From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Adding or replacing graphics - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial

Adding or replacing graphics

“

- [Instructor] We are starting off where we left off in the last movie, and you can see that we're still zoomed in. So let's zoom back by going to the view menu and choosing fit page and window. There we go. Oh, and I just noticed that we still have this untitled document open over here. I don't need that anymore, so I can close that by clicking this little x in the tab. Now you may be tempted to copy graphics out of some other program and paste them in here, but don't do it, resist the urge. Instead, it's almost always better to place them. That is go to the file menu and choose place. Oh, but first I want to make sure I have nothing selected on my page. So I want to choose the selection tool. That's the black arrow tool up at the top of the tool panel, and then let's just click out here on the pace board or where there's no other objects just to make sure nothing is selected on my page. I'll explain why in a minute. Okay, now back to file menu and choose place. When you choose place, InDesign gives you a list of all the different files that you can place inside your InDesign document. In this case, let's go ahead and grab this logos file. It ends with .AI which means it's an Adobe Illustrator file. Then when you click open InDesign loads what's called the place cursor. This place cursor lets you insert or place this graphic inside of a frame that you already have, or it can create a frame for you. But if you look closely in the upper left corner of the cursor, you'll see dotted lines. If I move it on top of this frame over here, they become parentheses. That cursor means if I click right now, this image is going to go into that empty frame behind the cursor. If I move the cursor over here, it changes back because there's no empty frame. That sharp corner cursor means if I click, it's going to create a new frame for me like this. So you see it made a frame and put the image into it, but it's way too big. So I'll undo that with a command Z on the Mac or Ctrl Z on Windows, and that reloads the place cursor. Now instead, let's click and drag, that creates a frame letting us specify exactly how big we want this image to be. Okay, let's go get another graphic. I'll go to the file menu and choose place. This time we'll place the making bouquet file. That's a jpeg and I'll click open, what happened to my logo? Well, you'll see that the new image actually replaced that other logo because the frame was still selected. That's why I made that point about deselecting everything earlier. But that's okay because you can always undo mistakes in InDesign. Again, we'll press command or control Z to undo that. That not only puts the logo back, but it loads up my place cursor. So now let's click over on this frame on the right, the picture goes into the frame. It's too large for the frame, but we'll deal with that later. One other important thing I should point out here, and that is that InDesign is linking to the file on disc. Every time you place an image into InDesign, it doesn't actually embed the image into your document. It creates a link between the InDesign document and the high resolution file on disc, and you can see that link by opening the links panel, which you can find by going to the window menu and choosing links. So now here on the right side of the screen next to the properties panel, we have the links panel and we can see all the images that we've placed into this file. Because that JPEG is selected on the page, it's also selected here in the links panel. There's much more to say about pictures and graphics and links, and I'm going to be covering all of that in detail in a later chapter. For now, we finally have a document that has text and graphics, but it's definitely far from finished. Next, I'm going to show you how to move these objects around to get just the look you want.

Contents