We are going to save this file three different times so that we can compare the results in an InDesign page. Go up to File choose Save As and we can just place this on the Desktop and this will be really just a dupe of the file we have opened, the logo.psd, click Save. If you get the Maximize Compatibility dialog, just click OK. That's our native PSD.
The next version we are going to save is going to be the Photoshop PDF. Go back to File, again choose Save As, this time out of the format pull down, choose Photoshop PDF, down about three-quarters of the way on the list. Let's check As a copy so that we keep our original file open and this copy is saved, click Save button. Don't be alarmed by the alert, it just recognizing that you are about to choose some custom settings, go ahead, click OK.
Now I have to make some decisions. We want to keep the transparency that we have in this file and in order to do that, the PDF that we save has to be Acrobat 5 and above because only at Acrobat 5 do we have support for transparency and for layers. So a high quality print is probably going to work for you. From the PDF Preset, if you click-and-drag down and choose High Quality Print if it's not already chosen for you. That's a good start but let's make a change. In the left hand column choose Compression. We don't want to resample our information so where it now offers to Bicubic Downsample, click that pull down and change that to Do Not Downsample. We don't want it to compress either. All we really want is our file just as it is in a PDF wrapper so that InDesign will treat it correctly.
So under Compression, where it now says JPEG, change that to None. So it's just going to be the pixels we have right now encased in a PDF wrapper, click the Save PDF button. The alert that you get here is just to warn you that users have much older version of Photoshop won't understand how to open this. Just click Yes to continue and you save this to the Desktop.
We are going to save one last format we have saved as PSD, we have saved as PDF, one more acronym, we are going to save this as an EPS. File>Save As we are going to put this on the Desktop as well and out format this time is going to be Photoshop EPS, second one in the list. You might notice that there is little yellow triangle of terror here by Layers, it means that we can't have Layers which sort of lets you in on the fact that you are not going to have transparency in this file either. Click Save, and EPS is sort of like something in a plastic bag. You don't really see what's inside, other programs don't see what's inside, that's what preview is about.
If you are on Windows, set the Preview to TIFF (8 bit/pixel), if you are on the Mac, set that to Macintosh (8bit/pixel). Notice that Include Vector Data is checked, make sure that it is and look you do get warned here at the bottom it says, Files with vector data are going to be rasterized by Photoshop, and what that means is that your crisp edges are going to turned into pixels and you won't be able to reshape all these little interesting element. So in essence, saving this as an EPS is a one way trip, click OK and then to test this, to see what the results are because we can't really tell with Photoshop's view. We are going to place this files in an InDesign page.
Open InDesign, if you don't already have it running, I already have InDesign running, so I am going to hit Alt+Tab on Windows to toggle to that other open program, by the way, you can use Command+Tab on the Mac to do the same thing. We are going to open up a simple little InDesign page just so you have some place to place these images and take a look at how each of them behaves.
If you go to your Project Files folder, choose File>Open and navigate to your Project Files folder, inside Chapter 01, you will find an InDesign file called LogoTest.indd. Double click on that and this is just a place for us to place these images and compare how they behave. Choose File>Place and we can actually get them all at once. You should have saved them to your Desktop, if you have saved them elsewhere, you will just have to remember where you put them, we want ERPCO_logo.psd, if you hold down Shift, you should be able to click on ERPCO_logocopy.eps, your may or may not have the word copy in there but as long as you have one EPS, one PDF and one PSD, you are good. When you click Open, you come into InDesign with a loaded graphics cursor, you see the little three that tells you you are actually
carrying around all three images.
We are going to place the images one by one so we can compare them. Click to place the first one, click to place the second one, click to place the third one. It might be hard to keep them straight. To figure out which one is which, if you look in the Links panel, which is contained over here in your right dock, with this one selected, you can see, in my case, the logo.psd is on the right, PDF is in the middle, the EPS is on the left.
We don't have to really look too closely at the EPS to realize already, he is not going to do the job for us. He has an opaque white background. So it's not going to let anything in InDesign show through and that's part of makes EPS unsatisfactory for what we want to do. So we can eliminate that one and hit your Delete or Backspace key and delete the EPS. That leaves us with the PDF and PSD.
At first they look pretty much the same but if you set InDesign to full resolution display, by going up to View>Display Performance>High Quality Display, in my case High Quality Display is already chosen the Typical Display is the default.
Let's zoom in and let's compare because they don't look too different. Go over to your Tool panel, choose your Zoom tool, let's zoom in at first on the PSD. In my case, that's the one the right. You can see pixels on the edge, so not all that great, kind of defeats the purpose of having vector content. I am going to double click on the Hand tool so that I am back to full page zoom and now I am going to go back choose my Zoom tool again, click-and-drag a zoom marquee so that I can look at my PDF. Look at that, nice, crisp vector edges.
Of course, the interior is made out of pixels because that's the only way to accomplish the shading that the bevel and emboss effect needed in Photoshop but the good news about this is that our edges are nice and crisp, out lettering is good, that's what you want for a logo and Photoshop PDF is the only answer. It's the only way to take a Photoshop file that has vector content in it and have it be rendered correctly in InDesign and print correctly.
So remember that the next time you want to put text or any kind of vector shape in a Photoshop file, remember to save it as a Photoshop PDF and you can reopen it in Photoshop, you may find that if you double click on the file, it's going to try to launch Acrobat. So one little extra step, be inside Photoshop, choose File>Open and then open up your Photoshop PDF and you will see that all your layers and all your original contents are still there.
That's the end of this lesson and we are through with this chapter. Just revisit some of the things we learned in this chapter, you now know that you can put spot colors into a CMYK Photoshop image so that you have something that's much more interesting and vibrant to print and you now know that there are other ways to mask items instead of using the Dreaded Pen tool, that you can create density mask and use the content of an image to actually give you a head start. And now you know when you have the special case of having vector content in a Photoshop file or text in a Photoshop file, the best way to save it is as a Photoshop PDF and don't be afraid to use PDFs as art files. It's alright to use PSDs, AIs and PDFs all the popular acronyms InDesign is going to treat them right. That's the end of this chapter.
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