Lessons

Lesson Info

Create a Collage Page

So let's talk about these collages. I'm gonna jump to one of the collage pages down here. Let's come to this guy here. Let's do this guy. Alright, so I'm gonna come to here, and I wanna create a collage page, but I wanna do it pretty quickly and easily, and when we get, in the next segment, or a segment or two down the road here, we're gonna actually talk about creating master pages, so that we don't have to do this every time. We might come up with five or six layouts that we like, and we're gonna use those, if we're gonna print books all the time, we're gonna just, every project we do, we're gonna make a book. Or maybe for every client that we've done, we're gonna make a book as a final product to sell to our photography clients, and I don't wanna have to come up with a new grid, or a new layout of these collages every time. Maybe I come up with 10 or 12 of them, that I use all the time. So, I'm gonna take a little bit of time to create them, but then I'm gonna use them over and over...

again. And so we're gonna talk about that as well. But I'm gonna come in here. I'm gonna reset my workspace back to how it was. And come down here, and I want to create this layout that's here. So, I'm gonna go ahead and just add a couple pages after this page, and I'm going to use a keyboard shortcut, which is Command or Control, and Shift, and P, which automatically adds a page right after the current page, using the same master page. So I'm just gonna hit P twice, so I get two more pages here. And I don't actually wanna use that master page. And we're gonna, like I say, cover master pages in a little while. So right now I've just got a blank page sitting here, and I wanna create a grid of images. So I'm gonna come over here to the rectangle frame, and I'm just gonna draw out a frame to start. And I wanna make sure, actually, since I'm in my Iceland book, I want to come over here, and I need to change those fitting options, because I only set it on that blank document. And so I only was setting the preferences for that document. I'm gonna come to Frame Fitting Options, and I want to Auto-Fit, Fill Frame Proportionally. Okay, that was already on for this document, good. But I want to make sure when I place those images, it's filling the frame. Less work to do later. Okay, so I've got my frame creation tool here. And I'm gonna go ahead, and I'm going to click, and start dragging out, and again I don't have any images placing. I'm actually creating the frame first, and then I'm gonna drop the images in afterwards. Because in this case, I might just be doing a collage layout. I don't have images ready to go yet. I'm just laying out several different options so I have them ready, when I have photos ready to drop into them. So I'm gonna drag those out. And while I still have my hand on the mouse, I'm going to hit the up arrow key, and that's going to add an extra row of frames. So as I hit the up arrow key, it adds many many. We're only gonna do two. And then if I hit the right arrow key, and again still holding down the mouse key while I'm doing this, I now get extra columns. So I have six images, which is basically what I wanted. Now it's going to put them in a perfect grid. We're gonna make changes to that in just a minute. The other thing that we can do, is we can change the amount of spacing in between those frames that are there. So this is what I like to call a bring a friend shortcut. It's really hard to do on these extended keyboards. I'm still holding down the mouse key. I'm gonna hold down the Command key, or the Control key on a PC, and I'm also going to hit the up arrow key. And, when I do that, you can see that I'm adding space between those rows. Now the thing is, I wanted it to match my margin, but I can't really tell. I can eyeball it, but I don't have any way of numerically knowing about that. I'm gonna use the right arrow key as well. And again, I'm eyeballing it. I'm gonna show you a way in a second to make it work numerically. But, I'm gonna look at that. I'm gonna let go of those items. And now I have this nice gridded grid ready to go. And I'm gonna make some changes to it. But first I'm gonna delete that. And I'm gonna show you how to, if you know that you always want the same spacing in there, we have I think five 16ths, on no we have a- yeah we have five 16ths of a margin. I want five 16ths between each of those images, so that the space around, and the space in between the images, is even all the way around. So to do that, when I created my new document, or, I can do it after the fact, I can come in here under my Layout menu, and choose Margins and Columns. But again I can do this in the new document, in the same, under the same item. When I chose Columns, I left it at one. We didn't even talk about columns, because we're not doing tons of text layout. But, one of the things that it says is how much gutter is between columns that you might have. So even though I only have one column, and I'm not even putting in column guides, I am gonna tell it that I want five 16ths of a gutter in between here. Now I can remember what the ... I can use the same margin, the .3125, or I can be clever and do five over 16, put in a fraction. When I hit tab it actually changes it to the decimal for me. But I'm telling it that's how much gutter I want. This is the number it's pulling when it creates those grids for whatever reason, it's going all the way back to something we did when we setup the document, and weren't even thinking about this. And, it's grabbing that number, and that's the amount of space it's gonna put between each of these grids. So I'm gonna do that after the fact. I'm gonna grab that, and I can draw out that frame. But instead, let's do it with images. So instead of creating the frames, and then putting the images in afterwards, we can do it all in one step if we want. So I often do this, even if I'm setting up a template, or something for a master page. I want images in there so I can kind of get an idea of what that grid is going to look like. And having images just sort of makes it easier than working with empty frames. So, I'm gonna do Command or Control D, to place some images. And I'm gonna do six of them. So let's go down here. And I'm gonna hold down my Command key or Control key to select non-contiguous items. So I'm gonna grab those. Don't know which ones I have. I'm gonna say Open. And now with that loaded place cursor, I'm gonna click and drag, just like I did. Now of course it wants to do it really wide. It doesn't matter because in a minute, I'm going to hit up. And so now, that ... The spacing in between should have come up the same as it was before, but it didn't. And I do not know why. I'm just gonna use my Command up and down arrow keys, to make the spacing the same. I'm gonna use the right arrow key to add columns. I'm gonna use Command or Control, and the right arrow key, to add spacing in between. It should have grabbed that information and it didn't. Alright, so I'm gonna grab that. Visually I just looked at it, and since it looks good, I can change that later. So I'm gonna come in here, and I'm just gonna drag it out to size. So I'll have this grid, but when I let go, all my images are placed in there. And again, I'm just using those images as placeholders to start with. So, when I go in here to the preview mode, and click on it, and click off of everything, I look at it and I think, okay, that's a good start. I've got a nice grid of images, but now I want to actually make some changes to those images that are there. So to do that, I'm gonna use this tool here, that a lot of people just don't use. It's called the Gap Tool. And it's going to let me grab the gap that's inside this particular grid. And I just realized, I'm gonna grab these, and I'm gonna copy these into a new document, only because I have these two side by side pages, and these middle items jumped the margin between the two, the spine between the two pages. And when i use the Gap Tool, it does not like your images to be on separate pages like that. So I'm gonna cheat. I'm gonna copy what we just did. I'm gonna create a new document. This is where I could put in, in the margins, or with the gap, I'm sorry, the gap I can come in here and say, great, from now on when I do that, I would like it to be that five 16ths gutter as well. And instead, I'm just gonna come in here, and I'm gonna choose a Tabloid size, which is eight and a half by 11 twice, turned on it's side, and say OK. And I'm just gonna paste it. Alright, so I've got those same images that are there. So I just dragged those out, and then I also wanna make sure that I have my Frame Fitting Options set for this particular new document. Auto-Fit, fill the frame proportionally, great. So now, all these images, let's just make sure because I placed those after the fact. But let's make sure. Fill Frame Proportionally is setup in the Frame Fitting Options. It is, and Auto-Fit is on. Good, so now when I grab that Gap Tool, now I don't have to worry about it because it's all in one page. What I'm gonna do is as I roll over it, hopefully you can see that it's kind of changing to gray, as I come in here to these different items. And it says oh, that's a gap. All the way down, I know that's a gap. If I click up here, it can see that that's a gap as well. So it knows where two things line up next to each other, and says that's a gap. What I want to do is change that. So I know these are kind of some wide images here on the left. So with the Gap Tool, I'm gonna grab this, and I'm just gonna pull off to the side. So now I'm making the images on the left a little bit wider. And because I have Auto-Fit turned on, those images are changing, along with the size of those frames. I can do the same thing here. Maybe shorten these guys up. But, I also want this one maybe to be shorter, and this one at the top to be a little bit longer. So to do that, I can hold down the shift key, and then it only works with the items that are exactly on opposite side of the Gap Tool. Instead of all the way across the page, it's just these two particular items. So I'm gonna slide down on that. So I can keep working with these items, doing the same thing. Maybe I want this a little bit smaller, and this a little bit bigger at the bottom there. So now I have that particular collage that's there. If I don't want those images there anymore, I can roll over on that little content grabber, and just hit delete. Turn my Preview on, so we can actually see there's still frames there. And just delete those items afterwards. But now, all of that is sort of baked into that. Now I know that that is a collage that I can use over and over again, and next time I bring in a bunch of images, I'm just gonna grab a whole bunch and say OK. When I say Open, now when I roll over it, you probably can't see it on the screen at all, but that little icon that's in the upper left hand corner of that preview, goes from having a square bracket around it, to these rounded parentheses, which basically says whatever you're on top of, you must wanna put that item inside there. So I'm gonna roll over that and click. Now that one's a wide one. Let's actually go with this one. Tall one, I like that one. This one's a wide one. This one's also a wide one, but let's try that and see what happens. Ooh, that doesn't look so good. I'm just gonna roll over those, and roll over those. So again, I can have that collage there, and that's what we're gonna put on a master page is that blank collage. Or even not even our master page. Just if I'm laying out one book, I don't know what the images are yet maybe, but I know what I want the images, how I want them laid out. So I can lay out the graph, lay out with the Gap Tool, play with that, get it all setup, and then start placing images in there. And even though we placed them as one, we did it in one step, they're not connected in any way. It's just the same as if I took this tool, and I drew one frame, and put an image in it. I drew another frame, put an image in. It's exactly the same. It's just that I did it all in one step, and didn't have to line things up visually, or create rulers. It just automatically did that for me. But again, I've got that collage ready to go, and drop in my new images as needed. So again I might say okay, I like this one. We'll make that a master page later. And then I can just create, like I say, 10 or 12 different ones, and I have those ready to just grab a stack of images, cycle through them using the arrow keys, and dropping in the ones that I need in there. So that's a quick way to get collages on the page, images on the page. That's how we get them in there. It creates a frame on the fly. We don't have to create it ahead of time. But we can if we want to.