InEffects 1.0 for InDesign CS: An Electric Screwdriver

If you already owned a complete set of manual screwdrivers, would you buy an electric with just the basic flat and Philips heads?

A Lowly Apprentice Productions (ALAP) just released the long-awaited InEffects 1.0 for InDesign 2 and CS.

I first tin­kered with InEffects last sum­mer and fall in ear­ly beta. I bare­ly got a chance to glance at it, though, as I was far too occu­pied test­ing what would be called InDesign CS and InDesign PageMaker Edition. Now, I was very excit­ed to open up the full ship­ping ver­sion in InDesign 3.01.

Since InEffects is essen­tial­ly an assort­ment of indi­vid­ual effects, I’ll exam­ine them indi­vid­u­al­ly before look­ing at them as a whole.

Drop Shadow

InDesign CS has a very nice drop shad­ow func­tion out-of-the-box, so why do you need InEffects’ Drop Shadow?

The good:

InEffects’ ver­sion is eas­i­er to use and more famil­iar to design­ers than InDesign’s, and it gives you more con­trol over the appear­ance of the shad­ow. In fact, the InEffects ver­sion of Drop Shadow is more Adobe-ized than InDesign’s own native Drop Shadow dialog.

Like all the InEffects effects, Drop Shadow enables live pre­view­ing of the changes to the effect(s). More like Photoshop’s Drop Shadow, InEffects includes inter­ac­tive slid­ers for blend trans­paren­cy, blur, inten­si­ty of shad­ow, noise, and dis­tance of the shad­ow from the object cast­ing it. Distance and angle are more nat­ur­al ways of defin­ing a drop shad­ow than InDesign’s native method of spec­i­fy­ing X and Y off­set in absolute measurement.

Unlike InDesign’s Drop Shadow, InEffects’ includes inten­si­ty and noise options. Both are defin­able via an inter­ac­tive slid­er, a drop-down list of typ­i­cal per­cent­ages (e.g. 0%, 10%, 20%, and so on), or by entry of an arbi­trary per­cent­age accu­rate to one hun­dredth of a per­cent (e.g. 5.25%).

Sliders. Adobe knows very well that slid­ers in a live pre­view effect are essen­tial UI fea­tures for visu­al exper­i­men­ta­tion. The slid­ers are there in Photoshop and Illustrator. So, why are they miss­ing from InDesign’s Drop Shadow dia­log? InDesign forces the user to type in new val­ues or use the OPTION+Up Arrow/Down Arrow (ALT+Up Arrow/Down Arrow) short­cut to adjust off­set coor­di­nates and blur in whole pica units. InEffects has slid­ers, mak­ing it easy to adjust dis­tance, blur, and all the oth­er angles in small or large incre­ments with the touch of a mouse.

InEffects’ Drop Shadow can be com­bined with InDesign’s Drop Shadow, thus cre­at­ing two sep­a­rate shad­ows (and light sources) for a sin­gle object.

The bad:

The one thing—and it’s a big thing—that InDesign’s native Drop Shadow has over InEffects’ is ease of use when spec­i­fy­ing the col­or of the drop shad­ow. InEffects makes exper­i­men­ta­tion with blend trans­paren­cy, blur, inten­si­ty, noise, col­or per­cent­age, dis­tance, and angle very easy, but ALAP dropped the ball on col­or choice.

The col­or of the drop shad­ow has to be pre­de­ter­mined before open­ing the InEffects dia­log. On the Drop Shadow prop­er­ties page the shad­ow col­or can be cho­sen, but only from col­ors already in the document’s Swatches palette. InDesign’s Drop Shadow dia­log defaults to col­or choic­es from the Swatches palette, but a sim­ply click on the Color drop-down box gives instant access to mix­ers for RGB, CMYK, and LAB.

To play around with the col­or of your drop shad­ow, you’d have to do it first in InDesign’s Drop Shadow dia­log, can­cel, recre­ate the col­or on the Color palette, add that to your Swatches palette, then go into InEffects to assign the col­or to an InEffects-generated drop shad­ow. In my book this is a big time waster in what would oth­er­wise be a tremen­dous improve­ment over InDesign’s imple­men­ta­tion of drop shadows.

InEffects also doesn’t sup­port gra­di­ent swatch­es, even if they are on the Swatches palette.

Inner Shadow

The good:

Again close­ly mim­ic­k­ing Photoshop’s func­tion­al­i­ty, InEffects’ inner shad­ow has options for blend space, trans­paren­cy, blur, inten­si­ty, noise, col­or, col­or tint per­cent­age, dis­tance, and angle. The con­trols and effect exact­ly the same as Drop Shadow; Inner Shadow sim­ply places the shad­ow inside the object or text rather than out­side it.

The bad:

It suf­fers from the same lack of cus­tom col­or def­i­n­i­tion as Drop Shadow. The col­or of the inner shad­ow must cho­sen from the Swatches palette or defined pri­or to using InEffects.

Outer Glow

The good:

The glow is nice and smooth, even when the InEffects affect­ed object lays atop mul­ti­ple objects.

The bad:

The col­or lim­i­ta­tion again.

Inner Glow

The good:

Like Outer Glow, Inner Glow has typ­i­cal Adobe UI ele­ments to adjust blend space and trans­paren­cy, blur, inten­si­ty, noise, col­or, and col­or tint per­cent­age. As you would expect of an inner glow, InEffects’ also includes options to switch the glow source between cen­ter and edge.

The bad:

Color choice. Again, only sol­id col­ors may be cho­sen; no gradients.

Bevel and Emboss

The good:

The excel­lent selec­tion of Bevel and Emboss options begin with choic­es tak­en straight from Photoshop: Outer Bevel, Inner Bevel, Emboss, and Pillow Emboss. From there every­thing you’d expect to see options is avail­able: Highlight blend space, blend space trans­paren­cy, col­or, and col­or tint per­cent­age; shad­ow blend space and trans­paren­cy, col­or and trans­paren­cy; over­all effect blur, depth per­cent­age, choice of up or down bevels, and bevel/emboss angle.

The bad:

Color choic­es are lim­it­ed to exist­ing Swatches palette (I should have cre­at­ed a text macro to enter that for me each time).

No gra­di­ent sup­port (for this one too).

Depth and Blur work in a funky way. The InEffects man­u­al defines the con­trols thus­ly: Blur: “To cre­ate soft­er, fuzzi­er edges for the bevel/emboss effect, enter a pix­el val­ue in the field, choose from the avail­able options in the menu, or drag the slid­er. Higher val­ues increase the blur.” Depth: “To spec­i­fy the depth of the pat­tern as a ratio of the size of the page object(s), enter a per­cent val­ue in the field or drag the slider.”

In prac­ti­cal appli­ca­tion, these are con­fus­ing. Blur defines the visu­al depth of the bev­el while depth con­trols how sharp or soft the edges and tran­si­tions between light and dark become.

With an out­er bev­el, the bev­el is semi-transparent. Where there would nor­mal­ly be the native object col­or is trans­paren­cy. This is actu­al­ly the cor­rect way to imple­ment it, but it could be a gotcha when fran­ti­cal­ly work­ing at 3AM on an 8AM deadline.

InEffects’ Inner Bevel doesn’t han­dle cor­ner effects well—neither do the rest of the bev­el and emboss styles. As you can see in this image, I cre­at­ed a six-sided poly­gon and used InDesign’s Corner Effects to cre­ate a styl­ized inset. While InEffects’ Drop Shadow rec­og­nized the Corner Effects set­ting and cre­at­ed a match­ing shad­ow, Inner Bevel col­ored out­side the lines. The same thing hap­pens with any object to which Corner Effects have been applied.

On text and on objects with­out Corner Effects applied, Bevel and Emboss can cre­ate clean, usable emboss­ing and beveling.

The Overall Package

Effects can be combined—beveled, glowed, drop shadowed.

Effects don’t scale with objects; they have to be rede­fined. This is a sig­nif­i­cant draw back to the pack­age, though it can be (most­ly) worked around with a lit­tle pre-planning of object size and placement.

InEffects Styles Palette

As you would expect, the InEffects Styles palette allows InEffects effects to be reused. It works just like the Paragraph Styles palette with a list of styles and New Style and Delete Style but­tons. After apply­ing InEffects effects you might like to keep, sim­ply click on the affect­ed object and click the New Style but­ton on the InEffects Styles palette. Styles can be applied, edit­ed, rede­fined, and shared through the Load InEffects Styles option on the fly­out menu.

I was able to place the palette among my oth­er (mil­lion and a half) InDesign palettes and even docked and stacked with native InDesign palettes.

On my Windows com­put­er I use a cur­sor styling app, CursorXP, with which InDesign itself has minor issues. When I tried to dock the InEffects Styles palette it failed, but it was because of the con­flict between CursorXP and InDesign. Turning off CursorXP instant­ly allowed me to com­bine the InEffects Styles palette with InDesign’s Swatches palette, and even to dock it (alone or com­bined) to InDesign CS’s palette sidedock.

On both OS X and Windows XP the palette docks and acts just like any native InDesign palette.

Thus, my only tech­ni­cal imple­men­ta­tion issue with InEffects has been resolved.]

User Interface

The inter­face will instant­ly be famil­iar to any user of InDesign—or Photoshop or Illustrator, for that mat­ter. All five effects tools are brought togeth­er in a sin­gle InEffects dia­log, just like Photoshop’s Layers Effects dia­log. Each of the effects can be turned on or off with a sim­ple check­box, and each has its own prop­er­ties page. Familiar Adobe UI ele­ments are faith­ful­ly recre­at­ed in InEffects: Drop-down box­es for select­ing style options and pre­sets like trans­paren­cy blend space; com­bi­na­tion drop-down lists and entry box­es for per­cent­age and size options, with slid­ers back­ing them up, giv­ing the user three ways to chang­ing the minu­tia of effects, and; dials for adjust­ing angles such as the degree of Drop Shadow’s cast. The InEffects Styles palette mir­rors any oth­er InDesign palette in appear­ance and func­tion­al­i­ty. If you didn’t know InEffects was an add-on, you’d nev­er know it wasn’t put in there by Adobe.

If you’re famil­iar with Photoshop’s Layer Effects, you’ll have at most a two point five minute learn­ing curve to become pro­duc­tive in InEffects. Of course, if you know ALAP, seam­less inte­gra­tion and facile learn­ing of its prod­ucts is no surprise.

Again, like Photoshop, mul­ti­ple effects can be applied simul­ta­ne­ous­ly. In one dia­log flat text can be embossed, made to look almost tubu­lar with an inner glow, and cast a drop shad­ow. And effects can eas­i­ly be turned on or off and exper­i­ment­ed with live with­out affect­ing the oth­er effects.

Compatibility

I test­ed InEffects 1.0 in InDesign CS 3.01 on Windows XP SP1 with­out a sin­gle tech­ni­cal issue. It auto­mat­i­cal­ly installed itself in my InDesign plu­g­ins fold­er, and, when I launched InDesign, InEffects was inte­grat­ed into the Object and context-sensitive menus. The InEffects Styles palette appeared instantly.

If you’ve used Quark or InDesign for any length of time in a work­flow intend­ed for press, you’ve at least heard of errors caused by miss­ing plu­g­ins. Prepress shops in par­tic­u­lar are inti­mate­ly famil­iar with this issue. It occurs in lay­out appli­ca­tions, usu­al­ly Quark or InDesign, when the design­er has made use of a document-critical plu­g­in to pro­vide addi­tion­al func­tion­al­i­ty (for exam­ple, to increase the size of the paste­board beyond Quark’s nor­mal lim­its), then sent the doc­u­ment for editing/printing to some­one who doesn’t have the plu­g­in. The typ­i­cal result is that the recip­i­ent receives the error and his copy of the lay­out appli­ca­tion is unable to open the doc­u­ment. It’s then up to the recip­i­ent to buy a copy of the plu­g­in just to work with the one doc­u­ment. This is pret­ty com­mon, and it wastes a lot of time and money.

In a stroke of genius ALAP has elim­i­nat­ed the need for every­one in a pro­duc­tion work­flow to have InEffects installed. Prepressmen rejoice! You needn’t buy InEffects just to send an InDesign doc­u­ment to RIP. All you must have installed is the free InEffects Viewer plu­g­in. InEffects Viewer, a friend­ly ALAP tech sup­port rep named Mike eager­ly informed me, allows any­one with InDesign (2, CS, or PE) to open an INDD doc­u­ment that makes use of InEffects effects.

The InEffects Viewer plu­g­in for Windows or Mac is avail­able for down­load free of charge from ALAP’s site.

Utility

In a pro­duc­tion work­flow, even if the InDesign lay­out artist is also the one who cre­ates styl­ized head­lines in Illustrator or embossed shapes in Photoshop, round-tripping from InDesign can rep­re­sent a sig­nif­i­cant amount of time cumulatively.

Here’s one com­mon sce­nario: Working on an ad in InDesign, a Scott decides to bev­el a head­line. He jots down the specifics: Font, style, size, kern­ing val­ue, hor­i­zon­tal width, ver­ti­cal height, col­or, and OpenType options used. Scott fires up Illustrator, recre­ates the head­line with the specs from InDesign. Then he uses Illustrator CS’s new 3D effects to apply and tweak a sim­ple bev­el. he saves the AI file. Switching back to InDesign, Scott places the AI file and tests it out in con­text on his design. The light­ing angle con­flicts with the angle in the back­ground image. This won’t do. So, Scott gauges the approx­i­mate angle and inten­si­ty of the light­ing in the image, goes back to Illustrator, and reopens the AI. He brings up Illustrator’s Bevel & Extrude dia­log again and tweaks the light­ing to match his InDesign back­ground image. Saving the file, he returns to InDesign, whose Links palette informs him that the AI has been updat­ed. Scott clicks on the item in the Links palette and hits the Update Link but­ton. Now he can see that the beveled text has a light source match­ing the back­ground image, but in con­text he real­izes the black on the shad­ow bevels is a lit­tle too cool to fit with the dark areas in the back­ground image. Scott will need to warm it up with anoth­er roundtrip to Illustrator. He repeats this process sev­er­al times, to tweak var­i­ous ele­ments of the head­line, before final­ly get­ting it right.

Here’s the same sce­nario with InEffects: Working on a sim­i­lar lay­out, Chloe also decides to bev­el her head­line. She sets her type and, with the Object Select tool, right-clicks on the headline’s text frame. From the con­text menu she choos­es InEffects. On the Bevel and Emboss prop­er­ty page she sets her bev­el options and turns on the Preview check­box. She sees that her light­ing source doesn’t match the back­ground image, so she adjusts it live until it match­es per­fect­ly. Like Scott, Chloe notices that her bevel’s shad­ow col­or is too cool a black for the lay­out. She applies effect, clos­ing out of InEffects. Selecting the eye­drop­per tool, she OPTION+Clicks (ALT+Clicks) in a black area of the back­ground image, load­ing the col­or into InDesign’s Color palette. On the Swatches palette she clicks the New Swatch but­ton. With the head­line still select­ed, she choos­es InEffects from the Object menu and goes to the Bevel and Emboss prop­er­ties page. There Chloe selects her new warm black swatch from the shad­ow col­or drop-down. Instantly her beveled head­line match­es the back­ground image. Like Scott, Chloe has to per­form a few more tweaks to get the head­line just right, but it takes her much less time because she can see her changes live, from with­in InDesign, and with­out save, switch, and update link steps.

If the copy­writer changes the head­line, who will be able to do it faster, Scott or Chloe?

All of these effects can be applied in Photoshop and Illustrator to objects that are then placed in InDesign. Within Photoshop and Illustrator there is more con­trol and a greater num­ber of effects, but you don’t always need more con­trol and more effects. If you need gra­di­ent over­lays and tex­tured bevels, do the work in Photoshop. If you need to rotate a beveled object in three-dimensional space or apply decals to var­i­ous faces of a beveled object, then you’ll need to do it in Illustrator CS. But, if you only need a good qual­i­ty drop shad­ow, a glow, or sim­ple bevel­ing, then why deal with yet one more placed object and a trip out to Photoshop? Do it inside InDesign, with native, ful­ly editable objects and text, with InEffects.

Value

Contrary to its name, InEffects’ val­ue isn’t in its effects. Most cre­atives already have all the InEffects effects (and more) tucked into Photoshop and Illustrator. The real val­ue in InEffects is in reduc­ing the reliance on Photoshop and Illustrator for a lay­out artist’s sim­ple and com­mon cre­ative tasks. InEffects is a time-saver, a pro­duc­tion tool. If Adobe hadn’t already used the name InProduction, I think ALAP would have con­sid­ered it for this time-saving suite of com­mon effects.

If you already owned a com­plete set of man­u­al screw­drivers, would you buy an elec­tric with just the basic flat and Philips heads? You would if you want­ed to spend less time dri­ving the screws you most often use.

Speaking of screw­ing… InEffects 1.0 for InDesign 2, CS, and CS PE, is $99 USD. Despite the flaws and minor incon­ve­niences of this high­ly con­ve­nient plu­g­in, InEffects is well worth the pock­et change. I’ll cer­tain­ly be adding it to my tool belt.

Wish List for InEffects 2.0

• Add a scale shad­ow fea­ture to Drop Shadow so that shad­ows at a greater dis­tance could be reduced in size, as if cast on sur­faces not direct­ly behind the text/object shadowed
• Perspective shad­ow­ing
• Support gra­di­ent swatches
• Allow mix­ing of col­ors with­in InEffects
• Option to apply effect to strokes and fills separately
• Separate spread and size slid­ers for glows, ala Photoshop
• Make it clear in the InEffects Styles palette UI how a user can save InEffects Styles
• Never get rid of InEffects Viewer