Working With Images: Design Your Own Postcard In InDesign

1. Working With Images Intro: Hi. Welcome to working with images. Design your own postcard using in design. In this 40 minute class, you'll learn the skills to design a postcard of using adobes in designs. Offer. I'm Stacy Fredericks, owner and graphic designer at Waypoint Creative Services, and I'll be guiding you through these lessons throughout this class. I'll introduce you to the basics of working with images and in design, the useful options for important different image types. How to place multiple images at once, and the tools and design has available to make working with images a breeze. I can't wait to see what you create, so let's get started. 2. Lesson 01 Image Placement Basics: Hi, everyone. Welcome to lesson one. Image placement basics. If you haven't already, let's fire up into sign and hopefully you'll have a test image ready that you can kind of follow along in. Place your Imogen and go over some of these things with us. Um, so I'm going to start by placing just 15 by seven image into in design. So let's go to file and then you're gonna go down to place. You want to use the key command, its command D or control de on the PC. I have my image ready here. When I load my image in, you'll see my cursor changes to this little thumbnail of the image that I selected. So I'm just gonna click, and that will automatically place in at its full size and correct proportions. Let's just on do this quick so we have our thumbnail back. If you have a specific size that you want to place your image got, you're gonna when you click, you're gonna hold down, you'll see that little cross appear and it says 0% on the X M. Boy, we're gonna start dragging, and this will automatically keep your image proportions so you do not have to hold down shift to keep your image proportions, and you'll see the percentage in the bottom corner. There is changing it, as I put out. So 100% is, of course, our full five by seven. If you want to a little smaller, we can't something just dropped in there at 75%. One thing to keep in mind as a best practice when you're placing your images and in design . If you know that you only need your image to be, say, a one inch by two inch picture, it's best practice to open your original image in photo shop or other photo editing software and a crop it to the size that you need or close to the size that you need, especially if it's very large. Because if you have an image stuff and eight by 10 originally and you go to police in in design and you only need it to be like one by two, that's quite a bit of difference. If you place the full eight by 10 image in there and just down five in divine, your final file that you open is going to be a lot larger because you have so many large images in there. If you cropped them down to the actual size, it will help reduce your file size. So it is the best practice that whenever you can crop your images first before placed them in in design. That being said in design is great for cropping or adjusting your photos to a certain extent once they're in there. One thing that a lot of people find frustrating about in design is these two boxes that you get with your image. So with the selection tool, if you click your image, you get this blue box around it, and this is called the Image container. So this box just controls the container that your image is inside off. I want to make my image bigger, and I have my selection tool. Click on the image and I go like this. My image doesn't actually get larger because what I'm doing there is Onley selecting the image container box, not the image itself. If I want to select the actual image, can grab my direct selection tool, Click on the image and you'll see that the brown or orange box is selected, and with that, I can change the size of my image. Now, I don't want to have to keep switching back and forth between the selection tool in the direct selection tool every time that you want to change our image size, it would just be frustrating and annoying to have to change your blue box and your orange box separately each time. So this time we're gonna do is we're gonna grab our selection tool, click on her image no hold command shift and then click our corner simple and that will adjust both. They can image container box and the image holding down shift keeps your image proportions . And holding command allows you to select both of your boxes. We don't hold down shift. Just hold command. It'll s move both around, but it doesn't keep our image proportions so we can end up with our image. Is looking a little funky. We don't want that couple other ways. Teoh, get ahold of your image box as opposed to your image container box. You can, of course, as I showed originally grabbed the direct selection tool click that gives you your orange box with the selection tool selected. If you mouse over the center of your image, you'll see this little circle and hand up here that allows you to select your image and move it around. And last but not least again with your direct selection tool. If you double click on your image, the little hand also appears and allows you to move your image around outside of its container box. So one last thing that I want to go over for lesson one, um, that is the info box. So we're gonna go up to window and in vote to open that up. If you don't have it in your toolbar here already, right, Click on her image and you'll see some information appear here. So what this tells you is the actual PP I or resolution of your image. So at five by seven, my image is 300 peopie i, and below that, you see the effective PP I So in this case it's 3 19 So what this is telling us is that at the size that I have may image place here in design, this is what the resolution actually is. So if your image is smaller than your original. When you place it, the effective PP, I or resolution will be higher then the original. If you place your image and you make it a lot bigger than its original size, you're going to see this number go down. So let's show an example here, so I have my image. I'm gonna make it smaller. Bring it down to this. You'll see. Now, at three by two, my image is 650 people. So it's pretty high resolution now if I bring this up to bigger than five by seven, which is my original size. So now we're eight. By like 5.75 my resolution is going down. So you really need to keep an eye on the resolution of your images because, um, especially for print, you want to your resolution to be at least 150 p p. I. And if you're making your images, if you have smaller images and you need them to be larger and you're in design document, you can certainly do that. But if the resolution goes below 150 then your printed images may start to look pixelated, so just keep that in mind is the best practice. When you're placing your image, isn't it designed? All right, so that's it for lesson one image placement basics, and I will see you and listen to. 3. Lesson 02 Show Import Options: Hi, everyone. Welcome to lessen. To show import options, the show import options box can be found in the bottom left corner of our place menu. So when we go file place Place menu opens up. Sit down here in the bottom left, you'll see show import options by default. It's unchecked, so if you don't have a check box there, just click on that. And then we're gonna select an image in this case of J. Peg and hit open, and we'll get this additional dialog box that pops up called image import options. The options on this screen will vary depending on the type of file that you're importing for J. Pegs, for example, will just have some basic image and color options. Um, but where I find this most useful is when I'm placing multi page PFC. Or Photoshopped files PSC's. I was gonna cancel out of this, and I'm going to show you what in design does with the PSD by default, and then I will show you some of the options that we can do with show import options selected. So it's gonna shut this off. Grab this PST here that I have this lion close cropped him, and he's got a green backer. So we're gonna hit open Place him in there and you'll see a placed. You see, my file was placed with the green background as well as line. Now, I know for making this file that I actually have two layers in there. The green background layer is separate from the close cropped flying. So what I'm gonna dio this time is I'm gonna go file place. Let that same lyon dot pst, turn on show import options, it opens, and you'll see we have this layers tab, and in this tab, we're able to toggle on and off the different layers of our PSD file. And if you're like me and you didn't name your layers in a way that helps you know what they are, we have this little preview over here in the left that the last U to see which layers everything toppled out enough. So in this instance, I don't want the green background. So I'm gonna shut off my layer one here and then I'm gonna hit, okay? And this time, when I place it, we don't have our green background and you can see that it's transparent there now for pdf . When you place the pdf, you're going to find different tub. So let's grab this. PDF, I've got here open our import options. We have a general top, so under the general tab, you're going to find options for your pages and which pages you would like to place into your document. So we can see here that we have a total of five pages in this document and by default, it selected to import just the previewed page. So right now we're on page one. Say, if I wanted to import page three, I could talk to Page three. If you've got a document that's like 100 pages and you want it to police page 50 you can just type that right in there and it will go to that page. You also have the option to select all of the pages. So that would place all five pages are document or a range of pages who say that I want to place uh, pages 123 I can type that range in there. And when I hit OK, pages 123 will load in for me to place You'll also find, um, Crop two options here. So even talk. Go through these and you'll see the dotted line around your document. Change according to which crop option you have selected. So by default in design crops to the crop box of your document and in most cases, that's where I leave it, because that will bring in your full your full size document. So if it's a NATO have 11 that'll bring it out and have love. And the final option that we have here is whether or not we want a transparent background, so that could be useful in a lot of cases. But in this case, I'm just gonna place my documents with a white background. So you click that off and then I'm gonna hit. Okay, Now, one thing that does not do for us is it doesn't have the little, like weep placed multiple images, which you'll see later on. Um, when it loads in our little thumbnail here, it'll have, like, a little number next to it so that we can see how many images we have to place. Um, and with the pdf, Even though he selected to place three pages, it doesn't put that little three there, so we know that there's three pages, so we just placed one. Um, n you'll still see. Okay, there's more there and click please to. And then when you only have one left, it'll just have a little a adobe sign instead of a plus sign that was there before. There we go. So those are just a few of the import options that are available. The ones that I've used most commonly throat my design experience. If you have different file types that you plan on using to create your post current product or whatever project you're working on, um, it's not about idea to take some time to just familiarize yourself with the options that are available for each given file Type that you're gonna be using doesn't necessarily mean that you have to use the options, but just see what's there and see if there's anything that might be useful to you and you have any questions about import options, please leave a comment below, and I'll be happy to answer them for you. Next up will be less than three. We will learn about placing multiple images in in design at once, 4. Lesson 03 Placing Multiple Images: Hi, everyone. Welcome to less than three, where we're gonna learn about placing multiple images at once. Okay, so we've learned about placing individual images and in design, and we've learned about the different options that are available when replacing our images . So next we're gonna move on to placing multiple images at once. So this and come in handy for a lot of documents that up, Uh, in any instance, where you have to place more than one image or, you know, there's going to be like, ah, group of images or what have you on a single page. So we're gonna go about this in the same way as we would if you're going to place one image . So let's hit command E. And this time I'm going to select multiple images. So to do that, um, you're gonna hold down shift, you know, click the images that you want to place. I mean to have your 12345 And if I went out of like, skip some because it's a couple years and I don't want to grab right now, I'm just gonna hold down command as well and click that and that will skip over those. It's the one thing to remember here is that, um because in our last lesson, we were using show important options. It stays on. So we want to remember to shop that off. In some cases, you might need it. If you know, there's something that you need toe, uh, set in your import options. Go ahead and leave it on. But in this instance, I'm gonna shut it off because it will pop up for each individual image. So if I leave this on, it'll come up six times. Just gonna shut that off and then hit open. So your cursor over will show a preview of the first image that you're ready to place as well as you see there in rockets. There's a number six that's telling us we have six images ready to place in here. She can use the left and right arrow keys to toggle through your images. And if you come across one say I'm like, Oh, I didn't actually grabbed that one. So I'm just gonna hit escape and you'll see it. It disappeared and your number decreased by one. So we now have five images placed in some six, so we could simply click five times. And police are five images just haphazardly. But what if we won't play small it once? So I'm just gonna hit Command Z and on do this and you see, you have a five images there. What's gonna hit it again? So I get my 6th 1 back so it in design allows us to do is to click and drag and create a box just like we would have replacing one image. But instead of just letting this go on placing one image, we're going to use the Cherokees. You see, it's starting to put divides. So right now, this is allowing us to put two images in those boxes. We know we have six, so we want. Now we have three. Then if you press the up and down arrows, you can divide your box into Cole's. So now we have six squares, so that will place all six of our images in those squares Now, before we let go, the other thing that we want to do here is adjust some of the spacing between the images. So if you hold down the command key and use your upper down or left or right arrows, you'll change the spacing between your images. So I'm just gonna hit my up key here and you'll see that space between my image is slowly increasing. If we hit our down arrow, it starts decreasing again. And the same goes for our left and right arrow keys. So I'm gonna make this space fair with smaller there their skill ago of my community. And then I'm going to release my mouth. They'll see our six images are policed. Now, I look at this and I'm like, OK, so our images are in square boxes, but none of them are actually square thistles where our image fit. Options come into play to replace multiple images. They're in squares are images are not square. They do not feel the boxes. So we're gonna click our first image here and you'll notice when I select an image, you get some buttons. Appear up here in your in your menu, not pertain to your images. The 1st 1 is Phil frame proportionately. If we click that with her image selected, you'll see that our image expanded to fill that box proportionately. So it keeps your original image proportions. So we're just gonna double click on here and you'll get you'll see the brown or orange box that's actually your image box appear and you'll see that it kept the proportions of of your picture so that waas the first option feel frame proportionately now, with that first image still selected. If we hit the second button up here, it's called Fit Content proportionately. So what that's going to do is it's going to fit your image to the container box. So if we click that, that's going to take us back to what we originally had with the image fit inside that square but not filling it. I don't like the way that look, so let's go back to fill for in proportionately you go. I believe this guy as an example of fit content. Fortunately, which is what it's set you by default, pick this 3rd 1 and will go up here. This is fit, content to frame, so if you click that, you'll see that our image actually stretched to fit that frame, so it's no longer keeping the correct proportions. And if you don't, if we double click on that like I just did and our orange box comes up, you'll notice that it's exactly square, the same as that content boxes. Our fourth option here allows us to fit the frame to the content. So watch our blue box here and you'll notice our image doesn't change. But the content box around it does, so that could be useful. If, um, if you are trying to, ah, resize your image or whatever and you accidentally grab your blue box instead of your orange box, you can hit that, and it'll bring things your box back to your image size. So what this final option does. So what are final option here does is it. Centers are content in the frame, so I'm just gonna double click on this and move my image up to the top here and actually even also move it over to the left a little bit. It's now, if I click on this and I have this button, it automatically moves it back to the center. So that's it for less than three, placing multiple images at once. As always. If you have any questions, please drop them in the comments below, and I'll be happy to answer them for you. Next up and Lesson four, we're gonna learn about the gap tools 5. Lesson 04 The Gap Tool: Hello again. And welcome to lesson for the Gap tools. Have you ever looked at bunch of images placed together in a document on their own nice and evenly spaced out and wondered, how long did it take them to get those spaces? All exactly the same. The trick here is in designs. Gap Tool. This tool allows us to adjust the space between our images or the gap so we don't have to individually select each image and try to get the gaps between them to be the same size. So you see here when I most over the image, I can't select it. But when I mess over the gap, this gap tool icon appears and the gap is highlighted in gray so we can see it a little bit better. You can adjust this basis here. You can adjust your spaces in here while keeping your lines. Exactly the same with now. A few things you should know about the Gap tool. I'm gonna leave this here. I'm just gonna squirrel down. We're gonna place are six images in again in our squares. 2345 placer, Six images. We've got even spaces between them. There you let that go? We can see the images aren't feeling the boxes. So with the mall selected still, we're gonna go up to fill frame proportionately. There we go. There all filled out, and I'm gonna grab our gap tool and start making some adjustments. So I was gonna click and start dragging. So you noticed that instead of actually adjusting the image, it's adjusting the image container box That's important to keep in mind. When you're using the Gap tool, it does not adjust your images by default. It adjusts the image container box. So the blue box. But when we were playing around with this one up here, you could see that the image was also being adjusted. So how we're going to do that is just let me hit on do here. I'm going toe select all of my images down here and we're gonna click this little box right here that says auto fit so it makes content resize as frames resize. Turn that on. Now we'll grab our gap tool again and we'll go to a justice and you can see now that our images are being resized as we adjust our gap. Let that go. So you notice as well with the capsule. If I click up here and I want to change this gap between these two images, I start dragging. It's also adjusting the two images below. So everything in that column. But if I only want to just these two, what I can do is with that highlighted, I'm gonna hold my shift key, and I'm gonna pull that. So now this area and this area are no longer connected. Shift click here. Let's move that one of a little bit So you can see how this allows you to make some really compositions with your images. And you can also adjust the facing outside of your images. So because right here where I have highlighted, um, it's affecting all of these images these six that I just placed as well as the six that I had police previously. So if I take this and move it to the right, it's gonna just all of those and the same with in here. So the important thing to remember with the Gap tool is that once you place your images, you want to select mall and make sure this auto fit option is on. So there you go. That's quick overview of the Gap tool. If you have any questions about that, please drop them in the comments below and I will get back to you next. We're gonna move on to lesson five, our final lesson where we bring this all together and create a postcard. 6. Lesson 05 Bringing It All Together: everyone. Welcome to Lesson Five, our final lesson where we're going to bring everything we've learned in our previous lessons all together and create our postcards. So let's start by creating and new and design document, and we're going to make it 75 You can set your margins to quarter inch all way around and you bleed to an eighth of an inch all the way around. Nick. Great. So I've decided to do a postcard for a zoo, and as I'm sure you could tell from my previous lessons, going to be using some photos of alliance. So we're ready to go ahead and start placing some images in here are So I'm going to go file place, grab this lion PST here. I'm gonna turn on show import options. So I want to shut off this green background. So we just have Mr Lion here and hit. OK, bring us up to the corner click to release that now I'm gonna hold command option and shift and grab. This bottom quarter is gonna Oh, polities don't do that. Gonna hold command and shipped. I do not need hold option. It's gonna direct this down so that it extends through the bleed. He's been pretty good there. Just like that. One more time. And I'm gonna lock this because I want to play some more images in there, and I don't want to be moving him around cause I've got him positioned, I think right where I want to be. Now that that's locked. So hit command D. I think I'm gonna grab four images here. Scrap these top four gonna shut off show import options because I don't want that import options menu popping up for each image in the book to place open Are images air loaded in here ready to be placed. You can see the number four there showing how many we have. We could just toggle through these with our left and right arrow keys Here. I think we'll start with these guys. Click and drag and hair up, Erkki. It's on the left or right. Cherokees there. Those gaps in between there are quite large. So you're in a hole command. Make those because I didn't have my command held down there in that command. Make those a little bit smaller. I don't think I want not big hand with themselves. So that I can just let go and my images will drop in there. Perfect. So the first thing I want to do here with ease is send them to the back because I want them to be behind Mr Lying here so that he is showing in the front speech is a right click with all of those selected going to go to a range and send to back that. And there they go. And then I'm going to come up here again with all my images still selected. Gonna tell them to fill the frame proportionately? No. I'm gonna turn on auto fit so that we can do some gap adjustments here without mething up our photos in their box. It's too much. I can go ahead and select those grabber Gap Tool. He pulled these over a little bit. Go pull you down a little bit nice. And with shift selected, I'm just gonna just this slightly so that it's all centered of that ones. Let's give a little variation there. I thought looking. That's looking. Not so ready. The arena, Adam. Some final touches here zu logo and get a place in here quite large. So we're gonna make it a little bit smaller. They will put down here in the corner. Perfect. And there you have it. There's our postcard. So thanks for watching. And if you have any questions regarding this lesson or any of the previous lessons, please feel for you to drop comment below and all get back to you with an answer. And don't forget to share the completed projects. I can't wait to see what you create.