An unnecessary hurdle
Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 1:29PM
Heather Walpole in graphic design

Today I was happily working away in Adobe InDesign creating a sign for an artist in San Francisco. Happily, until I tried to edit the original image. It's a simple sign, featuring a painting series synopsis and a photograph of the artist. The image I was using for placement until I receive the hi-res image had some text that was drawing attention away from my design. I thought I'd hop into Photoshop and clear it right up, so I did this:

Screen shot 2009-11-18 at 12.10.38 PM

With a simple right click on the image, I selected Edit Original.

Then this happened:

Screen shot 2009-11-18 at 12.11.11 PM

Do you see that? Do you see that my image, the image I wanted to EDIT, opened in Preview. PREVIEW! Preview. I was stunned. Irate! So annoyed. Why in the world would ADOBE InDesign open an image in Apple's Preview? Wouldn't you expect it to open it in, let me think, um, ADOBE PHOTOSHOP? Yes, I would think it would open in Adobe Photoshop. But it didn't. Instead, I had to go and open Photoshop, open the image, edit it, save it, go back to InDesign, select the image, open the Links palette, and choose Update Link. Instead of the three steps I had originally planned for there were eight. So thank you Adobe InDesign for adding useless steps, making my design take longer and just generally making my workday more challenging. That's great.

Article originally appeared on Heather Ink {Design + Life} (http://www.heatherink.com/).
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