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
Placing Graphics
Alright, so we're in this item here, and we wanna place all these images. I can look at see that there are several images, even things that don't necessarily look like an image, like this wood grain, that's a image that's there, and all I've down is put a transparent shape on top of that, and I can look and I've got those images as well. I've got all my fun stock art that's here, and this is just all Adobe stock art and so we're not gonna go into libraries in this course at all really, Creative Cloud libraries, But just so you know, I'm able to go shop for that right from within InDesign, place the Adobe stock inside there, and then when I wanna go ahead and buy it, I can also buy it right from InDesign. So, no more going and shopping on the page, and trying to remember where I downloaded or anything. It does that all through Creative Cloud libraries. And so I have these items that are here, and I can see that all the images that I have, are created as what I said were called "links". ...
So, that graphic that we just did from illustrator, I originally placed it as a link. So when you place items into InDesign images, it doesn't actually put the whole graphic, or the whole Photoshop file, whatever it is, inside your InDesign file. It puts what's called a "link". And that's what this Links panel is, and we're gonna come back to this in a little while. But it creates this link, it puts it in there. It puts sort of like a placeholder there, and it says "This is what the image looks like." And you can see that it's kind of even low-res, and we're gonna fix that in a little while. It's pretty pixelated here. It puts that image in there, and then it references where it actually was sitting when you did that. So when you go to export it, or print it, it actually references the file, instead of trying to make this really huge InDesign file, where it actually puts all those images inside, and just bloats up your file. So it creates what's called "links". And I'm gonna reset that, I messed up my panels there. Let's reset my workspace. So let's actually go ahead and place some of these graphics that are here. I'm gonna create a new page, so just right after this page here. And I'm gonna use a keyboard shortcut, which is shift-command, or shift-control on a PC, and the letter "P". So it just actually adds a page, and I'm gonna add two pages, 'cause I have these facing pages side by side, and I wanna keep my pages in groups of two. So I just added two blank pages, the only thing on them are the page numbers. And I want to place some graphics inside here. So, when you're placing in InDesign, whether it's graphics or a text frame, or I'm sorry, or a text file, or PDF, we use the same command. We use the "place" command. Or file place, or command or control D. So let's come in here to "place". And it just sends us out to our Finder, in this case. And so I'm gonna come in here and just choose some items. I'm gonna start with the people, I'll just grab one of our JPEGs that are here, and I'm gonna make sure that I have "Replace Selected Item" off. I believe it's on by default, but the problem with that, is that whatever you have selected, it will automatically put this image inside it. Even if it's a text frame. So you need to be sure that that's probably off. I don't necessarily know that I don't have something selected when I went into place this. Or just get really good at clicking off of everything first. And then "Show Import Options" I generally leave that off for images, but I'm gonna turn it on right now so we can look at it, but for the most part, there's not usually a lot to choose from, so I tend to keep that off. Because otherwise it wants to take you to the second dialogue box, every time. If you don't need to go to it every time, it will use the last options that you chose. So I'm gonna turn that on right now. And I'm gonna go ahead and choose this one JPEG that's here. And click "open". Now we can see we can't really do much to it. We've got the image, can't do anything else, everything's grayed out, and color, I can change the profile but I'm not gonna work with any of that. Basically the nice thing is that I can see a preview. I couldn't see a preview the way I had my "Find Dialogue" box set up, so this is nice, I can actually see a preview. If you're bringing in multiple images, and you're not actually able to do anything in this dialogue, but you have to say "OK" through 30 of them, that's where turning "Show Import Options" off comes in handy. If you're working with PDFs, you probably want that on though. But in this case we're just doing images. I'm gonna say "OK". And when I do that, I now have what's called the "loaded place cursor", and that basically says "Okay, I'm ready to place this image. "What do you want me to do with it?" I know it is kind of hard to see, I can't really zoom in on the icon that's there, the place icon. But I can come in here, and I have a couple different options. The first is to just click and, sorry, let's click... Why is it not letting me click just here? There we go. Just click on that, and it places it at 100% size. And if I zoom out, I can see that it's way too big, it goes past the paste board, it runs into the next page, that's really no good at all, so I'm going to undo that. And I'm gonna go ahead and fit that, the spread, back into the window. And the spread is when you've got pages that are side by side, that's a spread. So I've got two pages side by side, and I want the entire spread fit in window. So instead of command or control zero, which we did earlier for fit page in window, if we add the option or alt key to that. So option command or alt control, and zero, fits the entire spread in the window, so I can see everything. And I'm gonna click, come on, it's hitting the side buttons there, click and drag out and I'm trying to drag, if you noticed, if I drag straight down, thinking "I'll get a tall frame." it's not letting me do that. It's keeping it constrained to the proportions that the image that you're placing have, which is nice, that means when I let go, my frame, that it's creating in the background, 'cause remember I said it creates a frame in the background for you, it's keeping it exactly to size. So I'll just drag that out until it's the size I want it to be and let go, and it fits that image to the frame that I created. Now I'm gonna do command or control zero, and zoom in just on that page there. So, that's how I set it to size. Now if I had guides, I could of done that. So I'm gonna place that same image, I'm just redoing what we did before, turning off those import options. And if I wanna make sure it was to the guides, I can come in here and make sure if it's to the size or the height. I can do that so that it does it completely margin to margin as well. And then I have that item placed there. And again, it placed the frame proportionally to the size of the image that's there. Now I can override that if I want to, by placing that image, or you can choose another one, but we'll choose this one, and if I click and drag, sorry, it's me, it's operator error there, if I hold down the shift key, I can tell it "No, don't constrain proportions to the image." Hold down the shift key, then I can drag out whatever shape I want, and maybe I want it to be a really narrow shape like this, so I'm gonna let go, and when I do that though, you notice it created that narrow shape, but it still by default wanted to cram that image in there, so that nothing was getting cropped out. And we're gonna make changes to that in just a little bit, but just, I wanted you to see what happens when you create that other size, and we'll just leave this guy off to the side. Let's move him off to the side a little bit. I'm gonna grab the frame over there and we'll just move him to the second page. Because we are gonna go back where we want to make that fill to the size, we wanted that wide, narrow, or not too tall, but really wide image frame, and we wanted the image to be cropped to fit that. So we'll come back to that.
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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