(gentle upbeat music)
- [Instructor] Hello, and welcome to this video tutorial
brought to you by TastyTuts.com.
In this tutorial, I will be discussing
how to prepare for your InDesign project,
in particularly, your project files.
When it comes to Adobe InDesign, preparation is the key.
As you will find out later,
a lot can go into an InDesign document.
It is just as important what's going on outside InDesign,
as well as what's going on inside.
This will become very clear later on in the course.
For those who are not familiar with InDesign
and are more familiar with programs
such as Photoshop and Illustrator,
you will come to notice a difference with InDesign.
To put it briefly, when you place an image
into your InDesign document,
it's only going to be representative.
InDesign is a layout program
and not an image manipulation tool.
Now, it is possible to embed images into a composition,
but for this tutorial,
I'm going to demonstrate images as links
that exist outside InDesign.
In this video, I will be talking about
organization of project files.
The more organized you are,
the easier the whole process will be.
So you can concentrate more on being creative
other than worrying where all your source images are.
For this tutorial, we are going to prepare a document
ready for print, so there are some important facts
I need to keep in mind.
For example, any images within the document
will have to be CMYK and not RGB.
This is very important.
Basically, RGB is a format for screens,
digital artwork for websites and video.
CMYK is the format for print.
Your images will also have to be a minimum of 300 dpi
and of a high quality, otherwise your finished print
might not look that professional or clear.
Now, the last thing you want
once you or the client has spent all that money printing
is to have pixelated graphics in your artwork.
So let's get into it.
So I'm about to start the new project.
I have received the brief from the client
as well as the text document and all the necessary images,
which we can see here on the desktop.
You can find these files in the Start folder
in the downloadable project folder for this course.
Link is in the description.
So, the first thing I'm going to do is prepare my files.
So I'm going to create a new working folder
here on my desktop, and I'm going to call this Bike Leaflet.
Inside this new working folder,
I'm going to create a bunch of additional folders.
I'm going to create a folder called Layouts, then Assets,
Resources, Scamp/Design,
Low Res PDF, and High Res PDF.
Now, I have numbered them like this
for the sake of hierarchy,
and this will position them in the correct order
in my project folder.
Next, I'm going to come into my Assets folder,
and I'm going to create some additional folders.
I'm going to start by creating a folder called JPG.
Next,
PSD,
AI,
TIF,
PNG,
and PDF.
Now, I'm creating these folders,
as it will be much easier to manage my image files in future
instead of having all the images all bunched together
in one folder.
Now, I may not use all these file types,
but they are there just in case I find myself
using them in future.
So let's come out of this and back into my main folder.
So now, I have a nice, organized system for me to work in.
You don't need to have these folders in particular.
You may choose to do this in a different way,
but I use this system, and it really works for me.
So what are these folders for?
Well, the Layouts folder is for my InDesign document.
I'm going to save my InDesign document in here.
The Assets folder will be for all the images and graphics
that appear in the InDesign document,
all organized in their specific file types.
The Resources folder will be for any content or files
regarding the document, such as text documents,
briefs, or spreadsheets.
The Scamp/Design folder will be for any scamp drawings
or design research files for my project.
These could be drawings or visuals
that I plan to base my InDesign composition on.
The Low Res PDF folder will be for
when we export a low-resolution PDF,
and this will be used to send over e-mail
to the client for approval and status updates.
Lastly, the High Res PDF folder.
This is where the high-resolution PDF will be placed.
This will be the full-quality PDF
that will be sent to the printers to print.
So, once I have created these folders,
I'm going to take my files from the desktop
and place them in the appropriate folders.
So, I'm going to move the Brief and Leaflet text document
into the Resources folder in my project folder, like so.
Now, looking in the images folder received from the client,
I can see that a lot of these images are JPEGs,
so I'm going to move these into the JPG folder
in my Assets folder, like so.
I have two AI files, so I'm going to move these
into the AI folder in the Assets folder.
Now, I can delete this old Images folder on the desktop,
and now I'm left with the project folder.
So now I know exactly where everything is, and I am happy.
Nice and organized, all in one main project folder.
Now, I could leave this on the desktop
or file this away elsewhere on my computer,
but for the rest of this course,
I am going to leave it here on the desktop.
So now, I'm ready to start my InDesign document,
but before I do that, I just want to focus on my images.
So let's take a look at them.
So the client took some of the images
with his digital camera,
and also purchased some off the internet
from royalty-free image websites.
So as you can imagine, they're all RGB.
Now, we can check this by looking at the information.
One way we can do this is by opening the image
in Photoshop and look at the color profile
under Image, Mode.
So all these images are RGB.
Now, remember what I said earlier,
about images having to be CMYK for print?
Well, now I'm going to have to change every image
from RGB to CMYK.
I could do this later, but since I have all the images,
I'm going to do this now.
So in the next video, I will be demonstrating
how to quickly change a batch of images from RGB to CMYK.
Remember, if you wish to skip this video, you can.
Links are in the description and the PDF worksheet.
See you in the next video.