It’s OK to Design in Photoshop™

Many artists are now adding text to image layout design, and doing is unashamedly, directly in Photoshop. Yes there is a simple way to size text, to space letters, and space lines, even change the metrics (even spacing of fat and slim letters) to optical. Remove too many hyphenations and “widow” single words on an end line. Not even hidden! So easy; no new application to learn.

Here’s the “yes, but…” Even if you design the text to actual, finished size, that isn’t good enough; in Photoshop it is a hybrid, not fully vector or bitmap. For book printing you need to convert to scalable vector files and to PDFs. PSDs need not apply! Fortunately, you do this conversion in one step in Illustrator.

Purists may growl. Why not lay out a manuscript in InDesign, where vector text that you must have for commercial printing is ready made? And InDesign, there is a nifty little utility that wraps text around images.

For Fragments of Spirit, there was such a complexity of negative-slide-digital-iPhone image, duotone, manipulated color, selective coloring, layering, reduced opacity—none of which convert properly. You know how you want images to look. Tweaking for continuity, that believable transition between many different kinds of images and situations, is of necessity after the fact in Photoshop. InDesign is just a drag and drop, no fixes.