QuickStart! - Adobe InDesign CS3 Course

 00:00:01,001 --> 00:00:08,000Welcome to VTC's QuickStart! tutorial on Adobe InDesign CS3. My name is Brian White and I will be your host for this tutorial. The object of a QuickStart! tutorial is to make users familiar with some of the new features and some of the exiting features within InDesign and to give you an idea of the strength of this program in your workflow. We'll also be taking a look at how InDesign integrates with the other Creative Suite programs, Photoshop, Illustrator, and to a lesser extent Dreamweaver. So, if you're new to InDesign, one of the first things you're going to notice is this splash screen that comes up when you open it. Over on the left here, you can see a list of recently opened documents. Simply click in one of these to open it again. You can create new documents, books or libraries on this side, and down here you've got web links to the InDesign community. Down at the bottom, you have the Adobe help features. It shows you resources, the new features in InDesign CS3, and also a quick getting started tutorial, but you won't need these because you're doing this VTC tutorial. So what we're going to do, we're going to open one of the recently opened documents I have here and we'll take a look at the interface. One of the things that Adobe has done is to try and give you more space to work in your documents. Over on the left hand side, the tool palette is now one long list, but if you click on these double arrows, you get it the way it was in previous versions. I'm just going to keep it a long list here. The other thing is the other palettes. A number of them are listed out here. If I press and drag out here like this, you can see there is the text explanation of what these are. These are the palettes that you would find under the window menu. I'm just going to close them up a little bit here and click on one, like the swatches. It comes out, same as before, but we have the other ones, the layers, the object styles, stroke, and if you want to close them up, click on this double arrow. Again, this is to give you more space to work on your document over here. The control palette up at the top over here, which was always very powerful, has been improved. A lot more options are available to you in this context-sensitive palette. Now, we're going to be taking a look at menus and palettes a little bit later on in this tutorial, so let's take a look at some of the nice new sexy features that they've introduced. They have improved the transparency an awful lot. It used to be a problem one, so let me show you what they've done. I'm going to select this text here. It's in the frame and I'm going to give the frame a color. I'll pull out my swatches palette and drag it down here and let's choose blue like this. Close up the palette. Now, I'd like to give this a transparency when it sits over the butterfly, but in previous versions, when you give it a transparency, it affected everything - the text, the outline, the fill - but now you can change that. I'm going to come up to this button here in the control palette. Notice this is now on the control palette, which makes it a lot easier to access. I'm just going to apply it to the fill and down here we have the transparency slider. Slide it back like that and there you can see the transparency over the butterfly is applied just to the fill of the frame, but not the text itself. I could give the text an individual transparency, which is different, by coming up and selecting the text, coming down here and adjusting the slider. It's a different transparency than I've given to the fill of the box. Let's move that aside and we'll take a look at some of the other effects. If you're familiar with Photoshop, a lot of these are going to be familiar to you. Let me select the butterfly here and I'm going to pull out our special effects menu by clicking on this FX button up at the top. I'm going to choose an outer glow. Notice we have a number of items here - drop shadow, inner shadow, etc., etc. Again, Photoshop type things and, as we saw before with the text, we can apply it to the object, the stroke, or the fill. We're going to apply it to the object here. Let me move this out of the way a little bit so that we can see it. We'll choose an outer glow and I've got to change the color here because white on white will only show up white. I'm going to just choose the magenta here, like this. Click on okay. We've got the preview button on, so we can see it. You can see that around the edges. If I make this up to one inch, it'll be a little bit more dramatic. Just enter it in the box and there you can see the fill. Obviously we've got a lot of options here that will adjust it as we go along, adding noise, changing the spread, and we can have all these other effects here. Click on okay. These sort of affects can be applied to objects. They can be applied to frames. They can be applied to text. Very powerful. You're going to have to use Photoshop less and less with this particular version of InDesign. Well, this is the basics. There's obviously a lot more, so we'll be getting on with it in the upcoming chapters.  

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