of these techniques to work,you do need to make layers first in your In. Get your files whenever you need right from your cellphone. Up to 10x better download speed. You should install it for sure. Mar 15, 2015 Rating: want to sell 8 x 10 shed by: Anonymous Located in Lino Lakes, MN Royal Winchester shed not perfect, 1 roof panel has a hole but it doesn't leak. Design documentsand put different objects on each layer. Then, I can turn off all the layers except for one,and I'm going to export that one layer out as a PDF file. To do that, I'm simply going to go to the File menu,come down to Adobe PDF Presets,and then choose PDF/X- 4. The PDF/X- 4 preset is a pretty good around presetthat maintains your document quality. But before I actually choose that preset,I'm going to hold down the Shift key. That Shift key is a little trick that tells In. Designto bypass the export PDF dialogue boxand just use the settings built into the preset. So now, all I need to do is give this a name. Like I'll call this layer. I'll hit Enter or Return to save it to my desktop. There we go. I'm done. Now I'm going to hide that layer and show the next one,and I'll repeat the step. File, PDF Presets, PDF/X- 4, with the Shift key held down,and now I'm going to change the name to 2. That saves that layer. And finally, I'll do layer. There's the PDF Presets and Shift PDF/X- 4,give it a different name, and we're done. Once I have all the layers exported,I need to open them in Photoshop. So I'll switch over there. There are a couple of ways to open all those documents,but the easiest way is simply to go to the File menu,choose Open, click on the first one,and then Shift click on the last. That selects all three of those PDFs at the same time.
And then I'll click Open. Now when you open a PDF, Photoshop gives you this. Import PDF dialogue box. And there are a bunch of settings in here,but the most important one is a Crop To popup menu. It's usually set to Bounding Box,and you do not want to use Bounding Box for this technique. You want to use Media Box or one of these other options. That tells In. Design to bring in the entire page,not just the artwork. I've also changed the resolution to 2. Then, I'll click OK. Once you set up this dialogue box for one of the PDFs,Photoshop remembers the settings. So for each one of the other PDFs,all you need to do is click OK. Artisteer - Automated Web Designer. Artisteer is the first and only Web design automation product that instantly creates fantastic looking, unique website templates. There we go. I have all three PDFs open in Photoshop, one in each tab. There are several ways to combine them,but the way I usually use isto choose one of these other documents,make sure you have the move tool selected,and then start dragging this layer up. I'm going to drag this layer up,all the way on top of the tab that representsthe other document, my background document. And my mouse button is still held down here. So as soon as Photoshop switches windows,I can drag down on top of this image,and then, here's a great trick. I'm going to hold down the Shift keyand then let go of the mouse button. I know that sounds crazy, but if the Shift key isheld down when you let go of the mouse button,it will drop the image in exactly the same place as it was. Like it gets pin- registered to the proper location. Now I'll go ahead and grab that other layer. I'll come over here, start dragging this,drag it on top of the background document,drag it on top of the image itself,then hold down the Shift key,and let go of the mouse button. So there we go. I'm done. I have a three- layered Photoshop file,and I could turn those layers on and offand work with them separately. So that's pretty nifty but obviously it does take some timeand it's a little tedious. So fortunately, there's a better, faster techniqueusing a free script that you can get. Now I need to point out that this scriptcurrently only works on the Mac. The person who wrote it only wrote it for the Mac. So if you're a Windows user,you can use this PDF technique I just showed you. But if you're a Mac user, here's what you should do. First, you're going to need to download the scriptwhich you can get by going to this URLin any web browser: cpn. When you type that into your web browser,it's going to take you to a blog postwhere you can download the script. Once you've downloaded it,you need to install it into In. Design. It's not hard. Here's what you do. First, switch back to In. Design,go to the Window menu, choose Utilities,and then choose Scripts. Up comes the Scripts panel menu,and now all you need to do is right- click on the User folderor Control click with a one- button mouse. Then choose from this little menu Reveal in Finder. When you do that, up comes the Scripts folder,and inside the Scripts folder isanother folder called Scripts Panel. Let's open that. Now inside my Scripts Panel folder,you'll see a folder called David's Scripts. You're not going to have that of course. Those are my scripts, but it's no problem. Now what you need to do is take the folderthat you downloaded, that's this IDto. PSV6 folder,that's the one I downloaded from the In. Design. Secrets site,and I'm going to take that out of the Downloads folder,and I'm going to put it inside the Scripts Panel folder,not the Scripts folder, but the Scripts Panel folder. That's it. Let's try it out. I'll go back to In. Design, open up my User folderby clicking this little triangle,and then there it is, the IDto. PSV6 folder. I'll open that folder and there's my script: Layers. To. Smart. Objects. To run it, just double click on it. That opens up this dialogue box,and it's going to ask you what PDF preset to use,what color mode, which page, and importantly,what resolution you want. I'm going to change this to 2. And finally, it asks you if you want each of your. In. Design layers to turn into smart objects in Photoshop. I like that, so I'm going to leave that turned on. So let's try it out. I'll click OK and see this script doesexactly the same thing as all that work we did before. It exports PDFs, it opens those PDFs in Photoshop,and it combines them. But it does it behind the scenes,and it does it way faster than you can do manually. So here, in just about 1. Here we are in Photoshop and here are the layers. Isn't that sweet? Now, there are a few caveats, of course. For example, if you've used certaintransparency blend modes in In. Design,they may not translate exactly into Photoshop. But for the most part, you get a really high- quality. Photoshop file with the same layers as you had in In. Design. Once again, I always recommend using In. Designfor your page layout, even if you're doing large posters. But if you need to get your layout into Photoshopfor a further fine tuning, this script or that PDF techniqueis definitely the way to go.
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