Hiya,

First of all another of my customary apologies but it's been a pretty hectic and emotionally charged week for me. Far too hectic and emotionally charged to think about Adobe tutorials. If you're interested, as well as being overrun with work, I also found myself on the telephone speaking to my mother and father for the first time since 1998. It's a long story and I won't bore you with any details, suffice to say it's been a most unusual week.

Anyhow, Photoshop…

Ever visited an art gallery and tried to take a few shots of the paintings housed in it? The problem is that if you have a flash and stand right in from of the picture you end up with a photograph of a flash going off. The only solution to this is to take the picture at an angle and to let Photoshop strut its funky stuff.

As follows:

1. Select the Crop tool and draw a rough marquee around the image you wish to straighten.



2. In the Control panel at the top of the machine check 'Perspective'. You can now drag the four handles of your marquee to fit the image.



3. All you do now is hit return and hey presto! One magically straightened image. As simple as that.



PS. Sorry for the shortness of this little tip. I'm going to be making an effort to get back into the groove next week. As always comments most gratefully appreciated.

How many times have you flicked throught a newspaper or magazine and noticed that text is not lining up across columns? While this is not a deal breaker it's ugly and lazy work, especially when it's so easy to set up a baseline grid and correct this problem.

Setting up a baseline grid is something that I normally do at the very start of a publishing project. A lot of designers try this and get deterred by the fact that their leading (line spacing) values tend to mess up. This occurs because InDesign's default baseline grid is set to 4.233mm (in other words 12pt or 1 pica) and if your leading happens to be more than this you end up aligning your text to every other line on the baseline grid. Too many designers get this far and then give up.

The solution is simplicity itself:

1. Set your leading and make a note of what is.

2. Go to InDesign > Preferences > Grids... and set the Grid's 'Start' value to whatever your top margin is for the page. Next set the 'Increment Every:' to whatever your leading happens to be. Make sure that you include whatever measurement unit that you are using (i.e. if you are using pts then type '14pt' into the field).

3. Finally, select your type and in the paragraph pane of the control panel hit the 'Align To Baseline Grid' button (even better if you can do this in the paragraph style sheets dialogue box).

Now you're up and running...