A short article how to achieve an ‘aged’ look-and-feel using recent pictures in just a few clicks. To read more, click here.

This article is a little how-to about making pictures look ‘aged’ without needing to use Photoshop. First the end-result: here is an example image, part of an InDesign page. Below, I’ll explain how I did this without needing Photoshop, and without duplicating or altering the original color picture.

First of all, you need to install some plugins, more precisely: Color2Gray and APID ToolAssistant – which are available for download from this web site. We have versions for InDesign CS5, CS4… all the way down to InDesign CS. Click here for more info and download links.

Color2Gray allows you to display and print color pictures in pure black-and-white through a standard color-to-grayscale color conversion. The resulting image is a proper conversion, and renders on the black (K) plate only. APID ToolAssistant is free, and Color2Gray is almost free (we charge a small amount of money for it – US$19). You can try it out for free for about a month, so you don’t need to pay anything if you simply want to follow along and try this out.

Once you have the plug-ins installed, you can create a document and place a JPEG image in it – here’s a screen capture of my picture of a building dating from 1913, located in Wanganui, New Zealand. This is the original picture, right after I placed it onto my InDesign page.

Select the picture frame, and while it is selected, use the API – Color2Gray – Force Render as Gray menu item.

The result becomes grayscale. Keep in mind – the original image file has not been altered! Color2Gray only influences how InDesign outputs the image pixels on the screen and onto the printed result, while keeping the original image file untouched. If you’d do a CMYK output preview you would find that now only the black plate carries the image.

Next, we neatly cover the image with a frame that’s filled with a light sepia color. The colored frame should be made to fit exactly over the image.

(Disclosure: I think that color looks like a light sepia, but it might not be – I am slightly color-blind, so please forgive me if it’s more of a reddish green or a greenish red: I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Good thing I decided to be a software developer instead of a graphics designer, eh?)

Now the magic: with the colored rectangle selected, bring up the InDesign Effects palette and multiply the colored rectangle with whatever lies underneath.

Tadaa: instant ‘old’ picture:

Is that cool or what?

TextExporter is a US$ 19.00 plug-in for InDesign and InCopy CS, CS2, CS3, CS4 or CS5. It allows you to export all the text from an InDesign document concatenated into a single RTF file, grouped into a natural reading order. Even if text frames are not threaded together, the exported RTF file will have all the text in the proper order, which largely removes the need to manually clean it up before handing it over to a Microsoft Word user.

Read all about it at

http://www.rorohiko.com/wordpress/indesign-downloads/text-exporter/

We’ve just released a beta version (1.0.9b0) of our popular FrameReporter plug-in with support for InDesign CS5.

We expect the beta-test period to last until the end of June 2010 – during that period, you can purchase a (per InDesign install) license for FrameReporter for US$29.00. After the official release of FrameReporter, the price of a license will increase to US$39.00 – so don’t delay, get your licenses today!

More information can be found here.

http://www.rorohiko.com/wordpress/indesign-downloads/framereporter/

We’ve just released a new version of APID ToolAssistant – 1.0.48; click here for more info and the download links.

By itself, APID ToolAssistant does not ‘do’ anything apparent. Instead it assists other plug-ins to do their job.

You have this plug-in installed when you use most of the InDesign tools you can find on this web site.

As a result, this new 1.0.48 upgrade is a recommended download for all users of any of our tools (like TextExporter, TextStitch, MagnetoGuides, FrameReporter, Color2Gray…). Simply replace the older APID ToolAssistant plug-in in your plug-ins folder with the latest one.

This new version has a direct impact on FrameReporter: it fixes an issue with the frame labels shown by FrameReporter when a frame has a drop shadow applied. If you’re using FrameReporter, please upgrade your APID ToolAssistant!

Our LayerLifter freebie is a simple plug-in for Adobe InDesign that offers an alternative method for moving page items between layers, instead of using the InDesign Layers palette.

With LayerLifter, the names of the document layers appear in the context menu of any selected page item. You can move a page item between layers by right-clicking and selecting a layer name from the context menu.

This updated version adds an optional feature to nudge all items on a layer throughout the whole document, or across the current spread – only users that have a license for APID ToolAssistant installed have access to this optional feature.

To see a little bit more about this new feature, check this out – it’s a little article that explains how to nudge a whole collection of frames in one swoop:

http://www.rorohiko.com/wordpress/2009/10/29/how-to-nudge-and-shift-a-whole-layer/

More info about LayerLifter can be found here:

http://www.rorohiko.com/layerlifter

The latest version of our LayerLifter tool includes an optional layer shifter feature, which allows you to do document-wide ‘layer nudging’

Imagine you made a picture grid layout, with captions below the pictures – something like this:

You’ve put pictures into the picture frames (to do that fast, you might have used our ImageLibraryLoader tool), and the caption text is all neatly styled using a paragraph style Caption.

The caption frames are on their own separate layer.

Imagine there are many tens of pages like this. Now, for the sake of the argument, suppose we want to make the caption frames overlap the pictures instead of sitting underneath.

First select the API – LayerLifter – Preferences menu item, and make sure the Drag Attached Layer On All Spreads option is enabled.

Select any one of the caption frames, and then pick the API – LayerLifter – Attach To Layer menu item.

The caption frame should now display a little paperclip icon near its top left corner.

The caption frame is now ‘attached’ to the layer it is on – anytime you move this particular frame, you will ‘drag’ the whole layer along, as well as any other page items on that layer.

Drag the caption frame so it overlaps the picture above it. As soon as you let go of the mouse button, all other caption frames on all pages will shift the same amount – so they now all overlap – they were all on the same layer, so they all move along. (Yeah, I know the result does not look good – good thing this is only a dummy layout just for the sake of the demo, eh).

Finally, with the attached caption frame still selected, use the API – LayerLifter -Detach From Layer menu item to remove the paperclip, and detach the caption frame from its layer.

Important: this layer shifter feature is only enabled for LayerLifter users that also have a valid APID ToolAssistant license installed.

We’ve been hard at work these last few months – a beta of StoryTweaker, a new version of TextExporter, and also a new version of FrameReporter for InDesign.

This update adds the ability to display the image file name and/or the image file path next to any placed image on the InDesign page.

Here’s a sample of what it can do for you – imagine you’ve been asked to place a whole lot of images, and it’s really important that the images are placed on the pages in alphabetical order of their file name.

The problem is that the images look very similar, and carry similar names – how do you verify quickly you’ve placed them correctly?

Furthermore, all images should be placed at the exact same scaling factor, so their effective resolution is the same. Again, how do you quickly find that out if there are any outliers?

Here’s a screen shot of my InDesign page – I can immediately see that DSC_8755 is out of order, that it is missing (hence the red background behind the name) and that the fourth image has been scaled to a different effective resolution than the other three.

With FrameReporter, it takes all of two seconds: Select All, and quickly inspect the file names.

And rest assured – these little labels are purely informational, and they are non-printing – they won’t appear on the printed page.

FrameReporter uses little non-printing labels to display interesting info about selected page items.  A lot of this info can also be found on the various InDesign palettes – but you need to click around to dig up the info. With FrameReporter, the relevant info is displayed exactly in the area where you are working, and you can immediately see the necessary info for multiple items in the flick of an eye.

Another example: FrameReporter will show overset text warnings on the frame of any text frame that’s part of a linked set of frames.

Check it out – click here for more info:

http://www.rorohiko.com/framereporter

Our ever more popular TextExporter tool has had a face-lift. TextExporter is a free plug-in for Adobe InCopy and Adobe InDesign that allows you to export all text from an InDesign file to a single file – in either Text, RTF or InDesign Tagged Text format

Yes, you read that right – you can use TextExporter with InCopy as well as with InDesign!

For users of CS3 and above, this latest version has an improved method for concatenating the InDesign content into a single RTF document. As a result the RTF export has better fidelity for users of CS3 and CS4. It’s still very much WYSSRWG (What You See Somewhat Resembles What You Get) but generally speaking, it’ll look closer to the original.

Furthermore, for those people who have (or will have) purchased the optional US$25 license for APID ToolAssistant, there are two additional features.

First of all, you can opt to export an InDesign document in frame-by-frame order instead of the default story-by-story order, so for some documents, the resulting RTF export file can be visually a bit closer to the original layout.

Secondly, you can convert all text to black during export – which is helpful when the InDesign document contains white text above a dark backdrop. Such white text becomes normally invisible in the exported RTF file, but with this new option, that’s a problem of the past.

More info and download links can be found by clicking here:

http://www.rorohiko.com/textexporter

ImageHorn is a free plug-in for Adobe InDesign to automatically resize or re-fit an image frame’s contents when the image frame is resized.

ImageHorn has a new feature – it is now possible to ‘pre-assign’ a fitting option to an empty frame (without any image). Later on, when an image is placed or pasted into the frame, the pre-assigned fitting option kicks in and will be applied to the image.

ImageLibraryLoader is another free plug-in. This one allows you to quickly set up a floating palette filled with images from one or more designated folders. In many cases, it is much faster than Adobe Bridge, as it uses standard InDesign library palette – so there is no external app to launch.

ImageLibraryLoader has been enhanced with a menu item that allows the user to directly paste a library item into an existing frame – which saves quite a few clicks.

There are a few limitations though – this new ImageLibraryLoader feature only works in Adobe InDesign CS3 or higher, and it only works for users that have a licensed version of APID ToolAssistant installed. Users of the free, unlicensed version of APID ToolAssistant miss out.

These two new features work great together – read all about it in this post:

How to Populate a Template With Images in No Time At All