Using Your Design Tools to Their Full Potential.

Throughout the history of desktop publishing, Quark® and Adobe® have enabled the production of millions of brilliant designs and powered creative businesses to new heights through QuarkXPress® and Adobe Photoshop® and Illustrator®.

Today, QuarkXPress 7 has tighter integration with Photoshop and Illustrator tools than ever before, and through standards such as HTML and CSS, QuarkXPress users can publish across media — both independently and alongside Adobe Creative Suite® applications such as Adobe Flash® and Adobe Dreamweaver®.

In this article you’ll find out how Creative Suite 2 and Creative Suite 3 users can get the best possible interaction with QuarkXPress. You’ll be surprised how easy Quark has made it to unlock the full potential of all your design software.

Quick Links Table of Contents

QuarkXPress and Adobe Photoshop

• PSD or not PSD?
• Using PSD files
• Alpha channels
• Spot channels
• When is QuarkXPress picture effects an alternative to Photoshop

QuarkXPress and Illustrator

• Heads up: transparency
• Drops shadows

QuarkXPress and Flash

• Working with Flash the format

Working with Adobe Dreamweaver

• HTML to Dreamweaver

Working With PDF

• PDF output styles

QuarkXPress for InDesign Users

• The basics
• Graphics and full-resolution previews
• Transparency
• Drop shadows
• Alpha channels (masks)
• Tables
• Linking
• Printing
• QuarkXPress exclusives

Useful links

More information

---

QuarkXPress and Adobe Photoshop

QuarkXPress and Photoshop are the two most widely used professional design applications, and QuarkXPress 7 is considered by many to have the best integration with Photoshop’s PSD file format of any layout tool available today. In this section we’ll explain when you should use the PSD format for your images and how to get the most out of them.

PSD or not PSD?

The most commonly used raster-graphics format for print output continues to be TIFF, that is generated by scanners, some cameras, and by Photoshop.

However, a lot of work in Photoshop is done in the PSD format. The main benefit of PSD is that it easily retains layers when you save, whereas TIFF used to have to be flattened.

Sterling Ledet offers training on a variety of applications such as Photoshop, Illustrator, and QuarkXPress. Click here for info.

TIFFs now support layers, but no layout application can really do anything creative with them. So when you are deciding whether to use TIFFs (that are usually smaller in file size) or PSDs, the main question is, “Do I need to do anything with these layers in my layout application?”

For example, you may have multiple layers in your PSD with different product shots, which will vary from publication to publication. If you use PSD, you can switch those layers on or off in QuarkXPress without having to save a separate TIFF for each publication.

Another question that might tip you in favor of PSD is, “Do I need to use a spot color with this image?” Using spot colors in most image formats is often complicated. However, because of the way QuarkXPress supports PSD channels, it’s simpler and more flexible.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13

If you enjoy our articles, click here to subscribe.
Free JavaScripts provided by The JavaScript Source