AboutScott Valentine Expertise Author, "Real World Compositing with Photoshop CS4 (Peachpit)". Beginning to expert questions for Photoshop CS3 and CS4 Extended, including 3D capabilities. I am also an expert here for Digital Photography. Please - NO questions on Lightroom, Elements, Express or versions earlier than CS2. These questions will be discarded.
Experience Author, "Real World Compositing with Photoshop CS4" (available from Peachpit.com in January, 2009). I have been a professional level user since 1999, and have used Photoshop for photography, fine art, graphic design, web design, and technical image analysis. I have also conducted classes at the college level in both artistic and technical uses. I am currently an Adobe User Group manager.
Organizations National Association of Photoshop Professionals, Los Alamos Multimedia Users Group.
Publications CommunityMX.com, Real World Compositing with Photoshop CS4 (Adobe Press).
Education/Credentials Bachelor's degree, Physics
Awards and Honors Several awards for digital photography.
I will try to keep this as short and concise as possible.
I am the lab manager of a science laboratory (Windows computes) at a university. We have used a graphics program called Canvas to make our figures for publications, presentations, etc. Our figures are nothing too fancy...tabular data from Microsoft excel input into a formula, which makes an output consisting of a bunch of squiggly lines that are filled with color and export into a format such as .emf and input into our graphics program (please see attached).
The problem is is that Canvas is VERY OBSOLETE, so we looking to get a little more up to date. We keep hearing about Photoshop, which I downloaded the free trial. So far...so good. It seems to have amazing capabilities. However, I can not figure out how to 'grab' an image (jpeg, emf, tiff, etc) and shrink/expand to get all of our cm (y axis) to line up (see image), which can be done on canvas, as well as on Powerpoint, Word, etc. Can this be done on Photoshop? If so, how? This is a very important feature for our work. (Note...all sets of lines are separate images...they just need to be shrunk/expanded manually).
Thank you!!!
Thomas
Answer Hi Thomas,
I think Photoshop can do what you need, but I'm not really clear on how you are planning to use it... Photoshop will not do any data generation itself, but it will give you the ability to normalize all of your graphs as flat images.
Can you tell me your current work flow? If you are generating your charts in Excel, you can either do a 'screen grab' of the charts after you've sized it in Excel, or you can print the graphs to a PDF and import that file. The advantage to resizing in Excel is that your data will scale properly without distortion.
Grabbing the image from your screen is best done with a dedicated application. You can certainly use the Print Screen function in Windows, but there are applications that let you choose windows, application frames, scrolling pages, etc. These Screen Capture utilities range from free to decidedly not free; a web search will turn up tons of results.
So, the idea is that you size your images in Excel, use the screen capture utility to select the image and save it to your data or presentation folder, then open them in Photoshop to create a single graphic (and resize as needed).
Please let me know if I've missed your question. I do quite a bit of presentation and technical graphics, and I know how frustrating some of these things can be. It may be that you need a different graphing application that is better suited to your particular needs, but I don't want to get too far afield of your requirements.
 that need to be aligned by the y-axis scale (cm) by shrinking/expanding'))