Wait, You Can Do That In…?

Hello and welcome to the CreativePro podcast, where creative professionals come for tips, insights, and conversations to help you work smarter. I’m Theresa Jackson, Program Manager at CreativePro. I have a really fun episode for you today.

It’s called, Wait, You Can Do That In? No matter how long you’ve been using tools like InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, PowerPoint, and even Microsoft Word, it seems like there’s always another shortcut or hidden feature or some clever workaround waiting to surprise you. Sometimes there’s even those tips that you used to know and then you forgot you know until you’re reminded again. This episode is all about those types of tips.

Mike Rankin, CreativePro Editor-in-Chief, joins me to share some of these great tips that I collected from CreativePro Week speakers. Later in the episode, Marcus Radich from PageProof joins me for a fascinating conversation about how AI is changing the proofing process. If you’re new to CreativePro, welcome! CreativePro is the world’s most trusted resource for design professionals.

Through our membership program, events, tutorials, articles, videos, and community, we help creative professionals like yourself thrive by design. Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any future episodes of the podcast. And if you’d like to learn alongside hundreds of other designers like yourself, join us at CreativePro Week.

This year it’s being held in Nashville and also online, June 29th through July 3rd. The tips in this episode come from the speakers who will be presenting at CreativePro Week. And as a podcast listener, you can save $100 on registration with the promo code podcast.

If you can’t join us in Nashville, no worries. You can still join us online with an at-home pass. With the at-home pass, you can live stream over 50 sessions and download the super valuable speaker handouts.

The handouts are amazing. I review them ahead of time and the amount of information is incredible. You’ll have a full year of on-demand access to the sessions for the days that your pass covers, so you can re-watch any session whenever you want.

You can also save $15 on a CreativePro membership using that same promo code and get access to an extensive library of tutorials, resources, downloads, and more. All right, let’s get into some of those wait you can do that moments. Let’s join Mike Rankin now for that.

Mike, so good to see you. Hey, same. How’s it going? Oh, it’s going really good.

Really good. Getting super excited for CreativePro Week. We have less than a month to go.

How are you feeling? Are you ready or in the last minute just getting it all together? Can you really be ready for CreativePro Week? There’s just so much. It’s like this tidal wave of stuff and people and ideas and content that all comes. You get ready for your own stuff and then I just let the rest of it wash over me and just look forward to it all.

Exactly. When we leave the previous last year’s CreativePro Week, we can’t wait for the next one. We’re like, let’s do it again.

Yeah, I agree. Then we get into the planning stages and that’s a lot of work to put it together. I think it’s important to remember to be present.

I want to be fully present the whole week and not be worrying about everything. It’s going to be awesome. I’m super excited.

We have incredible content from a bunch of different amazing speakers and I had this idea to collect some tips from them and they responded. It was awesome. I emailed speakers and I said, hey, we’re going to do this podcast.

Can you share a tip and try and stump us? Share something that we may not know you can do in whatever tool it is of your choice. We have a bunch of them and I thought we could just go back and forth reading those tips, but I wanted to start with you because you’re doing a session that’s a bit new and different this year and I thought you’d probably have a bit to share to kick off this podcast. Thank you.

I’m very honored to be batting lead off here with the tips. I’m doing two sessions, but one of them is called Adobe and Affinity. It’s not about trying to convince anybody to dump Adobe and switch to Affinity, but are there ways that we can use Affinity software alongside Adobe, almost like as if it were a plugin or extension or just some add on that you can use for specific tasks? When you look at it that way and you can see some of the really cool features that Affinity has really new cutting edge stuff, it just really gets your mind thinking all these really cool ideas.

One of the things that I was going to show in the layout studio, which is sort of equivalent to InDesign for doing page layout and longer documents and stuff, really neat feature with bulleted lists that you can actually specify any image as the bullet character for your bulleted lists with just one click. It’s just in the paragraph panel or in the paragraph styles, you can specify it and there’s just a little button there. You just click, you choose your image and boop, boop, boop.

It’s also automatically sized to match the font size. I was thinking one example, like if you were doing say content for a cafe or coffee shop or something like that, you could have a coffee bean as your bullet or just something really fun. It just opens up lots of these really creative possibilities when it’s so easy to do something like that.

That’s so cool. I’m trying to visualize the panel in InDesign to customize your bullets and it feels like it’s from maybe 1995, something like that. We’ll give them a little more credit.

We’ll say 1999, but yeah, it’s pretty unchanged since then. You can pick a glyph from a specific font. I actually showed as a Three Minutes Max back a few years ago at Creator Pro Week how you can do the same thing, but you have to go through this whole process of making a custom font with the vector images.

You can use raster images, like you can use a JPEG or a PNG or whatever in Affinity. Affinity made it easy. Yes.

So cool. Well, thanks for kicking that off. We’ve got a bunch of tips.

I think we’ve got 15 tips here and a dozen different tools that we’re going to cover, an accessibility tip and some AI tips. Let’s just jump in. I’m going to start off with a tip that came from Melissa about Creative Cloud.

This is super cool. Did you know that you could find your entire Firefly generation history in the Creative Cloud app? No, I did not. I did not.

I did not know that either. I think it’s new. I’ll give us credit for that.

I think it just slid into the Creative Cloud app. If you go to your Creative Cloud app and you go to the files tab, there’s a generation history and you’ll see all your generations with the prompts. So you don’t have to keep track of your prompts.

And bonus, while you’re in there, you can also see everything you’ve licensed with Adobe Stock. That’s really cool. I love the fact that they include the prompt because there’s been times when I would generate something and not save the prompt anywhere and then later be like, wait, how did I get that? What did I tell it to do? So that’s awesome that it does that.

So what do you have for us? So my first one is going to be Amanda Dalton, and she has a PowerPoint tip on how to export video with transparency from PowerPoint. Wait, I didn’t know video could have transparency. Right? I didn’t even know that.

Amanda is that far ahead of us. But yeah, she actually describes it as really easy. I mean, you just go to file export, you choose a movie format, and then you have to choose a specific encoding, which I have to read off of my notes here is Apple ProRes 4444 as the format.

And then there’s a little checkbox you have to say make background transparent. And that’s it. And then you can just save it out as a movie file with transparency.

So really neat from Amanda. That’s a great tip. Think of the things you can use PowerPoint for that we may forget.

Okay, let’s go to Acrobat. Bart is doing Bart Van de Wiele. I missed I did not say that right.

Say his name correctly for me, Mike. I think it’s Wheela. Bart Vandewheela.

Bart Van de Wiele is doing a session on Acrobat, things you didn’t know you could do in Acrobat. And I think you knew this one, because I think you have a recording of this on on YouTube. But I didn’t know this till I saw your recording.

You can use Acrobat to edit an image in Photoshop. Even if you don’t have the source file, you can send it to Photoshop from Acrobat. Now, I tested this out.

And it was a little bit clunky, because Adobe wants us to use Express for everything now. And so I went, you have to go into the edit mode, and then select an image. And then you get this little helpful edit in Express.

And I was like, No, I don’t want to edit and Express. But if you do a right click, you’ll a pop up menu that if you scroll through it, there’s an option to choose edit with I think that’s what it says, edit with and then from there, you can send it to Photoshop and then make your edits in Photoshop and save it. And it automatically updates back in that Acrobat document.

Yep, absolutely. It’s a very familiar kind of workflow, like with InDesign, like edit original or even like, in Photoshop, like editing a smart object or something like that. You just go out, you do your little thing, save it.

And when you come back, it’s updated. That’s a great tip. Super cool.

But you are correct. They, they kind of hide it under under a layer. So like all the cool kids need to remember to right click or in some cases, like option or alt click to find like the really good stuff.

Yeah, don’t give up. I was trying it. I almost gave up and just had to stick with it.

Yeah, it’s there. It’s there. It’s there.

What you got? Alright, so not my next one is, is an Express tip. And it’s by Kyle Hammer. And it’s on using Express to animate your designs really easy, like some of the animation tools, especially if you’re not used to working in motion and graphics can be like super intimidating with timelines and keyframes and like all kinds of crazy stuff.

But with Express, it’s really simple, like they deliberately made it really simple. All you do is like you open your design, you choose like animate and it shows you different options to have things like slide in or up or bounce or fade in and whatever you can pick it all for individual layer or you can do like animate my entire design. And once you decide the one that you want, you can just export it out as an animated GIF or as a movie file.

So it’s a really low barrier entry to starting to work with motion. It’s really cool. You’re telling me that I can put my design and Express and click one button and it’ll be animated for me? Animate all.

That’s incredible. Yeah, right. Yeah, maybe I should give Express a harder look.

I really haven’t. I need to. I think we all say, you know, it never hurts, right? Like you have access to it.

So give it a look-see and see if it can do something that you need. That’s right. We have the tool.

It’s there. We do. All right.

I got a tip from Kevin Stohlmeyer, Firefly Boards. Have you used Firefly Boards, Mike? Only a limited amount. I watched Kevin’s session at the Design and AI Summit and I was just blown away and had that thought, like, I need to use these more.

Yeah, me too. I tried it when it was pretty new and I felt like I fell down rabbit holes and got lost. Because you could do so many different things.

But Kevin really was able to explain how to make it real world. These are ways that you can use this tool to create ideas without falling down rabbit holes. So he’s got a great tip for Firefly Boards that you can do a round trip edit to your other tools from Firefly Boards.

It includes Illustrator, Premiere, Express, or Photoshop. I didn’t know this, but I haven’t used Firefly Boards a lot. So you select the asset, click the ellipsis in the contextual task bar, and then you can open it in one of those apps, do your edits to it.

It creates a cloud doc when you go through this process. After you make your edits and close it and save it, it automatically round trips back to Firefly Boards. There we go.

So we’ve sort of got a theme going here between the Acrobat tip from Bart and now Kevin’s Firefly Boards of just integrating these apps, going out to get a specific thing done, and coming back to your work. So much of our workflow incorporates multiple tools, and that’s a really important… What am I trying to say? At CreativePro, we embrace that. It’s not like go learn everything you need to know about Photoshop and then come over here and learn InDesign.

It’s like, what is your workflow? How do these tools work together? And when you should use this tool versus another one, what’s the best tool to solve the problem that you currently have? Absolutely. And there’s no one-trick ponies anymore. Every designer I know uses all this stuff.

They dip into the programs and… I mean, they might specialize in one thing, but they know they have to use the right tool for the job. Exactly. So I think you’re up.

What do you have? I am up. I think I’m up to Amy Balliett. So I love Amy’s tip.

So she says, to get the most out of AI, pit two LLMs against each other. Age fight with the LLMs? Yeah. It’s like bot on bot crime here.

So in her example, she talks about vibe coding with a tool like Repl.it, and then she’ll take what Repl.it gave her, and then she’ll put it into Gemini and say, hey, Repl.it told me this. Find any errors in it. Is there anything wrong with this? So it’s just getting one AI to tell on another, which is really good because no one of those tools is perfect.

We all know that for anything. I’ve done a similar thing in preparing for my session on scripting InDesign that I’m doing with Erica Gamet. We wanted to generate a list of things that are and are not scriptable in InDesign so that people could know, oh, don’t even bother trying to do this because it’s not a scriptable feature.

And so I asked Gemini about that, but I was like, I don’t really trust Gemini that much. So then I took what Gemini gave me, and I dumped it into Claude and said, check this work. Confirm it.

And they didn’t quite agree. So eventually what I did in the end was I went to a human expert and asked them to weigh in. But as a good first step, I made the AIs check each other’s work, like Amy suggests.

That’s such a great tip because our AIs, they have quite big egos, it feels like. They believe they’re right all the time. They do.

And a lot of times it feels like they’ll tell you what they think you want to hear instead of necessarily what you need to hear. Exactly. Well, this reminds me, Mike, that I had a great conversation.

We’re talking about AI. And I just had a great conversation with Marcus Radich from PageProof. PageProof is going to be at CreativePro Week this year again.

And they have a new AI feature. It’s really incredible. It does the kind of things that I want to use AI for, right? I want AI to proof my stuff.

I don’t want it to create my stuff. So why don’t we take a break and listen to that conversation that I had with Marcus, and then we’ll come back and we’ll finish up our tips. Sound good? Cool.

Marcus, it’s great to see you. Thanks for joining us. Yeah, great to see you too.

Thank you for inviting me on. Of course. I always like chatting with you.

Last time we were together was on design and AI. Yeah, absolutely. That was a great conference.

And we have a lot of team members actually join the conferences. And of course, we’re in New Zealand. So the time zone is really quite interesting.

But people love joining CreativePro conferences. Yeah, that’s a little tough. We run on West Coast time because most of our team’s on the West Coast.

So are you in New Zealand right now? I’m in New Zealand at the moment. I’ve just returned back from San Francisco. So I’ve been been there for a little while.

And so now at the moment, I’m back at headquarters in New Zealand. Well, thanks for joining us with this big time difference. And we’re going to talk about page proof.

You have some new features in page proof. Before we get into that, though, it might be a good idea to tell our audience who you are and what page proof is because we always get some new listeners. So Marcus, I did not say that right.

Can you say your last name for me? Radich? Radich. Radich. Marcus Radich.

Good Croatian name. There you go. Thank you.

I’m sorry for butchering it at first. Marcus is one of the founders of page proof. And he is joining us today to share some new features and some tips for page proof.

Maybe you could start off by just telling us a kind of a high level overview. What is page proof? Why should we care? What do we need to know? Yeah. So we founded page proof, it’s actually 12 years ago.

And it was created in that sort of use case where we were trying to get approvals for our work. I worked in packaging and I worked in retouching for a couple of decades. And we were used to sort of rolling up our proofs into a tube, stick them onto a bicycle courier who would take it across town to the client.

They’d draw on it with a red pen and it would come back and then sit there with this piece of paper and try and translate the changes onto the screen. And we thought to ourselves, there’s got to be a better way. And we talk about using page proof for our customers to take their work from a draft to perfection.

Using page proof to achieve that. So you can just drop your work into page proof, invite your reviewers, and then they can go through and use the tools to leave feedback, there’s versioning, there’s a whole bunch of other tools inside the platform for that. We don’t just do Adobe as well.

That’s probably one of the big things about our platform is that we support Figma, we support Canva, we support of course all the Adobe tools, video production, but going through all of the different media types including PowerPoint presentations and Word and things. So we support all of the creative formats that you would possibly use and they can be sent out for people to just leave feedback on the work. So that’s in a nutshell what we do.

Wow. We all need it. What’s new? What’s the new great features that you know about? Well, we’ve been watching the world when it comes to AI.

And I have a background, part of my computer science degree was in AI, but it was a little bit outdated compared to today’s technology. But look, we have a bit of a link back to that. And one thing is that we’re always taught that AI should have a practical use.

There’s a lot of uses today of AI just rewriting your copy for you and you go, wow, that’s amazing. It’s like, well, actually, the original copy was probably very, very good. It’s just tricking you into feeling like it’s a lot better.

But anyway, we can go for days and days about that. And we’re looking at a lot of generative content that a lot of third parties are providing, things that generate lots of different imagery and videos and things. And for me, that’s not as interesting as actually using AI in a practical sense to help you get your work done.

I believe, and that’s because of my background as a retoucher and working in packaging, I think, for so many years, I believe that the creative piece should be human. You get such amazing results out of a creative human. It’s absolutely something that you just can’t predict.

And the results are incredible generally is what we see. But what we think AI is good at is looking at things and giving us feedback on it and actually saying, hey, look, this might be something you should look at. So what we’ve done is we’ve put that into page proof.

We have looked at the AI features that we could build. And we said, look, let’s actually put something into the product, which is really useful for feedback. Because generally, when you send your creative, right, you’ve designed this piece of work, you send it out to 10 people.

Those 10 people may or may not be enthusiastic about giving you their feedback. I mean, you get various, you know, some people ignore you. Other people send you a whole lot of different things, yet conflicting bits and pieces.

You know, it’s a good process to go through. But, you know, sometimes it’s a lot more hard work on the creative person than it needs to be. So what we’ve introduced is inside of page proof, the ability to turn on page proof intelligence, which we call PI.

David Blatner wrote a book about that. And we say it’s easy as pie. So you literally switch it on, and it will look at the work that you’ve uploaded and give you feedback.

It’ll say, hey, spelling mistake here. This doesn’t read as it should. Maybe think about this.

These colors are not on brand. So you can set up a page proof intelligence agent to actually, and you can tell the agent what your brand colors are, what your fonts are, what all the things, the language and all the things that you want it to check. You can put those into your own agent.

And then when you upload your work, the agent looks at it and says, ah, Pantone 285, you’re not using it. You shouldn’t. You should never have this here.

And that font is not Circular Pro. It’s not your brand font, you know. So it goes through and does those things for you, which it’s extremely good at.

Can I ask a detail? How good is it? Because this is a scenario that’s happened to me a lot. I’m sure it’s happened to a lot of designers. You’ve got a brand color, let’s say it’s a red color.

And when you visually look at your design, it looks like the same red’s been used everywhere. But when you go measure the values, it’s like six different reds. Can it catch that? Absolutely can.

So it will go through and it will say, hey, this color is different than this color. And visually we look at it and we as humans interpret color, but AI interprets the color and the values. Because we can’t see the values, but the computer can see not only the color, also the values that make the color, and see, hey, wait a minute, these are different, and can point that out.

Of course, the treatment of that is up to the designer. The designer then goes, oh, I didn’t see that. And they can do what they need to do.

But the idea is that we’re using the AI to actually show you things which would take you so long to go through. And even if you were motivated to do it, you’d be like, oh, my gosh, six different reds. Yeah, it’s not what we want to do.

We don’t want to spend our time doing that as designers. This is exactly what AI should be used for. Those things that we don’t want to have to do.

Absolutely agree. And that’s what we call practical AI. We really want to have a practical AI that really has a real world application for something that we don’t want to do.

And so when I look at, for example, if I look at all the generative AI products out there, it kind of bothers me. To me, they’re not really practical AI, because they are the things that we want to do. So why are we using AI tools to do the things that we do want to do? AI should be practical, and it should be about doing the things that I generally don’t want to do, like checking a billion colors on a page and seeing if it’s the right one.

Those things are useful. It’s doing the things we may not necessarily be that good at doing. It’s hard to find the colors that are off.

When you start looking at a page for so long, especially if you’re the one who designed it, it’s so hard to see things that are obvious once you see them. And you’re like, how did I not see that? So true. And it’s things like, you know, we’ve got some customers, we’ve got a customer in the UK who are a charity, and they’re using the Patriot Intelligence Agents at the moment.

And it’s really interesting because part of their brand is not having animals in their photography. It’s just a thing, because it’s a very human-focused charity. So they don’t want animals in the photography.

They want things spoken about in a certain way. And they always want the tone to be in a positive manner, never in a negative manner. So the agent has been told these are the things, and it’s incredible.

It’s just, it finds the things for people in the work. And it knows how to read even legal text, because, oh man, last thing in the world, me, I’m not going to sit there and read legal fine print. But the agent will read the legal fine print and make sure that it’s the correct legal fine print for the brand.

And those sorts of things really, really help creatives get their work through faster. Now the idea here is adding the intelligence so that you can get your work reviewed in one or two rounds rather than six. There’s nothing worse than going through six rounds of review to get something done.

If you can do it in two rounds, much better. Yeah. So in this episode, Marcus, I’ve collected a bunch of tips from our CreativePro Week speakers, like things that we probably didn’t know you could do.

And, you know, there’s so many features in our tools, and it’s hard to know all of them. So for our listeners that are already using page proof, what’s a tip that you could give them that maybe they didn’t know that they could do with page proof today? Oh, well, on the topic of AI, the AI features are available on our plans, and most people don’t know that you can go and turn it on. So it’s an opt-in.

Of course, you need to make sure it’s okay with IT and all those sorts of things. But page proof intelligence is off by default. So a tip would be, if you’re allowed to do it, and you’re a team administrator, go into settings, go into an intelligence, switch it on, and then watch the magic.

Watch it help you. The magic is it’s able to give you this feedback and give you all of these insights into your work. Like, for example, if you’re on your dashboard with a lot of different proofs on it, and you’re thinking, oh, I’ve got 40 proofs on my dashboard I need to manage, there’s an intelligence button up there.

You press it, and it actually tells you which proofs you should be looking at now, and that one’s not so important, and it does all that sort of interrogation and extracts the intelligence for you. The other one that’s really, really useful, especially if you work in a corporate design environment, inside of our reporting screen, a pie button, page proof intelligence button pops up in there. So you can do things like, do the report for my proofing for last month, and then you can click the pie button, and it’ll give you insights into your proofing.

And what I mean by insights, these are things you can copy and paste into a report. You know, on average, we close this many proof, you know, rounds, and there were only three rounds needed for this, you know, on average, three reviewers were needed, etc. So it goes through and gives you these insights, which you can literally copy and paste into your monthly report and give to your manager.

And you can do that literally in like three minutes, whereas normally they would take you a day. So that’s the sort of magic that we are putting in there. And you’re coming to Create-A-Pro Week, right? You’re going to share all of this with us, show how it works? Yes, there’s a breakfast session, so Page Proof has a breakfast session for July 1st, right? I’m checking my July 1st breakfast session.

Yeah, and we have a stand there as well. And I’ll be on the stand. So myself and my co-founder are going to be there.

And we love people coming and talking to us. We love showing things because it’s all, for us, it’s about improving the creative workflow. So come and talk to us.

But at Create-A-Pro Week, on stage, through the breakfast session, I will be announcing a brand new Page Proof Intelligence feature, which I think every creative is going to love. Absolutely love. So it’s not generative.

It’s not going to try and replace designers. This is truly going to help designers. And I think it’s a wow moment.

So I look forward to the day and really, really can’t wait to get up on stage and show everybody this new piece of Page Proof Intelligence that we’re releasing. I’m super excited to see that. I know it’ll be amazing.

And I get to see you in person, so that’s going to be awesome too. Yeah, if anyone sees me anywhere, just walk up to me. I’m happy to talk to anyone about anything.

So yeah, absolutely. I love Create-A-Pro Week. A lot of creative people around, and it’s just really, really fun to be there.

It’s the best week of the year. And I think it’s in a great place this year as well, which I’ve never been to Nashville, so looking forward to it. The following weekend is 4th of July, and Nashville says they’re going to have the largest celebration in the country for 4th of July.

So we’ll be in the right spot. Yeah, I think our flights are on the Monday, so we’re actually going to be there for that. We’ll be there too.

All right. Well, see you then. Thank you so much for being here.

Appreciate it. Thank you. Wow.

What do you think, Mike? I think that’s awesome. I love how Marcus really framed the tool as doing this sort of dirty work that creatives don’t want to do and leaving the real creative stuff to the humans. And they also have a fun sense of humor.

I mean, calling it pie and stuff. So I love everything about it. I love that name, pie.

Page-proof intelligence. It’s brilliant. Yeah.

And the insights, I thought, was also super interesting as well, like telling you how many rounds it took to prove something and things to really look at your workflow from a higher level and figure out what’s working, what’s not. I think it’s super useful. I could see it providing really, really useful data for your whole team.

You can start to establish who’s spending time here or there and what they’re spending their time on. Absolutely. That’s brilliant.

Absolutely. It’s like you’re not just proving a document, but your whole workflow. You’re getting insights about your whole workflow.

I think it is exactly what I want to use AI for. Do my proofing. Make me look good.

Don’t create the thing for me. Maybe that’s a simplification, but I love that concept. Okay.

Let’s get back to the tips. We’re about halfway done. We’ve got quite a few more really good ones.

I’ve got a tip from Jose Semidei for Illustrator. He’ll be speaking at CreativePro Week for the first time. Jose was an attendee that became a speaker.

We have a few of those in our group. If you’re one, if you’re an attendee out there and you’re thinking, I’d love to speak. I’m the person to talk to.

Send me an email: th*****@*********ro.com. All right. Jose does these incredible gradient mesh illustrations that look like photographs, and he’s going to show us how to do those, how he creates those at CreativePro Week.

He’s got a great tip. I didn’t know this. Mike, I’m wondering if you did, that you can start a gradient mesh from a radial gradient.

You can just draw a circle, fill it with a radial gradient, and convert it to a gradient mesh. You’re a good way towards where you need to be with your gradient mesh. Then you go around and you edit the different points.

You start with a circle, fill it with a radial gradient, and then go to object, expand. I know I’ve seen this before, and I just passed right by it. In that menu, there’s an option to choose expand gradient to gradient mesh.

Okay. Very cool. That’s a great shortcut.

Rather than starting from scratch, you already got a gradient that you like, the colors. It makes total sense. You got the colors you need.

You just probably have to add a few more points and move around the points that you have. He does say it still takes a lot of patience, but it’s what he loves about creating those illustrations. He’s amazing.

He wrote an article in CreativePro Magazine on his gradient mesh techniques that really walked you through step-by-step all the little details of doing it. He can do magic with that. We’ll link to that in the show notes.

That’s great. I think I’m up. I have a tip from Rob De Winter.

It’s AI related, also Photoshop related. And so now we have the Firefly Image 5 model as one of the Adobe models in Photoshop, and then we also have the Firefly Fill and Expand. And you’re like, okay, why do I have two different Firefly models? Well, it turns out they work quite differently, according to Rob, and he’s going to show examples of this in our Creator Pro Week.

The Fill and Expand sees everything outside. Like if you have a selection, start there. Fill and Expand can see outside the borders of your selection and use that information as part of its fill that it’s generating.

But the new one, the Firefly Image 5, only sees what’s inside the selected area. So you can get different results based on that. So really choosing the right model, again, for the job, right tool for the job is always essential to get the result you want.

I had no idea that. Seriously. I just pick a model willy nilly and cross my fingers.

I hope I get what I want. I don’t think it’s documented anywhere, or certainly at least not anywhere obvious. I don’t think there’s a little tool tip that says, hey, by the way, this model can’t see outside the bounds of your selection.

Wow, that’s awesome. Good to know. Thank you, Rob.

I’ve got a tip from Ben Willmore that’s ACR, Adobe Camera Raw, or Lightroom. Camera Raw and Lightroom work exactly the same. And I was very excited by this tip because I feel like that’s my expertise.

Like I love working in ACR and Lightroom. So I think I need a little setup on this because I don’t know how many of our listeners are very familiar with the masking tools inside. Mike, are you very familiar with the masking tools in Camera Raw? I would not consider myself an expert on those.

No. Okay. So we’ll start with some basics.

That’s not as tip as tips can go to the advanced level. When you create a mask in Camera Raw, it’s like a selection. You’re making a selection that you can apply an edit to.

But when you create it, it’s a container. If you want to add or subtract from that selection, you have to add sub masks inside of the container. So it’s a different way to think than Photoshop.

And it’s clunky because you create the mask and you get your selection and you’re like, well, I want to add more over here. And then you have to click in the container and say add mask and then choose the type of mask you want and then add that. Well, Ben’s tip is how to do that faster with a keyboard shortcut, which is awesome.

He described it in his tip as using the object selection tool, which is my favorite. It works better most of the time than select subject does. You paint over what you want and it selects it.

Um, he said to type shift and to add to that or alt or option and to subtract from it and it automatically adds a sub mask. That’s the same type of mask. But what I found is that the brush tool and the object selection tool automatically creates sub masks, but the gradients don’t.

So this tip really works for a gradient. Let’s say you want to create a gradient in the corner of an image to darken it, but you want the opposite corner to have the same effect applied to it. And you don’t want to create a whole new mask.

You can add a gradient sub mask by just typing shift N and then doing another gradient and it’ll continue to add sub masks. Or maybe you have a radial mask and you want to create like a Pacman type mask where a radial is cut out of a radial, maybe like a moon shape, create the radial mask, hit option N and it’ll create a subtract sub mask. So you can quickly build these masks up with keyboard shortcuts.

That was probably way, made it sound way too complicated. But once you start using it, you’ll be like, wow, this is saving me a ton of time. I think, yeah, it is like it’s, you have to use your imagination a lot, but I think the main thing boils down to is like shift N to add and alt option N to subtract.

Yeah. Thank you for summarizing that. That was good.

Yeah, no, no, it’s a great, it’s a, and Ben’s amazing. So yeah, that’s awesome. I have one from my partner in crime, Erica Gamet.

She has a tip about using GREP and it’s sort of, it’s not necessarily a technical tip. Like, you know, she doesn’t mention a specific GREP code or anything super nerdy like that, but it’s more like an approach to GREP that I find to be like really helpful because especially if you’re just getting started writing GREP expressions in design, it can be very difficult and very frustrating. And especially if you’re trying to do something kind of complicated.

And Erica’s tip is just that your GREP expressions don’t have to be exactly perfect. Like if you write an expression that just gets you close to the result of selecting the text that you need, when you’re, say we’re doing a GREP find change or like that, just get yourself in the neighborhood. You’ve still saved a lot of time as opposed to just, you know, trying to go through a document manually.

It’s still a great thing. What I also do sometimes when I’m trying to write GREP expressions and I don’t know how to write a really complex one is I’ll write several short ones that do the job in like two or three or four steps rather than trying to write like Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony of GREP expressions that will do everything perfectly on the first try. Like just do it in little chunks.

Great method for learning GREP. Absolutely. Keep it simple.

You know, keep your scope kind of narrow and just try to move the thing forward. I love that. It makes it feel very doable for me.

It is. And you know, once you have some success with that, then sure, then you move on to more complex expressions. But it’s a good way to work, I think.

Yeah, it’s very encouraging to hear you don’t have to be perfect for it to be helpful. Right. I’ve got a great tip from Dax Castro for accessibility in InDesign.

Super easy, but it wasn’t obvious to me at all. So, I’m wondering if you knew this as well, Mike. There is an alt text dialog box in InDesign.

I did know that. You can apply alt text to individual images. But you don’t have to close out of that dialog box.

You just leave it open in your workspace. And every time you select an image, it will the dialog box will repopulate for that image. And when you switch to the next image, it automatically saves the alt text you just wrote.

So, you could go through all your images really fast that way. Wow. I did not know that.

That’s very cool. Doesn’t surprise me that Dax would know that, though. It’s a simple thing.

But it makes a huge difference when you’re in the middle of a big project. Oh, yeah. If you’re doing that and you have like 50 images to go through, you’re going to be like, open, close, open, close, open, close.

Yeah. Excellent. They did it right.

For the next tip. So, we stay in InDesign. And this one is from the amazing Lori Ruhlin.

And it’s about applying parent pages to document pages. And there’s several different ways that you can do this. You know, you can drag and drop in the pages panel from the masters or parent pages area down into the document pages.

But Lori’s tip is about using the option or alt key. So, you can select the pages that you want to affect down in the document pages area of the pages panel. You can shift click them.

Or you can option alt click them to select them. And rather, sorry. Let me try that again.

You can shift select them. Or you can hold command control to select noncontiguous ones. Yeah.

And then you go up to the parent pages area. And then you hold the option alt key. And then you click on that.

And that will apply that parent page to all the document pages you had selected. So, really efficient tip from Lori. Yeah.

That would really speed things up. I didn’t know you could do that. I’m sure you did.

I did. But Lori is the absolute queen of InDesign efficiency. And if there’s a tip that makes it easier to do long document stuff, she knows it.

I always go to her sessions and leave with my brain full and then I forget half of what I learned the next time I need to use it. Well, that’s why you can go back and watch the recordings. That’s right.

That’s right. I’ve got one last tip here. I love this.

It’s from Jen Parkinson. And it’s a Microsoft Word tip. We are having Jen’s bringing Microsoft Word sessions to Create a Pro Week for the first time.

And I’m so excited by that. Because we all you know, we all find ourselves in Microsoft Word, like scratching our heads going, how do I do the thing that I want to do? So, Microsoft Word has layers. Did you know that? No.

What do you mean? It’s Microsoft. So, it doesn’t call it layers. But it is truly layers.

It’s the same thing that PowerPoint has, which I knew about, which is a selection pane. So, selection pane is really layers. It shows all your content on the page stacked.

So, you can select things that are hidden under things. You can shift things around in their stacking order. So, you go to the layout tab and then on the ribbon, you’ll see the button for the selection pane and the selection pane will open up on the right hand side like a layers panel.

Unbelievable. That you just blew my mind. That’s going to change how I work in Word.

Exactly. Me too. Wow.

That’s amazing. All right. So, I have the last one.

Mike Parkinson. Wait, by the way, this is another first. Yeah.

Mike and Jen are married. This is our first married speakers that we’ve had at CreativePro Week. I know.

How cool is that? How fitting that we’re ending with the two of them. Right. Imagine the conversations they have at home.

They’ll be like, did you know you could do this in PowerPoint? Do you know you could do that in Word? Anyway, the tip from Mike Parkinson is for creating outlined text in PowerPoint, which normally it doesn’t seem like you could do. But his technique is you create your text box, type out your text. You create just another shape, like a rectangle.

That’s bigger than the text. Shift select. So, you got them both selected.

Then you go to shape format, merge shapes, and choose the subtract option. So, it’s sort of like the Pathfinder commands in the Adobe apps. So, you’re just like punching a hole out of the rectangle with the text.

But the twist is, unlike in the Adobe apps with the Pathfinder stuff, where you would have the text directly on top of the rectangle, they have to be separate. So, the text is over here. The rectangle is over there.

And then when you choose subtract, it’s just like the rectangle goes away. And then you just have outlined text remaining. I’m sorry, Microsoft.

That doesn’t make any sense. This is why it drives us crazy. It doesn’t.

The first time I tried it, everything just disappeared. And I was like, okay, obviously I’m doing something wrong because I know Mike knows his stuff. But then I got it right.

That’s one of those tips that I didn’t know until I saw Mike present it at an event. And then I forgot I knew it. And then when I wanted to use it, I couldn’t remember how to do it.

Right. Were you trying to do it the Adobe way? Like having them on top of each other kind of thing? Right. Right.

Of course. Wow. My brain is full, Mike.

And this isn’t even like the tip of the tip of the tip of the iceberg. We barely scratched the surface. I think that was 15 tips plus the page proof intelligence.

11 different tools, some accessibility, some AI, and we just scratched the surface of what you’ll see at CreativePro Week. Really hope everybody can join us. If you can’t come in person, CreativePro Week, we’re getting to the point where it’s probably pretty challenging to get your travel plans because they’ll be in Nashville this year.

But you can get an online pass and join us virtually. We would love to have you there. Absolutely.

Join the fun. I’m sorry, what? I was just going to say that just going through these tips, it just reminds me what amazing speakers that we have. And you just never know what you’re going to learn.

Could be life changing tip. Life changing. Definitely a workflow changing tip or many of them.

Well, I’m excited to see you in person, Mike. Same. Yeah, it’s going to be awesome.

I’m excited to see all these people that usually just live on my screen. An actual human being. Yeah, exactly.

All right. Well, we’ll see you in Nashville soon. Thanks for being here and sharing these tips with me.

It was awesome. So much fun. Let’s do it again.

We will. All right. Bye.

Bye.