CS4 Photoshop – Content Aware Scaling

September 29th, 2009

New Feature – Content Aware Scaling

Licensed by Adobe for Photoshop CS4, Content Aware Scaling recognizes objects in the picture and appropriately scales objects. This is pretty amazing, and as the video demos is very easy to do.. edit->content-aware scale, hold down alt and scale. The porportions of the object will remain mostly the same while the background scales according to the drag.

Another use for Content Aware Scaling is scaling an image larger. It will attempt to scale the image while maintaining aspects of the image that do not scale well i.e. the wheels of a Hummer in the video. This isn’t perfect as shown by the demo and certain lines that are stretched will need to be fixed as shown with the history brush tool.

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CS4 InDesign GREP Styles

August 21st, 2009

Automate Fonts Using GREP To Save Time

Adobe InDesign features a large number of automation tools to format a range of text quickyly. Designers often want the font of their dropcap to be different than the rest of their page. Editing the paragraph style of the dropcap lets you pick the character styles you want applied. Using the preview option you can view your changes right away. Besides the dropcap, you can also do a similar formatting on a line of text as well using the line style. Another automated formatting is GREP styles. GREP is  way to search within the text for patterns. GREP in InDesign CS4 can be found under edit -> find change -> GREP Tab.  One example is to search for any digit and how many times the digit repeats (using a regex). Instead of having to do a find change and manually update each location you can use GREP styles to automate the process.

This is an advanced tutorial, but not too difficult to understand the process of. A beginner could probably play with the GREP expressions to get what they wanted. This is a very powerful way to automatically change fonts assuming you can figure out the pattern of text that needs to be changed. If you have any experience with regular expressions then this is basically the same thing with a little bit of hand holding.

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