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A clipping path gives you the ability to mask off regions of an image so that you can bring them into a desktop uh publishing application such as Adobe Indesign. Now what we are gonna do here is I'm going to use this picture that I took from uh a, a vacation in Washington, D.C. I'm gonna draw with my polygon lasso a very rough selection around this arch and the statues contained within it. And then I'm gonna make a, a path called a clipping path so that only this part of the image will be seen when I bring this into Adobe Indesign. So once again I can use any other, other tools to get a nice smooth path but just for the sake of efficiency and for instruction I'm gonna go really fast and just grab as much as I can just to show you what this tool can do for you. It's a very cool feature. So I have my, my path here, I'm gonna go to my paths panel and as you see here I'm gonna click on this arrow and I'm gonna choose make work path. And normally by default its set at two point oh which gives you a pretty loose path. I wanna make sure I have a nice tight path so I can enter a one for example or I can enter a point five as I had before so I'll click OK and you see we get a preview as to what the paths gonna look like. To save this just click and drag it on top of this icon here and now it's renamed for you. So its path one and now what I wanna do is, is I wanna go to the list again and I wanna choose to make this a clipping path and if I had more than one path to choose from I would choose it from this list and I'm gonna say OK. Now this file is ready all I have to do at this point is save it as an EPS. An EPS is simply an encapsulated post script file. So I'm gonna save it to my desktop and I'm gonna call it arch and I'm gonna choose from the format list Photoshop EPS. I'll quick save and I'll leave everything at the defaults and now this file is ready to go to Adobe Indesign so I'm gonna drop on over to In Design and as you see in this file I have a layer already set up. I put this color background here just to show you that the clipping path really will hide the rest of that image. So now I'm going to go to my file menu and I'm gonna choose place. On my desktop here's the file arch dot eps, I'll click open and then I get a little preview as to what its going to look like when I finish drawing my selection so I'm going to just draw out where I want to place this file so I'll just make it a gigantic selection and then I'm going to right click or control click inside of this document and I'm gonna choose my fitting options I'm gonna choose fit content to frame and there is the arch. Now it's a little jaggedy as I mentioned before I didn't take my time and do a nice job. I could also play around with those settings like make it point five and that kind of thing to make the tolerance a little bit better a little bit cleaner but as you see the file has been brought in the rest of the image is hidden and with this layer behind it you can see that I actually was able to hide this and just bring in the clipping path. So once again use a clipping path whenever you want to bring your Photoshop documents into something like Indesign and you really just wanna show a portion of the entire image and you don't wanna bring everything in. It's a really handy feature and it could really bring some new design ideas to your desktop publishing applications.
| Course: | Adobe Photoshop CS3 |
| Author: | Dwayne Ferguson |
| SKU: | 33782 |
| ISBN: | 1-933736-98-4 |
| Release Date: | 2007-08-02 |
| Duration: | 9 hrs / 161 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |