Adobe Output Module – Photoshop CS4 Sneak Peek

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Hi! I am Rich Harrington. And welcome top this edition of Photoshop CS4 Sneak Peek. Today, we are going to take a look at the Adobe Output Module, which is actually part of bridge but replaces functionality inside the Photoshop.

Long time Photoshop users may remember such cool things as making web photo galleries, contact sheets, things like that, PDF Slideshows, and that is really important way to get your step out there for clients to review.

Well, those features are now gone from Photoshop. But, before you get upset, be sure to look at how they replaced it. Simply fire up bridge and grab a folder full of images. So, once you are in bridge here, you can navigate to a particular folder of images and open it up and grab a bunch of photos. So here, I have several planes from the National Air and Space Museum.

Now, there are some cool things you could do inside a bridge when you are looking at these images now. There are lot of people miss. Under the view mode here, you could choose view, review mode and that is a useful way to quickly look at the images here. Now what you are actually seeing is that it comes up with this cool sort of slideshow and you are looking at it, you are seeing the photo, you could zoom in, check the focus on areas. But when you are ready, just press the right arrow and it switches to the next image. So this is pretty cool, it lets you check out your photos, zoom in, look at them in detail. All in all, pretty nice. And that is the review mode which is actually new with the bridge.

Now, let us take a look at that Output Module in particular. When you want to exit the review mode, just click the X button here and it exits back out. And, what you want to do is switch your workspace, just how Photoshop has workspaces for particular tasks so to as to this bridge.

You will find them across the top here, we have the essentials, film strip, metadata and output. If you do not see the output workspace, just click and you will see a whole menu here of all of your choices, for things like light tables and photos, but what you want is the output module workspace. Choose that and the user interface rearranges a bit to get ready for particular tasks.

So, with your images selected here, you see, we have the content along the bottom and those are selected images and up talk we have a preview area as we start to build things. The first thing that we are going to do is a PDF Slideshow.

Now, into the Output Module here, you could do a web gallery, which is Flash or PDF file. I am going to choose PDF and from the template, I could choose options such as a Fine Art Mat, for example, and then, click Refresh Preview.

You will see what it does is matted on the white paper with a single image. If you want to make it full screen, you could simply choose Maximize Size until it to Refresh and it will actually adjust. Now, this is putting the images biggest possible on the page. If you want to make an actual slideshow, be sure to change your paper settings.

Under the size here, you could specify what you want. Instead of International Paper, let us go to a Web size and specify that we want 1024 x 768, which is a real common size for a lot of computer monitors.

Next, make sure it sets to Landscape orientation, by clicking the Landscape button and choose High Quality. I am going to change the background to Black but you can use White or a Custom color. Now, when you want to see this update, remember, just click the Refresh button and the screen will show you how it is going to look.

At this point, you have a couple of other options. One is the ability to add a password for opening the document. So if you want to make the document password protected, just put a password on it. If you want a permissions password, you can actually do things like disable printing. This way, you could send the PDF to a client for review but not worry about them, printing out images that are not quite done yet. If you have images that still need touch up or maybe you want to protect the images from thief, this is a good way to do it.

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