InDesign Intro Course: Working with Photos & Graphics

Video Transcription

Let's see how to combine pixel-based graphics from Photoshop with vector-based graphics from Illustrator. I can click the Create New button or choose File > New Document. In here, I'm going to choose my print preset for the Letter size page (8.5" x 11"). I need to switch my units of measurement to inches.

It's going to be an upright, single page document. I'm going to check on Preview and I'm okay with a 0.5" margin all the way around. This layout is primarily one big photo with a little bit of text at the bottom and a logo. The photo will go edge to edge, so I need to set some bleed guides. I'll set the bleed guides at 0.125" all the way around.

I can bring in different file types, such as JPEGs, TIFFs, PNGs, Photoshop documents, and Illustrator files. I can create a box ahead of time for it using the Rectangle Frame tool and then place the photo or graphic in it. I can go to File > Place, double click on the photograph, and go to Object > Fitting. I can choose to fit the content proportionally to show the entire image, or choose Fill Frame Proportionally to cover the entire box.

If I go back and say "Fit", we'll see the entire image, but there will be empty portions of the box. If I choose "Fill", the whole thing is filled and part of the image is cropped off because it needs to match the aspect ratio.

When I'm using the Selection Tool, I can move the box around by dragging anywhere, except for the donut in the middle, which is called the Content Grabber. If I grab the Content Grabber, only the content moves, not the box. I can do this with double-clicking, too, switching between the content and the box.

If I have the box selected, I'm cropping the photo. When I click and hold, I get a nice overlay. If I don't like the delay that happens, I can go to InDesign Preferences and change the Live Screen Drawing to "Immediate". Then I can just click and drag and get an instantaneous live preview.

If I grab one of the brown handles to resize the photo, I have to be careful not to distort it. Holding shift keeps it in proportion. If I mess up the photo and don't hold shift, how do I get it back?

Depending on what you have selected, you will see the photo percentage of scale up top. If using the selection tool, click once on the box so the box blue handles are shown. You will always see a hundred percent because this is a scale feature. You can blow this up to 200 percent or you can scale it back down.

Double click to go into the box and select the content or use the content grabber to click on that. Now you will be seeing a percentage of that photo. With the link checked, which is normally the default, if you go to 100 it makes both of them 100, and you are seeing the photo at its original size. If you want to maintain proportions, hold shift.

To make sure it will print at a good resolution, check out the Window Info panel. This is a JPEG file and it comes in super big at 72 pixels per inch, which is often common for digital camera shots. Ideally for print, we want to print at 300 pixels per inch, but it doesn't matter what is actually in the file. What matters is the effective pixels per inch, which should be 300 or higher.

That's what we really care about because in this particular case, if I go for this image and I make it 100 (of its original size), that means it came in at 72 pixels per inch. It goes out at 72 pixels per inch, but I need to really shrink this thing down so that it ends up becoming high resolution. Let's say I make this 50, then it doubles resolution to 144. If I make it 25, I'm at 288, so I'm increasing the resolution.

The smaller it gets, the higher the resolution gets until I get to 300 or higher. So then, as long as I'm 300 higher, I know this is going to be good print quality for professional quality print (e.g. magazines, books, business cards). This is a really good panel to keep around; in fact, I would drag it over here to the side to dock it, and when you see that blue area highlight, just drop it in there and then you're one click away from being in the info panel. One click on the image will then show you that info and you can open and close that panel with one click to toggle that on and off.

Once again, that was found under Window and Info. So very useful for dealing with your graphics. Now, these original images are required to be kept around on your computer. You can't just delete the original file; the file is InDesign links to that file. It does not embed that document, although that is an option; it's not how we normally work, so we are linked to these graphics.

We can show these by going to Window and Links. Now I have this panel over here on the right, so I could also just click on that once to show it, and here we can see where this image is and all the details about this. So we can see where it is on my computer (which we can also find out when I hover over this image; that will also tell me where this is located).

In this info area (which might be collapsed, and we can expand it here) it tells you all sorts of things and that's another place where you can actually find out the input resolution (which is actual) and the output resolution (which is effective). You can see the pixel dimensions of that and where it is, but even if this is closed up here, you can still hover over it to see where it's supposed to be located on your computer. And you do need to keep that image around; don't go throwing that away. If you throw it away, the only thing that you're going to have in InDesign is a low quality preview. Under View, we can actually change our display performance from the default Typical Display (a high quality display) to Typical Display.

By default, InDesign will go to a high quality display, which needs those files to be around and linked, for even the display quality to look good. In Typical Display, you're going to see a lower quality display; it won't look as good, although this is a high resolution image, so it doesn't actually look too bad. But the High Quality Display does look better.

Let me zoom in so you can see this and let's switch this back over to Typical. Typical is more pixelated, and depending on the image that you're bringing in, it might be even more pixelated if you're starting with a lower resolution original. But what you're seeing here is just a preview that's actually built into the InDesign document when you're in Typical Display.

Why would you ever go to Typical Display? If you find that High Quality Display is slow (if you're moving around, zooming in and out, if it's slow) you can lower your resolution down to Typical Display and it will be faster moving around. You don't always need to be in High Quality.

Now, if your computer is fast and you're moving around just fine, it's okay to leave it at High Quality, but if anything slows down you can go to Typical. I wouldn't bother with Fast Display; it's so fast they don't show pictures. It's also warning that if you ever accidentally get into this display somehow (maybe you accidentally hit that keyboard shortcut).

Don't freak out, your images didn't go away—they just aren't being displayed. You can always go back into the Typical or High Quality Display and your images will come back. The only thing embedded in this document is a lower resolution preview, so if you need to make a print or PDF of this document, the only thing in the InDesign file is a low resolution preview—which is not good enough for a good quality print or PDF. That's why we need to keep those files around.

In case we ever need to modify that image, we need to be able to edit it back in Photoshop or Illustrator. Let me go ahead and delete this, and when I delete it, notice how it goes out of the Links panel—so we're no longer linked to that image. I want to bring in a different photograph here and I know I want this to cover the whole document. So, I'm going to use my Rectangle Frame Tool and drag out a box that covers the entire area, including the bleed area. I'm going to place my image into there and I want this photo to cover the whole area.

This is a very large image, so I want to see most of it. I don't want to do Fit because that will create empty spaces at the top and bottom. Instead, I want to do Fill, which will fill all of that area and cover the entire bleed area. I can further crop this if I want to. I can click on the Content Grabber, and when I do, I see my brown handles. If I want to zoom out, I'll hit my Command minus (Mac) or Control minus (Windows) and hold Shift as I do this. I can scale this up or down a bit if I want to change the scale.

I don't want to go smaller because I already got as small as I can. I actually want to crop off a little bit down here, so I'm going to hold Shift and pull the bottom handle and take a bit off there. I can also move this around within the box. When I have the photo in the box selected, I can use my arrow keys to nudge it around. Shift arrow goes a bit faster than the regular arrow keys. If I want to see what this looks like without all the guides, I can go to the bottom of the toolbar and click and hold on Normal Mode and switch to Preview Mode.

This will preview how it looks when it prints. A nice thing about Preview Mode is that it hides the bleed area. In Normal Mode, you can see it with the bleed and in Preview Mode you see it without. If I want to see it with the bleed but without all the guides, I can switch to Bleed. This will show me without all the guides, and I can make sure I've filled out the bleed area. This is previewing exactly what I'm going to get when I print, but technically speaking, the printer will print on a bigger sheet of paper that has the additional bleed, and then they'll cut it off. To switch in and out of Preview Mode, I can hit W. The W key will go in or out of Preview.

Here I'm hitting it once, here I'm hitting it again, so you can go in and out of that mode as much as you want. It's just a way to preview. If you want to design in this mode, you can. I still want to do some stuff with my guides, so I'm going to switch back into normal mode, which I could have done by hitting W on my keyboard. Before I continue with this layout, let me just show you one other way that we can bring things in instead of making a box ahead of time. You can place your photos or graphics in.

I'm not going to make a box, I'm not going to select the box, just going to choose my photo and if I drag to place this in, it brings it in at the size that I'm dragging and places it where I want. So I can choose where I want it to go and how big I want it to go. If I'm bringing in something like a logo, which I want to bring in right here, I can go to File, Place, and if I want to bring it in at the size that it was built, then I can just do that. I just click, and that works for any kind of graphic. It works for photos, Illustrator files, it doesn't matter what kind of file it is. Just when you're placing a graphic, you can click to bring it in at the size it was built.

If I bring that in for like let's say a photograph though, it's huge - it goes way off the edge of my canvas area. So if I go to place in let's say that original photo, it's huge, it's just giant. So when I click, it goes well off the edge of my page, which is not something that I want. So when placing really big stuff, it would be better to drag rather than to click. If I'm placing that logo, so File, Place, bring in my logo, if I drag that out, I can size that however big I want.

But if I wanted to bring it in at the size it was built, let me undo that, I would click and it places it in at the size it was built. I can now position this here. Now this is a vector graphic, unlike a pixel-based graphic where I have to think about resolution. Vector-based graphics are crisp and clean, and there is no pixels that make them up, so I don't need to worry about resolution.

There won't be any resolution to see in the info panel because it's a vector graphic. If I use my zoom tool, I'm going to drag to the right - you can actually drag to the left and the right using the zoom tool to zoom in and out of your document. If I drag to the right and I keep zooming in and I keep zooming in, you'll notice that even though I start to see some of the pixels in the photograph, I don't see any pixels here in the vector graphics, so it's always crisp and clean. That does assume that you are in the high quality display. If you're in typical display, you're going to see a pretty low res, crappy preview, but that is just a preview.

That is not how it's actually going to print or create a PDF. The full high quality display, that is actually how good it actually looks. So don't worry if the typical display doesn't look very good, that's just the embedded preview. Using the full high quality display, you're going to see just how good something looks. Now, in high quality display, if something looks bad, well then you know it's actually bad. So I'm going to zoom back out and show the whole page. Here I do want to bring in some text, so I'll actually just copy paste in some text.

So I'm going to use my type tool and I'm going to drag out a box and I'm going to align this box to the bottom of the margin area and make it the full width of the margin area, so that I can make sure it's the same kind of spacing and that it's centered within the page.

I've already got the type of text typed out here, so I'm just going to copy and paste it in. This text is black on a black background, so that's not good; we need to make it white. I'm going to do an Edit > Select All and then change the font color to white by selecting the paper color in the Character Options.

I'll also switch the typeface to Myriad and make the text bigger by increasing it to 15 points. To know exactly how big this actually is in real life, I can go to View > Actual Size. I also want to adjust the leading, which is the space between lines. To center the text, I'll switch to the Paragraph options and choose the Center option.

To align the text with the bottom of the margin guide, I'll use the Selection Tool and click on the Line Bottom button in the Control Panel, or I can go to Object > Text Frame Options and choose Bottom for the Vertical Alignment. Finally, I'll zoom out to show the whole layout in Preview mode and position the logo in the center of the page.

As I'm moving this around, I do see a pink guide. These are called Smart Guides and they are turned on by default. Smart Guides will try to help you line up with other things on the page, like margin guides or other text boxes. They'll help you to line up with the center. If the Smart Guides aren't helping you out, or it's hard maybe they're snapping to a bunch of other things, there is an Align panel. I can go to Window, Object and Layout, and Align. In here, I can click to scroll through the different options. All I care about is the setting right here - Align To. I want to make sure I see that I want to align to the page, and then I can align to the center of the page. Now it's possible you might also see these same alignment options up here in the control panel, but if you don't have a big enough screen, you won't be able to see those.

Now, once you've got this all done, I am linked to these two different assets. If you want to make a change, you can change those. Let's say, for example, this vector graphic. If you want to edit that, it would need to be edited back in Illustrator. If you were making a change to the JPEG file, you would be changing that in Photoshop. In Photoshop, although ideally you don't edit JPEG files, I know I placed a JPEG in here. If you were going to make further edits, ideally you'd convert that into a Photoshop file to maintain better quality moving forward.

As a shortcut, if you do this a lot, you can Option/Alt double-click on Windows directly on the image in the layout. You don't even have to go to the Links panel. That will do the same thing as clicking the Edit button. When you're all done, make sure you save. That's how InDesign knows you made a change, and that the file on your computer has changed, and InDesign has updated the preview.

Now, what happens if you didn't have the layout open and you didn't click that button? What if somebody, whether it was you or somebody else, made a change to that image? Let me save this as and I'm going to call this "Dan iWorks Ad" and save that. So let's say I close it and somebody's working on that logo, whether it's me or somebody else, they make a change and they save.

All right, so what happens when InDesign opens back up? So, you open up your layout and it says, "Hey, zero links are missing but one is modified. So, what do you want to do? If you want to see what happened, actually click "Don't update links" like don't update them yet, because when you say don't update, nothing changes here. Now, you can see in your Links panel that this is the link that's been modified. And while you can see it and I can actually go there, let's say this was a multi-page document, you can click on the page number and it'll actually go there and highlight that image. So you can find it.

You can then double click to update and you'll get to see that change. If I let me close this here, if when you open this up if you clicked update, you wouldn't be able to see what's changed, like it would just, I mean, you'd see it technically speaking that you'd see the change, but you wouldn't know what changed, like did it move, did the cropping change? You wouldn't know. You wouldn't have been able to see it update in front of you. So, if you know everything's safe, if it's okay, then it's okay to update all the links.

But, if you're not sure, if you don't know what changed, say don't update so that you can actually see it and you'll see the before and then when you update by double clicking on that alert icon, you'll see the change and you'll make sure that it was a good change that you're okay with.

Now, in that message that I opened up, it said zero missing but one was modified. So, what happens if a link goes missing? So, let me save that file and close it. I'm going to go to my computer here to these class files and so this was this iWorks logo right here and let's say somebody renames it, so logo maybe they say updated and so they changed the name of that.

When you go to open up that file it's going to say, "Hey, this document contains a link that is missing. You can find or re-link it using the Links panel." So, it says this is what it was called and it doesn't know where it is. It's missing, so it can't do the good preview because it doesn't have access to the original file. And if I double click on it, it wants me to know where is this? You tell me, I have no idea. You renamed it, you moved it somewhere else, where did this thing go? So then you choose the new location or new file name and it'll re-link and everything will be good again.

So, you can always update your graphics. You can always go find them, but my best recommendation is to keep a folder for each project. In that folder, keep your InDesign layout and keep all the graphics that you want for that project. So, you don't leave these scattered about your hard drive, forgetting that you're using them, maybe you update it and you forget that it was used in your layout. It's best to keep it organized into one folder and that way, you can't have files go missing or accidentally update things you didn't mean to update. Keep them in a project.

So, keep one folder with your InDesign file and all your different assets, all your different graphics, and that will make your life easier. So, hopefully, this has been a good start for showing you how graphics work with, whether it's vector-based or pixel-based, and you can create your layouts with graphics and text, bringing it all together. That's really what InDesign excels at is bringing everything together in one place.

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