Pariah S. Burke

Acrobat X Pro is an impressive release, with new features and improvements for anyone who creates or works with PDF files.

Acrobat, like many mature products targeting a wide range of users, suffers from feature bloat. There's something in it for nearly everyone, but unfortunately Adobe is still struggling to find the best way to provide users with quick discovery and easy access to every function.

For users of recent versions of InDesign, the confusion over how to resize an image instead of cropping it evolves from two issues. First, selecting the image with the Selection tool (black arrow) actually selects the frame, not the image within it. Dragging a frame handle resizes the frame, not the image, thus cropping or adding blank space rather than resizing the image. Second and more importantly, InDesign CS3 and CS4 introduced a slight change in the way to simultaneously resize images and their frames, compared to previous versions.

That tiny change messed up a lot of users.

Changing the colors of photographs in your InDesign project requires Photoshop, right? Not necessarily. If the photo is black and white and saved in grayscale mode in a compatible format, you can tint it directly in InDesign. You can even assign it two colors for an attractive duotone.

A duotone is an image with two colors or tones, effectively a grayscale image, but more accurately one that substitutes a color for black and another color for white or negative space. For example, sepia, a popular effect wherein the main ink is a shade of brown atop a yellowed or off-white background color, is a duotone. While there are varying definitions for the term that have evolved over time, the technique I demonstrate below reflects this interpretation.

Adobe Illustrator's Live Trace feature is a phenomenal way to transform a raster image into a vector image--or to put it more plainly--to turn a photograph into a drawing.

Placing a raster image into Illustrator CS2, CS3, or CS4 ( Macworld rated 4 out of 5 mice ) via File -> Place and access the Live Trace Options from Object -> Live Trace -> Tracing Options, or use the button on the Control panel.

The other day, we looked at ways to extract content from finished PDF files using Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro. But extracting content is not the only reason to revisit a finished PDF.

For example, one of the many uses I have for Adobe Acrobat's PDFs is to produce quarterly reports for my design clients. If you've ever done this sort of work, you know that parts of such reports--such as spreadsheets and charts--can change right up until the very last minute. That could mean multiple exports of an entire report to PDF format. The process can be time-consuming and tedious or it could be a matter of simply adding, removing, or replacing one or just a few pages in a long document. Here's how to perform such PDF maneuvers easily.

I need to say it: PDF files are supposed to be the final format for content. You aren't supposed to need to edit anything once it's been turned into a PDF. In the real world, however, many people find themselves, for a variety of reasons, needing to get material out of a PDF, either for reuse someplace else or for further editing. Here's how to get that PDF content out of an Adobe Acrobat document.

Images

Think of Global Light as a shop light--one of those caged light bulbs with the hook at the top.

While working on your car's engine, you'll typically hang the shop light somewhere under the hood to illuminate your work space. As you move around the engine compartment, you'll often relocate the hanging light. What happens then?

Few would deny the classic beauty of a grayscale (black and white) photo. Many ordinary pictures can be rendered more elegant simply by removing their colors, but none more so than portraits. Amidst the kaleidoscope of colors on social media sites, forums, and blogs, a grayscale avatar can stand out as unique and memorable. Even more distinctive is an image in which a single color is used in place of black, or perhaps even a second color is used to replace white.

An image consisting of one color is called a monotone. White isn't a color, but rather the absence of color--just like paper showing through a printed image indicates the absence of ink. Thus, in a grayscale or black and white photo, black is the only color, and that makes it a monotone. Adding a second color--either by replacing white or in addition to the first color--creates a duotone; third and fourth colors create tritone or quadtone images respectively.

Used as an avatar for forums and social media, a photograph helps people associate a face with your posts, status updates, and conversations. Of course, like anywhere else you use a photo, you want to put your best face forward. If you're lucky enough to have a professional photographer ready to snap some great shots of you, that's probably all you'll need. If not, Photoshop includes numerous filters and effects that, with only a few minutes of work, can turn a nondescript photograph into a stylish and memorable avatar. The two techniques below--which I'm calling Cartoonish and Color Halftone--are sure to give your photos some kick.

All the methods discussed here are inherently nondestructive, if you make sure to duplicate your original Photoshop layer, and then work only in that layer, leaving the original as is.

Photo-based avatars that look like paintings or illustrations are very classy and tend to be rare because few people possess the skills to make them without hours of work. But by following the simple steps outlined below, you will gain the skills to turn your photograph into a painted or illustrated avatar in minutes instead of hours.

1. In Adobe Illustrator ( Macworld rated 4 out of 5 mice ), open the raster (pixel-based) image you want to use as the starting point for your avatar. Illustrator can directly open JPEG, TIFF, and many other raster file formats.

So you need a small portrait of yourself to paste into social networking Web sites, instant message clients, or other venues that call for an image that you'd like to be a little less literal than a photo. In the previous stories about creating cartoon avatars, I talked about some of the online avatar generator Web sites that let you create a composite cartoon from different face and body components.

But that may not be your preferred look. If you need a little more hands-on avatar creation capability than you can get with the free online avatar creators we talked about so far, and if you have Adobe Illustrator CS2, CS3, or CS4--and if you know how to draw even crude shapes with the Pen or Pencil tools--you can whip up a new cartoon or caricature self-portrait in just a few minutes. The one below took me 60-seconds from start to finish. The more practice you have with these tools, the faster you'll go. Beginners might achieve the same results, but require more concentration on the task.

As social networking Web sites become increasingly popular, many users seek a way to pictorially represent themselves with a small icon. While a photo can be handy, it's not always possible or even desirable. Sometimes a cartoon representation can work as well or better, especially in social sites where you'd prefer not to reveal your face in a portrait.

Last week I showed you six free online apps you can use to make cartoon avatars of yourself in the style of South Park, Meez, Picasso, Gaia Online, the Wii game console, and Yahoo! Avatars. This week, in part two of my Cartoon You easy avatar series, I've got six more free online apps you can use to cartoon you. If none of these fully capture who are you online, be sure to check out the next installment in this series, which presents a do-it-yourself option.