Page 202 - Enhancing CAD Drawings with Photoshop

4386.book Page 186 Monday, November 15, 2004 3:27 PM

186 CHAPTER 5 PRESENTING PLANS

Save your own project and then open the file Hollyhock2.psd from the companion CD. Investi-
gate which Layer Style Effects were applied to the remaining layers. Completed project files such as
this are a great learning resource and reference for your creative inspiration.

Laying Out Plans on a Sheet

Laying out your final project image on a sheet is the last consideration when preparing your project
to be printed. Although Photoshop isn’t a page layout program as such, some basic layout tasks are
possible. Page layout programs such as QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign are specifically designed
to position multiple images and text for printing on actual pages, whereas layout in Photoshop must
occur within the boundaries of the image itself. Therefore, to lay out a project in Photoshop you
increase the canvas size to give you some maneuvering room and then move layout objects around
within a single document to create the final composition.
In these steps, you will enhance the kitchen project’s sheet layout by adding a logo and a title, plac-
ing a graphic scale bar at the proper size on the sheet, and fading the edges of the project image for
a soft border effect. We’ll open a logo artwork file and add it to the default shape library so that you
can insert the logo in the project as a custom shape.
When you are laying out a project on a sheet, you want the freedom to move the artwork around
in the final composition. The myriad layers that you used to create the project overly complicate the
situation and are no longer relevant to the task at hand. Therefore, it is much easier to simplify by
starting a new file that contains only the composite image of your project.
1. Open the file Kitchen2.psd from the companion CD, or open the project file you completed
earlier in this chapter (see Figure 5.47).
2. Select the Composite layer at the top of the Layers palette and press Ctrl+A to select all. Copy
the entire image to the Clipboard (press Ctrl+C). Next, to create a new image with the same
dimensions as the Clipboard, press Ctrl+N and then press Enter or Return to accept the
defaults in the New dialog box. Finally, press Ctrl+V to paste the image from the Clipboard
into the new document.

3. Close Kitchen2.psd without saving. This saves memory as the project source document is no
longer needed.
4. Increasing the canvas size is the way to add a border around the image, and the background
color is used by default in the Canvas Size dialog box. Click the background color swatch in the
toolbox to open the Color Picker. Select an off-white color with HSB values of 50,10,100. Then,
choose Image Canvas Size to open the Canvas Size dialog box. Check Relative, and set the
measurement drop-downs to inches if they are not already. Type 2 in both Width and Height
text boxes and click OK.

5. Press X to switch the foreground and background colors so that off-white is in the foreground.
Use the Paint Bucket tool to fill off-white into the small spaces surrounding the glazing in the
windows. This makes the windows blend more with the canvas color.
6. Open the file Logo.psd from the companion CD. Figure 5.55 shows this grayscale artwork.