Planet Quark

Because our friends over at Lynda.com were gracious enough to share a selection of chapters from my “QuarkXPress 7 New Features“ video training, I hand-picked several that I thought would be most appealing to new users of QuarkXPress 7 and QuarkXPress 8.

This is the fifth in the series, and it shows how to manipulate the layers, channels and paths in a native Photoshop file, directly inside QuarkXPress 7 or 8. The “PSD Import” palette is where this magic occurs, and it functions exactly like the Layers palette in Photoshop — you can turn layers on and off, and adjust their Blending Mode and opacity. You can also instantly enable or disable alpha channels and paths.

But it goes even further: for example, QuarkXPress automatically creates new “spot colors” in the document for every spot color channel in the Photoshop document. That way, you can create a mask in Photoshop for areas where you want to apply a varnish, spot color, emboss or foil, and then QuarkXPress makes it “checkbox easy” to print those extra plates.

If you like, you can even map the “colors” coming in from Photoshop to existing colors in QuarkXPress. That way, you can add Photoshop’s masked areas to your existing items that you intend to apply a varnish, spot color, foil or emboss to.

See exactly how to do all these things in this 12-minute video:

Play Video Tutorial: Using Photoshop Files in QuarkXPress

You can also watch my previous videos “The Amazing (and overlooked) Glyphs Palette!“, ”Using Picture Effects to Edit Images in QuarkXPress“, ”Alpha Channels“, “Multiple Windows” and “Alpha Channels“.

Popularity: unranked [?]