In the world of page layout features there are the bread-and-butter features such as numbered lists, running headers and footers, multi-placing of images. They’re nice, but the features that get people excited are the bells and whistles of any new version.
InDesign CS3 is ringing church bells, jingle bells, and fire alarm bells, as well as blowing their wolf whistles, train whistles, referee whistles, and even kazoos with the improvements and new features for Effects.
The fun starts in the new Effects panel, your one-stop-shopping for everything to do with Effects that leaves the old Transparency palette in the dust.
First thing you’ll notice is that you can get to all the effects-drop shadows, opacity, feathers, and so on-right from the Effects panel. There’s no more running up to the menu for drop shadows and running back to the panel for blend modes. Of course if you enjoy menu surfing, you can find all the effects under Object>Effects.
InDesign now has a full set of effects that can be applied to objects as a whole or just the strokes, fills, images, or text within an object. This means that it is no longer necessary to separate the text from a frame that has an opaque fill. You can set the fill for a low opacity while keeping the text at full strength. This has been a big request ever since InDesign added opacity to frames.
Adobe has also added new effects and modified some of the older ones. For instance, the Drop Shadow command now has an angle wheel to move the position of the shadow as well as controls for if the shadow is seen or not under opaque objects. (Before you could only control the position by modifying the X and Y coordinates-not exactly intuitive for visual designers.) Similarly, the Basic Feather effect has been improved with a Choke control that lets you harden the edge of the feather.
But those are hardly the big news for Effects. InDesign now has an Inner Shadow effect which creates the appearance of an object punching a hole in its background. (Amazingly, this popular effect has never made it into Illustrator’s Effect>Stylize menu.) It also has a new Bevel and Emboss effect complete with Inner Bevel, Outer Bevel, Emboss, and Pillow Emboss. In fact, with the exception of Gloss Contour and Stroke Emboss, the Bevel and Emboss controls in InDesign are identical to those in Photoshop. (And yes, this is another effect missing from poor Illustrator.)
By the way, did you notice I mentioned the Basic Feather effect? That means that there are two new feather commands. The Gradient Feather allows you to create gradients that fade from a color to transparent. You can have as many opacity points as you want to create ripples of transparency. (Think of the Opacity stops in Photoshop’s Gradient controls.)
But the new effect that meets the most requests is the Directional Feather. For years people have wanted the ability to fade an image to clear. While sneaky ID experts had figured out convoluted workarounds, there really was no easy way to do it. Finally (finally!) those days are over. With the Directional Feather effect, you can fade an image into transparency with ease.
You would think that all this would be enough, but not for the ID engineers. They’ve added two glows: an Inner Glow as well as an Outer Glow. These new glows give you more control than the old trick of using a Drop Shadow as a glow.
Finally, the ID team has added a Satin effect that allows you to create wavy textures. I wish I understood this effect better, but I have never used it in Photoshop, and I doubt I’m going to use it in InDesign.
Finally, just to throw a little more light on the subject, InDesign CS3 now has a Global Light setting. This means that for effects such as shadows and bevels, which give the illusion of light casting highlights and shadows, you can set a Global Light position and altitude. This ensures that all the elements on a page have the same light source. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked at pages where the lighting source seems to come from totally different directions.
With this new set of effects, CS3 has made a lot of noise!
This article was last modified on December 18, 2021
This article was first published on March 29, 2007
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