Adobe Photoshop is a graphics editing program and usually used for editing photos. As a planning engineer we can use it for better presentation of our schedule, like as highlighting of desired activity and we can also prepare a progress drawings showing the actual progress. Here just we get an idea about that, how we can highlight our desired area in drawing by using Adobe Photoshop.  This procedure is simple. Let see how we can do it.

First we work on .Pdf drawing. (pdf = Portable Document Format)

How to make a .Pdf Drawing in AutoCAD.

1. Open the AutoCAD, go to plot options.
2. From Printer/plotter option Scroll down and select the option “DWG to PDF.pc3”, then select the desired paper size and then using “window” option select the desired area of drawing to make it .Pdf drawings, then save it. As shown in fig below.

3. Now open this drawing.pdf with Adobe Photoshop, you will see this this dialog box.

4. Select the “page” and press ok. The you will the drawing with a pattern background and it seems transparent. Like this as below.

5. After this go layer menu New layer Layer from background. The we get our desired look as shown below.

6. Now our task is to highlight “Main Telephone Room” & “Garbage Room” to show that they are completed. For this purpose we use selection tools

7. There are different types of selection tools. But of our ease I will use “magic wand tool” for selection.

8. This tool will automatically select the desired area in which we will use it. As shown in fig below, that Main Telephone Room is selected.

9. Now we want to make it highlight with green color. That this area is completed. While it is selected go to as shown above. Go to layer optionànew layer—> layer, then name this layer and save it. Then you will notice that another layer(layer 1) will appear other than background layer. As in fig below

10. Now we will go to edit menuàfillà then select the desired color. As shown below.

11. Now we use the Opacity or fill options to give the desired transparency. And set the opacity ranging 20% – 70% or it depends upon required transparency. Then press Clrl+D to deselect the selection.

The final drawing

Now how to highlight the desired Activity in a Schedule

1. We know that form Print Preview option in primavera we can save our desired page as a image.jpeg. as shown

2. Now we and open this image with adobe photo shops. And we want to highlight the desired activity. For example in our image we will highlight the activity no 22.

3. Follow the same procedure first select the desired activity( for this time “Rectangular Marquee Tool” is used) then make new layer then fill it with desired color and via opacity or fill option we can change its transparency. And that’s it.