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Working on the autobiographical history of my grandfather was a very rewarding project, from start to finish: working with my fellow editor Suzy Bills to clean up the manuscript, working with my grandmother and my aunts and uncles to get their input and their stories and their pictures, and preparing the work for publication using Photoshop and InDesign and Lulu. Here is the result:  Today's tutorial comes from this site. It was a little difficult to follow exactly because they had an old version of Photoshop and they were using a PC. I used a fun picture I took while playing with my son at The Pit Park (everybody brings their old or unused toy cars). The effect wasn't exactly the same because I had to use a different texture than they did, but it was still useful because I learned how to feather a picture (New Layer, use the Marquee tool and then Inverse to get a frame, feather it using Modify-->Feather (25 pixels in my case), and then fill it with white using option + backspace.  I know I said that I would give you an eBook, but I need some more time than I currently have to produce something worth blogging about. So instead, I watched a tutorial on Lynda.com called Deke's Techniques to set up layer styles that mimic gold and silver. The text is still editable, which is really nice, although I have to readjust some of the sparkles if I move the text. I think it will be very useful for projects in the future. Deke only showed how to do the gold lettering; I then monkeyed with the style to get the silver coloring (not too hard). Stay tuned for eBooks hopefully next week.  Here once again are my somewhat incomprehensible notes. If you watch the videos on creating eBooks with InDesign on Adobe TV (just search for it), you'll probably have a better grasp of what these digital chicken scratches mean. Next week I'll have the final round of eBook making and include an ePUB file as a practice round that you can open up and see. To Make an eBook (Part II): Must have separate InDesign files for each part of the book: cover, front matter, each chapter, back matter, etc. Open all these in an InDesign Book file. |
Get Updates Jamie Zvirzdin While I still edit science books and help kids create stories, I've moved my focus to writing fiction and non-fiction stories. See more at www.jamiezvirzdin.com.
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