Lessons

Lesson Info

Working with Images Part 1

We looked a little bit earlier at the links panel and how images are managed in design, but we haven't yet looked at how the heck do you even put them here in the first place? Right? So there there there's a whole lot of different ways we can do that? Actually, there are two tools on the toolbar that worked really well for images most of the time. I used this guy right here, so it's called the rectangle frame tool there's a little fly out? Yeah, rectangle frame tool as opposed to the regular rectangle tool. S o the little x in it sort of hints that it's really geared towards images, and actually these tools function the same way, and I'll explain what the difference is in a minute. But it's it's not a big difference, but I'm going to go for this guy and the keyboard shortcut, as you can see and prevent the seas is f so, in case you didn't realize any of the tools that you hover over, you're going to get this little fly up a little banner flag and in parentheses. It has a letter or a ke...

ystroke, and that is telling you what the keyboard shortcut is for that tool, so, um, it's called the rectangle frame tool, but the keyboard shortcut is f like frame. Or frank? So I am going to grab that, and the way it works is pretty simple. You click and you drag to draw a frame, and when you let go, you see a nice x in it letting you know that there is your frame and it's ready to accept an image. So how do we get an image into it? Well, the, um, one of the ways, I guess is that we can come up to the file menu and choose a place so file place or you'll notice the keyboard shortcut is command or control d for drop that image in there. I got e just made that up right now. Okay, so we're going to drop an image in here, so I'm going to hit commander controlled b and that's going toe pop open my little window here so I can navigate. I don't even know what we'll goto links and see what we've got. Um, here is an image here, all right? So we'll place please son image in there. Now, you'll notice when this image appeared, it fits nicely in the frame, it's filling the frame proportionally, so if you were paying attention and last segment, that was a preference that we set under object fitting, we chose frame fitting options, and we told it to fill the fair the frame proportionately and we had it do that aligning from the centre eso this little thing right here I call them little chocolate squares because they look like gum so you want to put the little center chick lit on um and what that's doing is by default for any frames that you create when you put images in they're going to fill the frame proportionately from the center so if you don't do that, the image is gonna appear really probably so large within the frame that you actually won't even be able to tell what it is and then you have to resize it manually and that's not the end of the world but it's a little more work so we'll talk about that too, but so that's one method is you draw out the frame and then you go to file place or you pressed commander control d to drop that image in there. Another thing thatyou khun dio I'll draw out a press f to make sure I have the frame to again and I'll just draw out another frame here and what I like to do is actually I drag and drop from bridge pretty much all the time so I'm gonna pop a bridge open here and if you don't use bridge a lot I encourage you to give it a world cozy up to it because it's pretty great the way that I like tohave my bridge set up is like this. There used to be something called compact mood in bridge, but I think it went, I think it went away. Maybe it's back? No, it doesn't look like it. So if you have, like, an old version of bridge, you can go to view compact mode. If you don't, then you just go up to your window menu and remove pretty much all these check marks right here. And what that does is it clears out all the other stuff that is in bridge, like your key words and your metadata and folders and all that. And it just lets you look at your images on dh. You can scale them larger or smaller the previews by dragging this little slider down here. And then you can drag the, uh, window oops let's grab from the site it's a little safer. Okay, so you, khun, drag the window to be whatever size you want, so I usually keep it in this sort of vertical filmstrip situation over here and then I can just scroll through let's find a fun like this image and I'm just going to click to select it and click and drag and drop it into in design and again because of our key bird. Our preference that we changed it just fits nicely into the frame so really make sure you change that preference because otherwise you're going to be really frustrated when you drop images in and they're going to appear larger than life pretty straightforward let's talk about the anatomy of an image in in design because there's two things going on we have the image and then we actually have the frame that goes around the image, so if I want to grab any of these, I'm going to come over here and get that selection tool again. The keyboard shortcut is vey like move of ah in photo shop um although here is called the selection tool so I don't have a good like memory thing for that, but be like the move duel, the move of ah tool and photoshopped so what that means is I can click to select this frame and I can just move it, I can click and drag it around, I can adjust the frame so like right now, it's kind of a vertical situation I can click right here and drag outwards and make it, you know, more square or horizontal now you'll notice when I do that, if I drag really big like all dragged from this corner and pull out now, you'll notice the frames actually bigger than the image that is within it, so we have two things going on, we've got the frame and then we have the image inside it. Now if I want to grab the image inside the frame cause maybe I wantto pull it to match the frame. I can't do it with this tool because this tool selects the frame if I want to get the content within the frame, which is, in this case, an image I need to get this other selection to all the direct selection tool and the keyboard shortcut is a um so now if I click, you'll notice I get this kind of rust colored frame that goes around it. Now I'm adjusting the image within the frame, so this blue box here is the frame and this rust colored box is the image, so if I want to scale the image proportionally, I'm going to hold down shift while I drag from this corner, and now I can actually make this bigger than the frame, of course, and I can move it around within the frame. Okay, so we have the frame and then we have the content that's within the frame and you can manipulate them separately using these two selection tools right here, um another thing to know is I guess if you want teo, you know, scale down this whole thing it would be handy right if we could just like scale this and have the image go with it that's what this auto fit option does appear in your control panel if I click auto fit and now I hold shift and drag shift meaning to scale the frame proportionally it's going to size the image within it at the same time so if I make it larger it's going to scale up the image to stay within the frame the way it is personally I don't turn it off it's awesome I just don't personally use it a lot because I'm so I used to before we had out of it so used tio just doing it myself on dh you could do it yourself too with the keyboard so if I turn this back off all I have to dio I still hold shift I just add commander control and now I couldn't do it myself and the reason I like to do it myself instead of auto fit is because sometimes I scale it down but I don't you know, I I wantto skill the image but also move it and so or maybe I want to scale the frame and I don't want the image to scale with it so I just prefer to have total manual control all the time because I'm in control of reeves I'll just admit that right now if my husband's watching he's nodding in agreement he knows s o I don't use auto fit but that's what it is if you like it, it is here and you can actually turn that on as a preference forever if you do it again with all your documents close and you go backto object fitting fame frame fitting options you khun turn on auto fit here but I don't I don't care for that so again to scale the whole thing with the image it's just commander control shift and drag and the whole thing will scale like that if I want to go back um like let's say I'm going to make this vertical again so now maybe I want to reposition this image within the frame I can go get the direct selection tool by pressing a or see this little circle that pops up when I mouse over the image that is called the content grabber and if I click on it even though I have this tool active if I click the content grabber it grabs the content within the frame so it's kind of just like a little quickie shortcut way to get to the content and be able to move it within the frame personally, I turn off my content grabbers they're very cute and they sound wonderful in theory but what happens in my world is I click on it all the time by accident and it makes me bonkers so if you decide you want to turn off your content grabber you could do that under the will soon be under view extras hide content grabar so that's just me I'm going to turn it off for now because otherwise I'll be doing it all the time by accident so I just like knowing I'm just constantly aware of what tool I have here so I know that if I've got the selection tool I don't have to worry that I accidentally grabbed the content and if I want the content I just press a to get the direct selection tool and now I can move the content and I don't I just don't have to worry that in designs I don't know not reading my mind so another thing that is handy once you have the image scaled up like this like let's say for some reason that we end up making this frame little on baby we just you know we could grab this content and shift drag it down or we could have auto fit or whatever but maybe I just want to quickly snapped this image back to size there's a keyboard shortcut for that and I use it all the time and it's very handy so with this frame selected I'm going to hold shift command option or shift control ault whatever basically all three of those keys on dh then see because why it's so convenient right all the keyboard so the whole left buddy your keyboard and see and that will just snap the image to fill that frame so if somehow they got separated and like maybe you know your cat jumped on the keyboard and did this and like now your image she's crazy and you're like what just happened? Just click on it do your very convenient keyboard shortcut and it will just snap into place you could also come up here that's what these little buttons are this woman here is phil frame proportionally so if that convenient keyboard is not keyboard shortcut if it's not convenient and not for you, you can come in here and just click this but I use it so often that I just really embraced that keyboard shortcut so that's pretty rad. Um okay, so that is a little bit about frames and they're content moving them around and such I guess while we're here, I can also show you that in design has a stacking order built into stuff so let's actually let me draw one more frame and we'll go back to bridge to get to bridge, by the way impressing command tab window's probably does that too, I guess its control tab I don't know on dh thatjust toggles me back and forth between my most recently used applications, those two that I've used most recently so I can pop back to bridge really quickly and let's, just throw this image here, so I'm going to drag that over, okay? So I'm going to grab my selection tool and just move these around so you can see if I positioned them like on top of each other, and I'll press the w for wonderful mode to hide all the frames. Eso it looks wonderful, and we can see that this image is actually on top of this image, and this was the waterfall the r fountain fountain. This fountain is on top of the picture of the rings, so the way that in design works is the most recently added object is always added to the front. So in photo shop, of course, we have a layers panel guess what in design does to guess what else? You don't use it like you used photo shops, laywer panel so well, I could put all of these on a separate layer or something and design you just don't do that, it's not how in design works there is a layers panel, but you use it more for, like really separating things like if you have, like, template items that you want to be ableto lock or hide or whatever, you might put those on a separate layer, but unlike photo shop, where everything's about the layers panel in designed the layers panel is like way more of just a supporting role it's not like a lead lead star or something. So even we have multiple objects like this multiple images they can lay on top of each other like this but you can move them around very easily. So if I want to take this let's put this over here if I want to take this sunset image and push it all the way to the back I can do that with my keyboard or I can come upto object arrange and we can see that I can send it back one level or I can r excuse me, send back word one level or it consent it all the way to the back right here. So I'll just go ahead and send it all the way to the back and now we see it's behind everything else. Right? Um same with with this let's say we want to send this just back one level so we'll come upto object arrange send back word not to the back just back one level now it's in between see that same with bringing them front so you can do that from the object menu or you can collect it and then right, click and choose a range and then you can also do that here on dh now, of course that this object is not in the front. We also have the option to bring it forward or bring it to the front but also these air the keyboard shortcuts so this is how I do it most the time this is command or control and then the bracket keys so the right bracket those air the keys on your keyboard next to the letter p for puttin it. Oh my goodness. Okay, so those bracket keys next to the letter p so if I want to take this and send it back, one level hits shift left bracket oops command scuse me not shift command left bracket to send it back and if I hit command left bracket again, it'll go to the very back. If I want to bring it straight to the front, I'll add shift and then right bracket so you could do that with your keyboard is very simple and you really don't use the layers panel and in design the way you would be used to in photo shop yeah or illustrated quick question for you s oh, this is from devoted son on dh this goes back just a sec. Does the resolution of the image change when you change the size of the image within the frame? Yes, very good question. So as you scale the image within the frame the resolution is changing and you can always if you're curious to know what it is you can always look in your links panel and with that image selected in your document it will also be selected in your links panel and if you expand the bottom it will show you down here the effective pp I so the effective pixels per inch is what you want to look at here so the actual pp I it says for this image is seventy two that's because that file, if I opened it up in photoshopped it would spread out into a huge bathtub sized document with seventy two pixels per inch but because all those pixels are corralled into this little two by two kindness image here we can see the size that this image is up here in the control panel it shows me the width and height for the selected frame so it's very small right now, it's like a wallet sized photo so all those pixels are now squished into this little frame so the effective pixels per inch number is twelve hundred and fifteen pixels per inch. So it's going to print just fine? Um if you wanted teo, we will talk in segment four briefly about pre flight profiles so before you print your document, if you want do you have in design warn you about anything like low resolution you can set that up, and you can specify where you want warnings to take place. You know, maybe you don't care if your resolution drops all the way down to one fifty, as long as it's above one fifty, you're fine. You can specify that in your pre flight profile. So most of the time, though, you're probably going to be okay unless you're really making enormous documents or dramatically scaling. Your image is really extremely so. But that's, a good question. You definitely want to keep that in mind.