The affects and effects of effective Effects
March 29th, 2007In the world of page layout features there are the bread-and-butter features such as numbered lists, running headers and footers, multi-placing of images. They’re nice, but the features that get people excited are the bells and whistles of any new version.
InDesign CS3 is ringing church bells, jingle bells, and fire alarm bells, as well as blowing their wolf whistles, train whistles, referee whistles, and even kazoos with the improvements and new features for Effects.
The fun starts in the new Effects panel, your one-stop-shopping for everything to do with Effects that leaves the old Transparency palette in the dust.
First thing you’ll notice is that you can get to all the effects—drop shadows, opacity, feathers, and so on—right from the Effects panel. There’s no more running up to the menu for drop shadows and running back to the panel for blend modes. Of course if you enjoy menu surfing, you can find all the effects under Object>Effects.
InDesign now has a full set of effects that can be applied to objects as a whole or just the strokes, fills, images, or text within an object. This means that it is no longer necessary to separate the text from a frame that has an opaque fill. You can set the fill for a low opacity while keeping the text at full strength. This has been a big request ever since InDesign added opacity to frames.
Adobe has also added new effects and modified some of the older ones. For instance, the Drop Shadow command now has an angle wheel to move the position of the shadow as well as controls for if the shadow is seen or not under opaque objects. (Before you could only control the position by modifying the X and Y coordinates—not exactly intuitive for visual designers.) Similarly, the Basic Feather effect has been improved with a Choke control that lets you harden the edge of the feather.
But those are hardly the big news for Effects. InDesign now has an Inner Shadow effect which creates the appearance of an object punching a hole in its background. (Amazingly, this popular effect has never made it into Illustrator’s Effect>Stylize menu.) It also has a new Bevel and Emboss effect complete with Inner Bevel, Outer Bevel, Emboss, and Pillow Emboss. In fact, with the exception of Gloss Contour and Stroke Emboss, the Bevel and Emboss controls in InDesign are identical to those in Photoshop. (And yes, this is another effect missing from poor Illustrator.)
By the way, did you notice I mentioned the Basic Feather effect? That means that there are two new feather commands. The Gradient Feather allows you to create gradients that fade from a color to transparent. You can have as many opacity points as you want to create ripples of transparency. (Think of the Opacity stops in Photoshop’s Gradient controls.)
But the new effect that meets the most requests is the Directional Feather. For years people have wanted the ability to fade an image to clear. While sneaky ID experts had figured out convoluted workarounds, there really was no easy way to do it. Finally (finally!) those days are over. With the Directional Feather effect, you can fade an image into transparency with ease.
You would think that all this would be enough, but not for the ID engineers. They’ve added two glows: an Inner Glow as well as an Outer Glow. These new glows give you more control than the old trick of using a Drop Shadow as a glow.
Finally, the ID team has added a Satin effect that allows you to create wavy textures. I wish I understood this effect better, but I have never used it in Photoshop, and I doubt I’m going to use it in InDesign.
Finally, just to throw a little more light on the subject, InDesign CS3 now has a Global Light setting. This means that for effects such as shadows and bevels, which give the illusion of light casting highlights and shadows, you can set a Global Light position and altitude. This ensures that all the elements on a page have the same light source. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked at pages where the lighting source seems to come from totally different directions.
With this new set of effects, CS3 has made a lot of noise!
I’m not sure who “people” are (maybe “tech bloggers”?) but this regular user is much, much more excited about the chance of having functional running headers in CS3 than any special glow or sheen that is added on to the release.
Yes, you can create running headers in CS3. I’m sure we’ll get to covering that feature before long. There are literally hundreds of big and small new features to cover!
Oh, wow! I hadn’t realised we were going to get all that. Having an angle wheel on the drop shadow effect? That alone is worth an upgrade for this designer! Thanks Vectorbabe for letting us know what’s in store…
Bread-and-butter? This post plays with a distorted view. Numbered lists, running headers and footers are much more important for regular DTP professionals than effects.
Surely, it is amazing to see ID CS3 with this robust set of effects. But the difference is: you can create effects in Photoshop and then place the images in InDesign. In other hadn, you can’t create numbered lists, running headers and footers in any way except manually before this new version.
Or proper legal numbering too for that matter.
And whats wrong with a bit of longhand work rounds, shows you are prepared to commit time to learning the software not just apply a box of effects and pretend you are a designer
Or maybe like Sonic, the software would only allow the toys to become active after you had so many difficulty points????
People are forgetting that InDesign is like Ronseal, it does what it says on the tin, it’s a design program first and a typesetting program second. It’s functionallity in typesetting far surpasses any other and it’s designing features are getting better and better. Running heads, footers, numbered lists etc. are important but so is having a nice layout, it’s like which comes first, the chicken or the egg? Different people have different priorities for InDesign.
This is where I find the entire Creative Suite concept to be a bit of a farce. Effects, affects and more effects within InDesign.
Drop shadow wheel? Really?
Just weld the three programs together already, and have them all speak the same language.
Glows, blurs, feathers - how about getting rid of the simple, rogue ‘missing fonts’ problem first.
Still waiting for the ‘create concept’ plug-in for InDesign. Maybe in CS4?
well, a lot of these effects are handy and people are going nuts over them cos us designers can now do them directly in InDesign, without having to bounce in and out of programs. Saves time, and image files remain in-tact.
A question tho’… when we export said IND CS3 to INX for a client to open in CS2, what becomes of, for example, the Directional Gradient or the Gradient Feather effect? and other than pointing them to Photoshop, is there any way around having the image come up solid again when it is re-opened in CS2?
All the CS3 special effects disappear when you open the INX back in CS2, as that version has no idea how to reproduce them. If you need to show your client the page, just send them a PDF.
Well, the layout is what the client wants to maintain… the text is on a 5th spot ink on a separate layer which is meant to allow for different language translations. The trick is, the client wants to take away the file and supply to as many 3rd party contractors to do so, which is why I need to convert to INX to make allowance for “other” designers who may not have CS3.
I proposed stripping in the text separately onto a PDF of the 4c process images/backgrounds/logos (stuff not subject to translations) and I don’t think they understood me. Hence why they’re wanting an INX to convert to CS2. What do you think?