[whatever7]

Hi gurus, first post in this group. Just have a small question for your professionals.

Recently somebody ask me to do a big head shot with the title "Black Hair Style" or whatever slightly cover by the hair. I ended doing everything in Photoshop.

My question is, how do you do it in Quark, So I can have editable Title? The only way I come up with now is to make a headshot with transparent surrounding in Photoshop, and export it to TIFF, keep and tranparency. Open it with Quark, and set the "clipping" wih "alpha channels."

I wonder if this is the professional way to do it. How do the pros do it in one of those women magazines? Is embedded path in a EPS better? Where do I control the "feathering" of the vector path? I use extract in Photoshop to knock out the background, what do you use btw?

Thanks in advanced!

-tino
name0000_nospam@yahoo.com

[arrested502]

There's a couple of ways to maintain the transparency. For what you're doing you've probably stumbled across one of the better ways to achieve the desired effect. Although this method can be a little tricky also. Now if it was simple a black and white image you could keep it in greyscale format and make it a greyscale tiff, or even a bitmap. This will also keep the transparency. Best case scenario is if the image was an Illustrator EPS, that will also keep the transparency. Sometimes Quark isn't the best format. You could keep the text editable in Photoshop 6 or higher and just keep a layerred version of your file for editing later on. Do as much as you can in Quark, then simply do the trickier stuff in Photoshop and import it as an image.

[lland]

You can do a cut-out using 'paths' in Photoshop save only the cut-out part - that overlaps the text - as an EPS file.

Then call it into a new picture box on top of the text. Then reduce the original picture box to the square up size of the picture. Both boxes should now overlap.

Saving as a tiff I don't recommend as this can cause problems at repro.

[bluedog]

with fine hair details for a convincing effects Photoshop is the way to go.

[suhail]

Quark's clipping is solid, there is no way to get a feathered clippings like in InDesign.

So the "professional" way in Quark is the manual PhotoShop Clipping Path. Do not use the Alpha feature in Quark, it will just throw a clumzy path around the Alpha.

The professional Magazine way, is either InDesign for the Covers or, as bluedog said, PhotoShop and save your file as PhotoShop EPS which keeps the sharp vector text and feathers the blends using the Alpha.

[bluedog]

Quark's clipping and compositing features are getting a little 'long in the tooth' and need some updating.

InDesign does a good job of masking features.

The clipping path options (creating a path in photoshop and defining it to be the mask in quark will work) provide only for the sharp masking lines of a postscript line.

For details like hair it would be nearly impossible to make a natural mask of the hair using clipping paths. Hence using photoshop to do so is the viable current option while you use Quark.

Its also fairly easy to accomplish in Photoshop and I don't have enough experience in InDesign to know how its effect would result. In reality you could still use the Photoshop masking options with text and place that graphic in InDesign in the same way it is necessary in Quark if you want the realistic soft masking.

Good luck.