Lessons
Class Introduction
01:51 2Document Set-Up
15:39 3Panels
11:46 4Toolbox
08:22 5The Adobe® Workspace
05:17 6Shortcuts
05:33 7Saving Files
05:37 8Guides
12:42Text Frames
08:13 10Shapes, Fill and Stoke
07:43 11Arranging and Modifying Shapes
08:31 12The Pen Tool: Drawing, Stroke and Fill
06:52 13The Pen Tool: Handles and Anchor Points
08:27 14Pencil, Smooth and Erase Tools
05:46 15Strokes and Arrows
13:33 16Importing Shapes from Adobe® Illustrator®
08:57 17Placing Graphics
08:05 18Placing PDFs
04:22 19Placing Multiple Files
06:14 20Frames: Fitting and Manipulating
07:28 21Specialty Frames
05:52 22The Links Panel
21:34 23High Quality Display
06:48 24Clipping Paths
13:08 25Transparency
09:41 26The Gap Tool
03:55 27Color & Swatches Panels Basics
16:38 28Eyedropper Tool
10:03 29Gradient Swatches
05:31 30Character Panel
23:38 31Paragraph Panel
15:09 32Spelling & Autocorrect
06:42 33Text Frame Options
08:10 34Printing and Exporting
16:16Lesson Info
Eyedropper Tool
I wanted to take these images, and I wanna create a new group of colors based on graphics that are inside my document. And I can do that with the Color Theme Tool, which sits usually under the Eyedropper Tool. Looks like it's actually on top. Most of the time we have the Eyedropper Tool selected as our Eyedropper Tool, but the Color Theme Tool is sort of like an Eyedropper, specialty Eyedropper. So, I'm gonna choose that, and I can do a couple different things with it. I can either drag across an image, or I can just click on a specific image. So I'm actually gonna zoom in really quick on just the sunflower, and I've got the Color Theme Tool selected. I can just click on this image and it comes up with three or five colors that it found inside that particular image. And if I didn't wanna do that, I can escape it, and instead maybe just draw across two different images, or a portion of each image. I can just draw across here and let go, and now it picked up five colors based on the port...
ion of the images I dragged across. And I kinda like that combination, looks kinda good. And I have a couple different options, trying to move it up there. So, I now created sort of this color group. So instead of having to figure out where, how to create each of these colors and mix them and find them on the spectrum like we were doing in the Color Panel, I can select it from an item or items on the page. And it doesn't have to be just images, it can be anything that I created on the page, but most of the items on my page already have the colors in them that we expect to see. So, in this case, I created it from this image and I can do a couple different things. One of them is that I can send it off to my Creative Cloud Library. And again, I'm not covering libraries, but just know once you're working on the Creative Cloud this is one of the reasons why. I can create a color group here and save it to a library that I can then use in Illustrator, or Photoshop, or any of my other Cloud applications. I can also click here and this will just add this theme to the swatches. Or I can Option click to add a specific color only. But, in this case, I wanna add this to the swatches overall. So I'm gonna open up the Swatches Panel, actually, move this guy over here, and just click to add that color. So now when I come down to the bottom, I see this thing called Colorful Theme, and I can rename that if I want by double-clicking on it slowly. Click on it once and then click on it again. And maybe we'll call this Sunflowers. 'Cause that's where the colors came from. And I can see the different colors that are included in there and, again, they're labeled with the color value so I can change that and change that to a different name if I want. But to put it in this nice little group. Then I can create another one from a different image. We'll come down here, choose that same Color Theme Tool, drag across these colors here, let's actually escape out of that first, and now do that, and I end up with a slightly different set of colors. And the other option that I have, I click here, you notice it said Colorful, and our group was called Colorful Group One. I also can choose different variations of these colors, whether I wanted a muted version, deep version, dark version, or bright version. So I'm gonna choose bright and go ahead and save that as well. So now that Swatches Panel, that group should be in the Swatches Panel in here, and, again, it just names it by the choice we made which was Bright. And I can just put, I don't know, we'll call this Forest and Desert. Alright, so now I have those as groups. I'm gonna delete these again. The groups are down at the bottom, we've got our Sunflower group and our Forest and our Desert group. But again, I created those just out of this particular image. And I can do that if I don't want to do a whole theme. Go back under that Color Theme Tool, I can click and actually do that using the Eyedropper. So the Eyedropper will let me select one color only. And the reason that it's more difficult is that it's going to select one teeny, tiny, little pixel, so I don't know exactly what pixel I think I'm gonna get, and it's gonna be whatever one I end up hitting. So it's a little less accurate, but the nice thing is you can create these colors that live in your images and bring those into your Swatches Panel. So let's say I wanted this word, travel, I'm gonna come over here and just make it a little bit bigger and bold. And we're not gonna worry about it right now because we're gonna work with text in just a little while. So let's come in here, I just wanna make this a little bit bold there. And I want this image, or this text, to be a certain color. It's black right now. I can select this text and use my Eyedropper Tool and just click somewhere and get that color, oops. I wanna make sure that it's colorizing the text and not the image itself. And, if you notice, right now my Eyedropper is full because I picked it up, I picked up a color a second ago. If I wanna keep sampling, I need to hold down the Option or the ALT key, so I get that empty Eyedropper, which means pick up something instead of put it down. So I'm just going to click, and as I click, because I have that frame selected, and I told it it affects the text and not the frame itself it's doing the fill of the text as I keep clicking, holding down the Option or ALT key. It's going to go ahead and change the color for me. So I'm just gonna hold that down and I can keep clicking, and when I find a color I kind of like I should probably save that to the Swatches Panel. Because even though I chose it here, and it's applying it to this text, it isn't saving it in any way. Once I find what I like, I definitely wanna save it. So I'm gonna come over here and I can see that color is pretty loaded in the Color Panel. And I'm gonna choose Add to Swatches. So even if I'm just gonna try different things out, I'll keep saving it along the way, because I can always get rid of it later by coming into Swatches and once I've applied it to a bunch of different things, I can come in here and tell it, Select All Unused and then just delete all the ones I'm not using. In this case, I don't wanna get rid of all of my Sunflowers and all that. So I won't do it, but I could go ahead and select that from there. Alright, just one or two more quick things I wanna show you in the Color Panel. How to add to a frame versus the graphics itself. So, I'm gonna place a black and white graphic. And it's not just one that doesn't have color in it from Photoshop, it actually has to be in the mode, the Black and White mode. So I've actually told it it is black and white, I've stripped out all the color information of this black and white image that's here. Alright, so bring this in, and I want to colorize the frame, right? So what I wanna do is I'm gonna take this image and I'm gonna move it up just ever so slightly so that it's sitting outside of the frame. So here's my frame, and then here's my image. My image ends right here. So I do have this little bit of extra white that's here that's showing in behind. So when I select this frame, and I go to the Swatches Panel. And I'm gonna come into here, and we'll just make this blue, we'll make the background blue. So what I did was I colored the frame to be blue and anywhere there was any transparency in this image, or white, it is shining through from the frame below. I'm gonna undo that. And, make this a little bit longer, I'm gonna go ahead and instead of colorizing the frame, or filling the frame with color, I'm gonna change the color of the image itself. So, I'm gonna roll over it or choose the Direct Selection Tool to work with the image. And click on the image, and now go to the Swatches Panel, and choose a color that way. So now, anywhere there's 100% black, becomes 100% blue, it's 75% black, becomes 75% blue. And it has to be, like I said, it does have to be a grayscale file. It can't be something that just looks grayscale that's still in CMYKRGB, because that color is already built in. Because it's black and white, it is open to me changing the color in InDesign. So, if you're trying to change the color and all your colors in your panel, in your Swatches Panel, are grayed out and you can't select any of them, it means that you don't actually have a grayscale file. But I can kind of combine the two. So now I'm selecting the frame as well, and I'm gonna shorten this up a little bit, and I can make sure that the frame background is also a color, or the fill is a color. So in this case I filled it with yellow so the image is blue and it's on a frame that has, that's been filled with yellow. In fact if I extend that, I can see that that's been filled with yellow. So you can get some nice effects. You can also get some very ugly effects doing this, but sometimes if you just wanna manipulate the color a little bit, you don't have time or the skill to move into Photoshop to do that, you can also do some interesting things here in InDesign. But remember, it does have to be a black and white image. You couldn't do this to, say, a PDF either, because color information is already hard-baked into that PDF as well. So we can affect the frame, or the image itself with color and we can combine the two in interesting ways.
Ratings and Reviews
Susan
Fantastic course. I have used Illustrator and photoshop, but learned when under tight deadlines. We are going to begin using inDesign to publish a more extensive multipage newsletter, and I wanted to build a better knowledge foundation of this tool, rather than just diving in. The course was comprehensive and I feel that I'll be able to make a better product after taking the course.
Terri
Have loved Erica since I was a baby designer. She is a great educator, and even though I have been using ID for about 8 years, I just changed from CS6 to CC. This was a great refresher as well as a mental upgrade to new options and effects.
Gilbert Beltran
I enjoyed these classes. Learned the Indesign toolbox and picked up a few smart tricks. Erica is great at keeping up the pace and being very clear and easy to follow.
Student Work
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