Communication: Information Technology and Desktop Publishing

Using graphics for Desktop Publishing (Microsoft Photo Editor)

In last week’s class, we started to use graphics in Pagemaker by saving graphics from websites such as www.freefoto.com and placing them in graphics placeholders in Pagemaker. You may also have resized graphics using the element >frame > frame options facility.

You will come across several different types of graphics in this unit - .jpeg, .bmp and .gif files are all common on the internet, while .tiff or .tif files are common in desktop publishing. Do not panic if the last sentence is complete gobbeldy-gook to you!! Every file you use on a computer has an ending that tells the computer what type of file it is – e.g. a word document might be called ‘myfile.doc’ – the computer knows that all files ending in ‘.doc’ are Word files, and that it should open them in Word.

On the desktop, go into My Computer and go to your student server space or a disk on which you have several files. You should see your file name and an icon (a small picture) next to them. Word files have a picture of a sheet of paper with a blue W; Pagemaker files have a grey sheet with a P and 6.5 etc.

Keep My Computer open as you will use it shortly.

Go into www.freefoto.com and download a picture from the front page – remember to click on the thumbnail to get the full size picture. Save this to your student server space, remembering to give it a name that you will recognise!

Go back to My Computer, find the picture and double click it to open it. It should open in Microsoft Picture Manager.

If you get a strange looking icon and the picture opens in Picture Viewer rather than Picture Manager, click on the disk icon at the bottom of the screen and save it as a ‘Tiff’ file. Then try double clicking again – it should now open in Picture Manager.

Click on the ‘edit pictures’ button in the toolbar. You should now see a screen like the one below:

Try experimenting with brightness and contrast, rotate and flip, and colour. Hint: by dragging the ‘saturation’ control across to the left you can see what your picture will look like when printed in black and white.

You can get the ‘edit’ menu back by clicking on the ‘home’ button at the top (the house icon) and then clicking on ‘edit pictures’.

The crop tool is particularly useful. If you click on the crop tool, you get black handles at the side and corners of your picture. Click and drag on these to ‘crop’ your picture. When you are happy with it, click OK.

Now click on the ‘home’ button to return to the full menu.

You can ‘export’ your picture file to the ‘tiff’ format, which works best in desktop publishing packages like Pagemaker. Click on ‘export pictures’, and under ‘export with this file format’ choose ‘TIFF’. The new file will be saved next to the original file, unless you specify otherwise. Click OK and then go into My Computer to look at your new file. You should see that it has a different icon – a picture of a scanner, rather than the orange ‘JPEG’ file.

Exercise

Use www.freefoto.com and http://dgl.microsoft.com (click on ‘copy’ to select a picture, then choose edit > paste in Microsoft Picture Manager to see the picture, to experiment with different pictures. Use the pictures available to create a one-page autobiography of your life so far….