Five things I didn’t know about Photoshop last week

This weekend I studied a course on www.lynda.com called Photoshop for Designers: color by Nigel French. I love Lynda.com courses and can’t recommend them highly enough.

So five things I learned from the course, or came across as a result, that I didn’t have an inkling about already.

1. You can set up soft proofing so you see as colour-blind people would see. Apparently colour-blindness affects more people than you would think.

Soft proof. Colour in the navigator

This more useful for more graphic work, seeing where there is enough colour contrast, but interesting none the less.

2. Match colour. This is where you can map colours of one image on to another.

Before

After

Hey presto!

3. HUD colour picker. If you want to pick a colour as you go – ctrl alt  cmd click will bring up the colour picker. If you want to jump from one slider to the other press the space bar. Groovy!

4. Locking transparency. This is just a scribble, but if you lock a layer’s transparency, you can only effect pixels that aren’t transparent (so you can’t colour over the lines).

Locking transparency

5. Getting a hex number from the eyedropper tool.

Right click and the dropdown menu shows copy colour as hex number or html. These are numbers sampled from a rainbow gradient.

A rainbow of hex numbers

 

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InDesign epub conversion. When is black not black pt 2

Last week I posted about an issue I’d been having with the css generated by InDesign cs6. When I tested files on the Kindle for iPad and then Kindle Fire, I found that my black text wouldn’t revert out in the night theme. (It’s fine in iBooks and Kobo)

After some investigation I discovered that InDesign seemed to have changed how it expressed black in the css.

css generated from InDesign cs5.5 and cs6

This is the css generated from the same document – the one on the left in cs5.5 on the right cs6. Notice the color value. I hadn’t changed anything in InDesign except open the file in cs6.

Colour swatch options when creating stylesheets

This is the colour menu in the paragraph styles dialogue. You have a choice of black and registration to create black. Black is the default (at least it is on my set up).

Css generated using ‘black’ and ‘registration’

And this is what I got when I set up one style using ‘registration’ black and one using ‘black’.

Interesting…

Now I know how to fix it, it’s not a problem, but it had me scratching my head for a bit.

 

Edit:

Below is a screenshot of the night theme on the kindle mac desktop app and the accompanying css. The text styled as ‘body’ is not showing up and has a color value of #1a1818 which is what InDesign has generated when I used the epub export dialogue. The other text has had the css edited in Dreamweaver to colour:inherit and no color value.

kindle for mac black screen and css