Placing Photoshop Images in Other Programs

Either your Photoshop images will be "standalone" works of art, or they will be incorporated into some other kind of project. Perhaps you edit a newsletter, or you do Flash movies or PowerPoint presentations. Maybe you've done a pile of product shots to go into a catalog. The question is, how do you move them from Photoshop into some other application? It's not difficult. The other programs do the importing. You simply need to save your images in a compatible format, and in a folder that you can easily keep track of.

Compatible formats for anything ending up as printed matter would depend on whether the final product is being printed on a Postscript or non-Postscript printer. To print on a Postscript printer, save the file as a PDF, DCS, or EPS. For non-Postscript printers, use TIFF when you place the picture into another file.

Using Photoshop with PowerPoint

PowerPoint supports most graphics formats, but GIF (for line art such as logos, charts , and graphs) and JPEG (for photos) are the most compact and best suited for screen display. How you insert the picture depends on whether you're using a preformatted page or making one up as you go along. You can select a slide layout (see Figure 23.10), and then choose the picture to go into it, as in Figure 23.11.

Figure 23.10. The PowerPoint New Slide dialog box.

Figure 23.11. Locate the picture you want to use and click Insert.

You also have the option of starting with a blank slide and placing your photo on it. To do this, you use the same dialog box as in Figure 23.11.

Using Photoshop with a Word Processor or DTP Program

The process of adding pictures to desktop publishing documents is a little bit different. Rather than inserting the images into the program you create, you link to them from the master document you assemble in the DTP or word processor. This means that, in order to keep your pictures where they belong, you can't move or rename any image once it's been placed. If you do, you break the link, and then you have to find it and restore it again. If I'm creating something like a newsletter or ad that might have several images in it, I keep them all in one folder, and make sure that the folder goes to the print shop along with the InDesign or Word files.

To insert a picture in a Microsoft Word document, choose Picture from the Insert menu (as shown in Figure 23.12) and navigate to the picture you want to use. It opens in a box that you can move or resize as needed.

Figure 23.12. WordPerfect and other word processors have a similar menu.

Typically, in a desktop publishing program like Adobe InDesign, the command to insert a picture is Place and it's found on the File menu. Other than that, the procedure is much the same. Navigate to the image you want to use, and (in InDesign) click the page to place it. In QuarkXPress, you'll need to draw a box to contain the picture first, but that's the only real difference. Once the picture is on the page you can scale it, move it, and wrap type around it.