Lessons

Lesson Info

Working with Images

Well one of the things that we need in a portfolio are images, right? So we need to start putting some images inside, and so I'm just going to jump over just to our blank document here. And I've got it in preview mode, and the first thing I want to do is just place a graphic inside here, an image. So we're gonna work with some photographs for sure, and I'm going to go ahead and just place that image here. And so I've got my images here, and these are stock images. Why do I not have my regular ones? Let's come over here to, excellent, I do not have my images on here. I have my stock, I have my placeholder ones. That's odd. I do not have my regular images that are here. I got rid of the ones that I needed, so I have ones, that's all right, they just have a watermark on them. They just won't be as beautiful as the ones that are in my final folder that's here. But where I got those again, I went to Adobe Stock to get those, and I downloaded for placement only sort of images that are here. ...

So, again they just have this watermark on there, and that's all right. So what I want to do, when I place an image, I want to do File, and I want to do Place, and it doesn't matter if I'm placing an image, or a PDF, or an Illustrator file, but I'm going to go ahead and place it using the Place command. And a little bit about file types. If you can, if you've got the native files, let's say you've got a Photoshop file, a .psd file, and you've got your Illustrator files as well, you want to place those if you can in their native formats. So the .ai file and the .psd file, and that's just because you have access, InDesign is able to access all the information that's in that particular file that's there. So if you've got a Photoshop file and you've got all those layers that you've created, you can actually access the individual layers in InDesign when it comes to placing those. So on the file type like I said, if you can use the native files, that would be great. If you don't have those, because a lot of times you don't, you have JPEGs, right? So JPEGs are fine, it's just that whoever saved that JPEG sort of had the options of what was saved and wasn't saved with that file, sort of baked into that file. So if you have the native files you want to use those. If you've gotten a JPEG for instance, anything you download from, like any stock photography place is probably going to be in a JPEG file, and there's nothing wrong with placing that JPEG. If however you're going to make some changes to it, and open it in Photoshop, you're gonna want to save it as a Photoshop file anyway, and work with it there, and then don't save it back to a JPEG. There's no reason to and actually there's reasons not to. For instance every time you save a JPEG you lose some information, so if you open it up and you're gonna make some changes to it, save it as that PDF file. It can handle so many file types. PNGs, JPEGs, like I said all the native formats as well. So I did a File, Place, and again it doesn't matter if you're placing an image, or a PDF, or an Illustrator file. Do a File, Place, and we're gonna go ahead and find the image that we want. So I'm just gonna look at this preview here, and a couple options that are down here is we can Show Import Options. Which for images we usually don't need simply because there aren't usually many options to choose from, unless you have layers that you do want to turn on and off on import. You can change those later as well, if you bring in a layered file that has 27 Photoshop layers, and you bring them all in, you can turn them on and off after the fact. You don't have to do it when you do an import. But you can choose to see it here. If you're bringing in a PDF, this is vital that we have this selected because that's where you get to choose which page or pages of your PDF actually come in. And also Replace Selected Item. If you have something selected on your page and you have Replace Selected Item there, you will just now cram that image right into the frame that you have selected. So be aware of that. Even if that frame has text in it, you will now change that frame from a text frame to an image frame, and everything will get messed up. I tend to keep this off simply because I don't remember if something is selected on a page or not. Also, you may or may not see these options right away, because this is a new behavior in the last couple versions, is that you don't even get to see those options. You have to click Options to actually choose your options. So I'm gonna do Show Import Options just for this one time so we can actually see what sorts of options are there. So I'm gonna say Open, and again there aren't many to choose from. Almost everything is grayed out because I don't have a clipping path. I don't have an alpha channel, and I'm not gonna be working with the color at all, and I don't have extra pages to choose from because it's just a JPEG. So I don't really have many options. So I'm gonna say OK, and when I do that, I now have what's called a loaded place gun. So I've got this image here, let's see if we can actually, it doesn't blow up the icon at all. It's a little icon, it just shows a little picture icon, and it says it's ready to be placed. So I have a couple different options when it comes to actually placing it. I could just click and depending on the size of that image, that image may just fly off the right and bottom of your pasteboard and you won't be able to see the edge of it, which makes it really hard to make it smaller, right? So we kind of want to control that. I'm gonna actually undo that. Command or Control + Z to go backwards, and another thing I can do instead of placing it at size, although sometimes I place it at size just to kind of see, is this a massive file, or is this a really teeny one? If I click it and it's only the size of that thumbnail, I know I'm probably gonna be in trouble because that's probably not a high enough resolution photo to even be worthwhile. So instead I'm gonna click and drag, and if you notice it's automatically maintaining the proportion that I had before. So I'm gonna show you how you can actually change that in a minute. But I'm just gonna place it at whatever size. All right so I'm gonna go ahead and place that there, and that's how I get that image on the page. Pretty simple. I can also, I'm gonna do Command or Control + D to Place again, and I'm gonna turn off my Show Import Options. And this time I'm actually gonna choose several. So I'm just gonna Shift + Select all these images, and I'll say Open. And now, I can hopefully, you probably can't see on your screen, maybe, but there's a little five or six next to it, however many images I grabbed there, and it tells me that I have that many ready to place. But I can scroll through them if I don't like the order that they're in. So I can use the right and left arrow keys to scroll through the images that I just picked up. So I can say, okay I like that one here, and I want to click and place that. And I don't want that image, let's actually, let's actually go to this one, but I have this road, the one that's on the front cover, but I want to see it tall, I want to see a nice tall portrait version of that. But if I click and drag it, it automatically wants to put it in the original proportions. So instead I'm gonna hold down the Shift key, and now I'm kind of freeform. I can put whatever size I want, so I'm gonna put that tall, if I decided actually this is where I need a tall image, and I'm gonna let go. When I do that you notice, oops it still put it wide, and it put it in the frame, and it fit it completely to the frame, but there's all this space on top and bottom, and we're gonna fix that in just a little while. So we're gonna leave that one just for right now, but what we want to do is we want to have it so it automatically fills it for us. So I can scroll through and decide, do I want any of these other ones? Sure let's place this guy too. So again I'm just clicking and dragging on those options that are there. So let's actually fix this one. I'm gonna zoom in a bit on this guy. So what it did is it fit it to the frame. I made a tall frame, it's a wide image, and it made sure that the entire image was showing. But what I really wanted was it to fill that frame. So ask yourself, what's important? Does the image dictate it, or is your layout, or your frames that you've created ahead of time dictate that? And keep in mind, I think I mentioned but I'm not sure that everything in InDesign lives in a frame, but if you notice I didn't create the frames and then drop the images in. We can do that, but we don't have to do that. I just brought in the images, and they created a frame for me in the background. In fact if I select this item, and I'm gonna use the Direct Selection Tool because that's how I select what's inside a frame. I'm gonna click on that item, and hopefully you can see that this is the size, or this is the image itself, this kind of beige outline that's here. So I have the image selected. If I delete that, I now have that image frame that I could have drawn with this tool. But I didn't, I didn't have to do it. Now I can, like I said I could create this, drag out a tool, and then put an image inside it. I could even have it selected, and when I place that image, tell it Replace Selected Item. It will automatically work its way into this frame. But I don't need to, I'm gonna let InDesign do that for me. So I'm actually gonna undo, get back to where we had that image sitting inside here. And the other thing is, I switched to that Direct Selection Tool to grab the image, but you can instead just leave the Selection Tool here instead of the Direct Selection Tool, and roll over this image, and when I roll over this image, if this is turned on which should have been on by default, but it's not, I'm gonna come in here to the Content Grabber. So under the View menu, under Extras, Hide and Show Content Grabber. By default it's usually on. What happens when I roll over an image, even with that Selection Tool, is this Content Grabber, or what I like to call the translucent bagel shows up. And it says, oh actually maybe you want to work with the content instead, so if I click on that, I'm actually selecting the image but I didn't have to switch to the Direct Selection Tool. And if I click on the frame, now it's back to the Selection Tool. So it kind of goes back and forth between those two tools without you having to switch the tools. So I tend to leave that on. Some people hate it, so I have it on, so I can move those items around and not have to keep switching those tools. So let's actually fit this. I actually wanted this to fit the frame. So I'm gonna select the item, and I'm going to go up under the Object menu, and come down to Fitting, and I'm gonna tell it that I want to fill the frame proportionally. So I want to fill it edge to edge and proportionally. Now that might not be the exact portion of the image that you wanted. It automatically centered it up, but if I roll over the Content Grabber and click, I can see the outline of the image itself, and now I can move where that image sits inside that frame. So I've got a couple different options. I can just click and grab, and if I just hold on for a brief second, like I click and just pause for a brief second, I suddenly see the outline of this entire image, so now I can actually see what I'm doing. And if I hold down the Shift key, then I don't have to worry about it dropping down too low below the frame, because I definitely, it's right to the size of the frame. I don't want it dropping down below, especially if that frame is going to have a border around it, it's gonna be very obvious that the image didn't fit to the size. So I'm gonna hold down the Shift key and just move this around, or I can use my arrow keys if I want. And just move that until it fits exactly how I wanted. So I'm gonna look at that and say, okay that's great. That took a little bit of time, I'm gonna show you how to set that up in a second so it's automatic, and it always does it the way you want it to. So a couple other things that I can do is when I have an image and I want to crop it a little differently, I again need to grab it either with the Content Grabber or the Direct Selection Tool. And if you are using the Direct Selection Tool, know that the first time you hit the Direct Selection Tool after having the frame selected, I'm not actually selecting the image yet. What I am selecting are the actual handles on the frame itself. So the first thing it sort of drills into is it starts from the selection, and then when you choose the Direct Selection Tool it says, oh maybe you want to work with the content of the frame, the actual what makes up the frame. The points and the segments, but that's not what we want, we want to click one more time to where we're actually working with the image itself. And that's why I love the Content Grabber because I don't have to click two times just to get to an image. So I'm gonna go back to the Selection Tool, roll over the Content Grabber. It automatically goes right to the image, not the frame and the points and all that, and now I want to change how this image sits in the frame. So the frame is set, this is exactly how I want the frame, but I just want to crop the image a little differently. So I'm gonna go ahead and grab one of these handles, and I'm gonna hold the Shift key to constrain proportions, and I might even hold down the Option or the Alt key which will move it from the center outwards. Because maybe I like the way it's centered, I just need to crop off a little bit all the way around. So I'm holding down the Option or Alt key and the Shift key at the same time, and also if I do it again, pause just briefly, I can actually see it happening. I'm gonna let go of the Option key or the Alt key so I'm actually just working with the Shift key, and then I'm going to grab this image, and just keep moving it until I get it cropped how I want. So maybe I just want it off to the side a little bit, like that. So once I do that I could say, okay I like that but maybe the frame wasn't set completely in stone, or maybe it's just too tall. We've decided it doesn't fit what I need, and I'm going to just grab that frame, let it pause again a second so I get that preview, and just bring it down. So the image stays but the frame gets manipulated. So keep in mind there's actually two frames happening here. There's the frame, and then there's the image itself, so I kind of think of it like sometimes like a mat if you're mounting into a frame a photo, and you've got the mat, so you've got the image and you've got the mat, so the frame here works as the mat. You're moving it around or you might change the size of the photo by reprinting that photo, right? So kind of keep in mind that way. So now we might have it setup, and we go okay great I like the proportion, I like the size of the frame, and I like the way the image is in the frame, but now I want all of it to smush down smaller. So I want to grab this item with the Selection Tool, so I want to make sure I don't hit the center piece at all, so come over here and select this, and I want to size it down. So to do that I need to hold down the Shift key to constrain my proportions, if I want to do that, but I also need to hold down the Command key, or the Control key on a PC, and that basically is going to move both items together. The frame and the image itself. So I'm gonna click and hold, and drag down, and size it down. All right so, and again, I can keep working everything individually. I can change the size of the frame, I can click on the image, change the size of the image. Move it around as needed, and then when I have it like I like it, I can hold down the Command or Control key, and the Shift key, and size it back up. So it's a little bit of a little hand gymnastics going on trying to get those to move around, but it becomes habit after awhile. So, that's how we can place those. Let's go back to this guy here, though I want to make sure that next time I place an image, a tall image with a wide, or place a wide image in a tall frame, that it automatically stays how I want it. So I need to set a couple of settings. Instead of having to select it, go up to Object and Fitting, and tell it to Fill Frame Proportionally. I want it to do that automatically on the fly. I'm gonna delete this guy, and move him off to the side. So to do that I want to set a preference. When you're setting preferences, and this is pretty much throughout InDesign altogether, is if you have no document open at all, it will, if you set a preference, it becomes the default behavior for all new documents you create from that point forward. If I set a preference with nothing selected, but a document open, it becomes the default behavior for this document. If I have something selected, I'm only affecting the object I have selected. So in this case, I said for all this, for this document, every time I put a new image in here, I want it to fill the frame proportionally. So I make sure I have nothing selected so I'm just gonna click off. Go up under the Object menu, and come down to Fitting, and at the very bottom is Frame Fitting Options. So this is sort of the same thing we saw in the Fitting menu, but we can set this ahead of time. So I want to tell it that I automatically want the fitting to fill the frame proportionally. I also want to fill it from the center outwards. Now you might know that all your images are off to the side, and you want to crop it slightly differently. That's fine. You also might know that you have, say an eighth of an inch all the way around that you're never going to use. Maybe you're working images that were slides at one time, and they've actually got the image, the information all the way around the side, and we want to crop that out. We can set a crop amount. And the last thing is, we can choose Auto-Fit. I'm gonna leave that off for a second to show you the difference with and without it. So I'm gonna say OK, I'm gonna go ahead and place another image. Let's actually find that same image. And I'm gonna say OK, and I'm gonna hold down my Shift key, so I get that nice tall frame, and when I let go, that frame is automatically there. It's centered like we told it to, it filled the frame proportionally. I don't have to change it afterwards. Now I just need to make it look good inside that frame that's there. Now, what happens is, if I change the size of this frame, and let's actually make it bigger here, when I do that, now I have that extra gap again and that's because I don't have Auto-Fit turned on. So with Auto-Fit turned on, I'm gonna undo that, and I'm gonna come over to my Auto-Fit options here. Which is, oops, gone because it doesn't have enough room to display everything. So I'm gonna actually come up to the Fitting menu, because that's where it lives, and our Frame Fitting Options, and I'm gonna tell it Auto-Fit on this one. So now what happens if I make that frame bigger, the image continually will, is continually filling that frame, and as I size the image up, or the frame up, the image sizes up with it. So I never get those white frames off to the side, or that white space off to the side, and that's because I have Auto-Fit. So again if I go with nothing selected under the Fitting menu, under the Frame Fitting Options, I can tell it Auto-Fit, so now that's automatically there, everything I place. So let's go ahead and delete all that. Gonna go back and we're just gonna grab a few images. And I'm gonna say, okay this one is a wide image, that's fine, but I do want this one tall. I'm gonna hold down the Shift key and we'll put that over here. And this one's definitely a wide one so let's actually put this guy here. And maybe I want it wide but I don't want it to be that tall, so I'm gonna hold down my Shift key, and we'll just make it cram inside there, that looks pretty good. We've got another panorama here, and then we'll put this guy in here just completely as it was. So there I have it, everything is completely filled to the size, and also if I change this image size here, and I decide I want to start lining these guys up, because I already have that option on, that Auto-Fit option, I never get those blank spaces that are behind those images. So that's a couple different ways that we can crop that, and I'm gonna talk a little bit in a little while about collages and how to make some collages. That I just laid out visually, and we just kind of threw it on the page, but I'm gonna talk about a couple different ways to make collages in just a little while. First I want to talk about what actually happened when we put that image in there. So, by default I have put an image here but I basically only put sort of like a library item that's here. It's a placeholder, it's a low resolution placeholder, and so I'm gonna open up a panel that I need to use a lot, which is Links. So I'm gonna open that up and just pull those down so we can see it. Actually I'm gonna pull the Links panel completely off. And just let it float off to the side here. So what happens when you place an image in here? It doesn't actually put the whole image in there. Like I said, it uses a low resolution placeholder, but it references the file. So if you've got this massive Photoshop file sitting here, you can put it in here, but your InDesign file doesn't get huge and bloated, and that's a great thing. Because it's basically saying, yeah this is what it looks like, and I'm just giving you that image to look at, but here's where the actual file is, so that when I go to print or I go to output my PDF, or whatever, it's going to reference that back, and then it's gonna grab that PSD file with 1,800 layers in it. Maybe not 1,800, that's a lot, 20 layers, and it's gonna grab all that information, and all the information that you have in that stacked PSD file now can, or you can strip it out of, but all that information goes into that PDF, so that you have access to that later on. So all the little things that you want to do to it. You can turn layers on and off, you can do that even in a PDF. So again it's just putting a placeholder and then it's gonna reference the actual file, and all that information will go into that output file instead of bogging down your InDesign file so that when you're trying to work you're not trying to work with these massive Photoshop files and actually move the real thing around. So, what happens when you place an item is it gets put into this Links panel. And so it basically shows you what your file looks like and what page each of those are on, and these are hyperlinks, so if you want to actually jump right to it, you can click on it and it will jump to it a different page if it's on a different page and in this case it went ahead and it even selects the graphic itself, the image itself. So when I jumped to it, it automatically selects it. Now the great thing is sometimes you're thinking, what is this file? Especially in this case, they all look the same, right? I can't even see the full name unless I roll over it, and if my tool tips are on it will come up and show me the name of the file. Or I can come down here and see the name of the file as well. So, I can see which one that is in my document which is super helpful when I start to need to relink or realize which one needs to be worked on, or anything like that. So a couple of things that are in the Links panel is we have under my Panel Options, there's a lot of things to choose from. You can just use the default that's there if you want. Things that you want to make sure you have though are probably the location. So up in the top you don't have a whole lot. You're gonna have a Status, Name of course, Status, and the Page that it's on. That's basically all that's showing in this top section. The Show in Link Info is this whole bottom section. There's a lot of information there, and you don't necessarily need to have it all turned on. We could turn some of it off if you want, but things we do need to be aware of are things like Actual and Effective PPI, and that's the resolution. We're gonna talk about that in just a second. Some things like Dimensions, the file name is nice, knowing where it comes from, or what the path is is pretty good information to have. So again we could turn on all that information on or off. We can also choose what our panel options look like. Whether it's small rows or regular rows, or large rows. I want to look and see how big that is. We can see larger images that way as well. So again a few options that are here. Status is huge, because what's happening is it's telling it, okay this is where this image was when I placed it, but if I move that image somewhere else, maybe it's either on a different drive, or I just rearranged where it sat, it might say, hey you've moved this, it's missing, so you might either get a little thing that's telling me that it's been modified, so if I've gone into Photoshop and I've made a change to it, it's gonna give me an item, or an error message that tells me it's been modified. Or if there's a little stop sign, it's gonna tell me that it's missing, so it might have lost track where it is completely. So that's something that we need to keep in mind. So actually I can go out to wherever that's sitting and I'm gonna choose this item, and I'm gonna go ahead and Reveal in Finder. That's gonna show me where it is, and I'm actually gonna just grab this item and I'm gonna move it somewhere else. So I'm just gonna move it onto my Desktop, so now when I come back into InDesign, it's telling me it doesn't know where it is, so I need to relink that. I need to find where that is, either go put it back where it was, because it's expecting it to be where it was when I placed it, and that's what the Links panel is always keeping track of, is where is that actual file? So when it goes to print or output it knows what to grab. So I'm gonna go ahead and tell it to Relink. So I'm gonna go out and I'm gonna find where that was. It's out on my Desktop, and here's this thing and it tells me this is the name of it, and the name that it's looking for here. I can also do it in a folder if I have a ton of images I need to update. I can say relink to folder if all the images are there, the same name, it's the same thing. It's just I move the whole folder, it will relink to those as well. But we're just gonna do one image for now. It does say, Search for Missing Links in This Folder, so if there are other ones that are missing it will do a whole bunch at one time. Just gonna say OK, and now it's linked there, and now it knows it's actually sitting on the Desktop and not actually in the folder that it was originally. So again the Links panel is just keeping track of that, and the other thing that we really need to look at is resolution. So, when you are going to an output, wherever you're outputting, you have to kind of know what the resolution is of that either device, or if you're going to print, what the printer expects you to have, and you need to keep an eye on that. And you have two different resolutions, and the PPI is pixels per inch. If you're from a printing background you might call it DPI, though they're not actually the same, they're kind of used interchangeably at least when it comes to values. So there's dots per inch and pixels per inch, but PPI is what we're gonna be working with. And it shows me that the actual PPI of this image is 73. Why it's not 72 I have no idea, but normally, just an on screen resolution is 72, it might be 96 depending, but it's a low resolution image. And, what the effect of PPI is when I've taken that image and I sized it down, I was able to gain resolution, so you can't just go in, anybody that's worked in Photoshop knows that it's technically possible to go into Image Resolution and just type in a bigger number, but you're not actually bringing in any new resolution, you're not making it really any better. The software is sort of guessing what it would be look if it were higher resolution. So basically it says, this file is 73, which is fine, because it's actually a huge file. So you can download a 72 DPI image, but if it's this big, when I, if it's like, I don't even know how many, let's say it's 24,000 pixels wide, I'm not gonna use it that big in my document. I'm going to size it down. When I size it down I squeeze more resolution out of it, so that's what this second number is, and that's the one that's most important. So 260 is pretty high. So if I was going to print, 300 is kind of this magic number for printing, so I want to make sure that all my images have an effective resolution of 300-ish. And it depends, again, if I'm going to print I'm gonna talk to the person that's actually printing it and I'm gonna find out, what are the limitations? Where do I need to be? Do I need to hit that magic 300? Great, and I'll do that. So, if I'm going to digital, it depends what I'm doing. If I'm doing to Retina display, the Retina display is, I think, I want to say it's 266 is what the resolution is on a Retina display. That's almost print quality, so I'm still shooting for about 250, only because on a tablet, especially on the Retina one, you're going to zoom in. Especially if you're a photographer and you're putting your images in here, and not only are we looking at it nicely on the page, but maybe it's a PDF and they're gonna zoom in on that and they want to see all the detail in your image. Well keep in mind if you placed it at and it's 100% and they look at it, and then they decide to zoom it in, you're losing that resolution. So in your case you might want even higher resolution. You might want three or four hundred if you think, again, who is using it? How are they using it? If you think they're gonna zoom in and look at it, that's great. If you are, let's say selling real estate, they're probably not going to zoom in on the images because your images, if you've gone and had professional photography done, they might zoom in, but a lot of times real estate is a quick turn thing. You're out there with your phone camera or your point and shoot and you're shooting something really quick, because basically you just want to grab them to say, hey let's go look at this house. You're not trying to show them all the architectural details of that house, so your resolution might not need to be as high. My suggestion is, play around with a lot of the images that you have, and use it in the way you would use it, and see what you think you need, but this is where you keep an eye on that. Now there's no real way to change it. If 260 wasn't high enough, I either need to make my image smaller on the page, or I'm gonna have to start with a higher resolution image to start with than 73. And again, if I don't have that, I just don't have it. So that's how we actually tell what the resolution is, so that's something to keep in mind as well when we're placing it. So, in the case of these Iceland photos, let's go back to the first page. I have this blown up pretty big. In fact if I click on the image, then I go up to the size up here, well it's at 100%, but it is 16 by 11, so it's pretty wide. If I look at the resolution however, it's pretty good because the actual resolution of this image, because this is not the placeholder image, this is the final image, is 300. And I've placed it pretty much at size, it's 101%, so it's about the 300. I didn't get much change there at all, but I can also see that it's 5,000 pixels wide. So, again I knew I had a big enough document to start with. That's pretty high, I could print that and it would look good. If I'm just going to PDF, it's gonna be more than I need. But again, they can zoom in on it and it's still gonna be clear up to a certain zoom level as well.