RaghuDesigns - portfolio and blog of Raghu Consbruck

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Typography: Ligature, Loop & Stem Poster

Everything you ever wanted to know about the the actual parts and pieces of a font is on this elegant typography poster from FPO.

Art from Volume 25

I love these sweet and whimsical posters from Volume 25.

Copying and pasting bits of text is even more efficient when you take advantage of all the Paste options InDesign has to offer. Most of the time, when I'm pasting in text, the box or the text area I'm pasting into already has a style applied. I want to make sure the text I'm copying takes on the new style, leaving any previous formatting behind. The following options help keep that formatting in place while pasting text.

When pasting into InDesign from outside of InDesign (email, web, MS Word, etc), make sure your preferences are set up correctly to strip away any extraneous formatting. Under Preferences > Clipboard Handling, check "Text Only" in the "When Pasting Text from Other Applications" box.

When pasting within InDesign, from one text box to another, use Edit > Paste without Formatting (Shift-Cmd-V).

My Work: Graphics.com Contest Entry

I entered the Graphics.com and 123RF.com Design Challenge to design a wine magazine cover.

Going Backwards: Extracting a Jpg Tile from a Photoshop Pattern File

It's pretty easy to go forward in the pattern making process—use Photoshop to define a pattern from an existing graphic. It's a little trickier to extract the original file — convert a Photoshop pattern to jpg.

A lot of the free patterns available online are available in Photoshop pattern (.pat) format, but if you want to use a Photoshop pattern as a website background, you need the original tile in jpg or gif format, not the pattern file. Here's how to get an accurate jpg file from a Photoshop pattern (so you don't have to guess where the seams are, crop, test, crop again, test again):

Open your file in Photoshop. Choose the layer you want to apply the effect to and choose Pattern Overlay. In the Layer Style dialog box, Pattern Overlay, scroll through the patterns to select the pattern you'd like to use. Click on it to select it.

With the thumbnail view still open, hover on the pattern you selected for a while until its tool tip appears. The tool tip will tell you the original file name and pixel dimensions of the original tile! (If there's somewhere else this information is, I'd love to know - this was the only place I could find.) Write down or screen capture the pixel info. In this example the pattern is 250px x 307px. Click OK to to exit the Layer Style dialog box.

Select Image > Canvas Size. Select the top left corner of the canvas (patterns are always applied from the top left corner down) and enter the pixel dimensions from the previous step. Click OK to crop the canvas.

Export the cropped file as a jpg or gif.

Bonus step: If you would like to test your file in Photoshop to be 100% sure the tile was created correctly, make sure the file is flattened, select all (Cmd-A) and select Edit > Define Pattern and save your pattern. Create a new document at a much larger size than your pattern. Then choose Edit > Fill, choose pattern, find your pattern (usually new patterns move to the end of the list) and click OK. The pattern should fill the document seamlessly.

Southern Savers Magnolia

I saw this sweet magnolia web header at SouthernSavers.com. Love the colors and vintage style.

No Coast Craft-o-Rama Poster

Folk art with sophisticated color scheme and a little grunge: poster from No Coast Craft-o-Rama event.

Book Cover Inspiration: Moody and Dark

These covers show the drama and atmosphere that the color black can convey. I love the moody silhouette and type on the branch in the To Kill a Mocking Bird anniversary cover. I like how the colors work together in The Bells cover. Torment's strength is artistic photography and interesting fonts. The over the top gothic swirls and grungy photo make Beautiful Darkness deliciously dark.

Using Photoshop CS5's HDR Toning Adjustment as an Image Correction Tool

There are so many different ways to adjust an image in Photoshop: Curves, Levels, Brightness/Contrast and more. CS5 introduces one more way to adjust images: HDR Toning. HDR toning can be used to create artistic photographic effects but applied at low settings on high contrast images it works to preserve highlight detail while illuminating the shadow detail.

Open your image in Photoshop. Select Image > Adjustment > HDR Toning.

Set the Method to Local Adaption (it may already be set on this setting). Tip: if the saturation default is high, set it to 0 first and then adjust the rest of the settings.

If you want your adjustments to look realistic, keep the settings low and don't make drastic adjustments. For this specific image, I used: Radius 50px, Strength .50, Gamma 1.14, Exposure 0, Detail +30, Shadow, +10, Highlight -20, Vibrance 0, Saturation 0.