articles/Photoshop/adobecreativeuitecs4-page9
by Mike McNamee Published 01/02/2009
INDESIGN CS4
InDesign is intended to be used for page layout designs of single or multiple pages with a rich graphical content. If you think about it, that is just what a wedding album is! We have long pondered whether InDesign would make a good album-design tool and concluded that the answer is 'yes' if you wish to move away from 'straight' pictures in an album. Obviously if the range you offer is for albums with slip-in photographs, InDesign will be of little use. Alternatively if you wish to create album designs with complex, sophisticated graphic content, then InDesign might just be what you are looking for.
The 'sophisticated' graphic elements can take the form of lettering, drop shadows, borders, and swirly motifs and swashes. You should recognise immediately that all these things can be done in Photoshop, the question is whether you can get an edge in either timing or sophistication using InDesign. Potentially, one area where InDesign scores is for the placement of multiple images onto a backdrop spread. Here the Photoshop photographer/designer can find themselves adjusting the layered, individual images up and down in scale - devastating pixels along the way! Although Smart Layers in Photoshop get over this, there are overheads on the file size and some compromises.
Using InDesign you can 'collect' a bunch of images in Adobe Bridge and then 'fire' them into pre-set content boxes on an InDesign template. This is the work of (literally) seconds - just a single mouse click. Now you can resize as many times as you like, up, down and rotation, as the linked file is only rescaled once (for flattening to print or perhaps to create a PDF.).
The conundrum for the theme of this InDesign versus Photoshop debate is this. Does the speed with which you can place images (seconds) matter if you then spend 30 minutes pushing and pulling images around the page? Well, if Photoshop was better for doing this you would find magazine designers using Photoshop to design their pages - and they do not! Take the example in which you have decided that one photograph, on a page of many, has to go.
In Photoshop you have to open the file (which, with as many as 10 Smart Objects may be quite large), identify the correct layer, delete it, re-import the replacement image to a new layer, scale it and make it a Smart Object, then apply any Styles such as drop shadow and borders. Now with InDesign you quite simply drag the replacement file from Bridge and drop it into the box to replace the original. You may need to know a couple of keystroke shortcuts to fit a new crop but that is all. It is undoubtedly more efficient, but the question arises in regard to the difference in overall time to complete the album. Cropping is certainly easier using InDesign, you always drop the entire image into place then drag the container box to crop to taste - in Photoshop you either have to pre-crop the image or 'crop' the view using masks; both have their disadvantages.
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