From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Cropping and fitting graphics - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Cropping and fitting graphics

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- [Instructor] When you import an image into an empty frame, it often doesn't appear at the correct size on your page. For example, let's go up to the layout menu and choose "next spread". Now, let's select this blank frame down here and place an image into it. I'll press command or C control D to open the play dialect box, and I'll choose one of these, say number three in this list. Because I know what this image is supposed to look like, I can tell that InDesign isn't showing me the whole thing. I need to figure out how to shrink the picture to fit inside this frame. It's important to remember that the frame is not the same as the image. They're two separate things, one inside the other, and you can select the image inside the frame with the selection tool in two different ways. You can double click on the image or just click once on this little donut-shaped icon in the middle. Now, I've selected the image inside the frame, and you can see the edge of the image way out here. It's a little hard to see at first, but it's much larger than the frame. When the image is selected, you can move it around inside the frame simply by dragging it, and you can scale it inside the frame by dragging one of the corner handles or changing the scaling field in either the control panel or the properties panel. For example, I'll change this to say 75%. Notice that when I did that, it scaled it from the upper left corner because the reference point was also set to the upper left corner on the left side of the panel. Then if you double click on the image again or press the escape key on the keyboard, it selects the whole frame again, and now we can change the size of the frame by dragging one of these side or corner handles. By resizing the frame, it crops the image differently. Actually, when I crop images like this, I like to use a little trick, click and hold down on the side or corner handle for just a moment or two before you drag. When you do that, you enter what's called the live screen mode, and you can see the whole image where the cropped out portions are a kind of ghosted back, and that can be very useful when you're cropping an image because you can get clear about what should and shouldn't be in the frame. Okay, in this case, what I really want to do is fit this image. I want to scale it down so that it fits inside the frame better. So I'm going to head up to the object menu and choose from the fitting sub menu. There are a bunch of different features here. For example, "fill frame proportionally" means make sure that the image fills the frame, even if some of the image is cropped out a little bit, it fills the frame. I should point out that the control panel actually includes all those same frame fitting features, but only when your screen is wide enough to show them. If you're working on a laptop, you may not be able to see these, but you can still find them in the menu or in the properties panel. Okay, this second button in the frame fitting section is fit content proportionally, which means scale the image up or down until it fits inside the frame, but make sure none of it gets cropped out, even if it leaves some blank areas in the frame. The third one, "fit content to frame", scales the image inside the frame to fit, even if that means scaling it disproportionately, and it's pretty rare that you'd want to use that, so I'm going to undo that with the command or control Z. Number four is "fit frame to content", and that does kind of the opposite. It changes the size of the frame so that it matches the current size of the image. That's super helpful. This one over here is "center content", that's obvious. It just centers the image inside the frame. Finally, down here is something called "content aware fit", which is just like fill frame proportionally, but it uses some AI to figure out the best placement of the image for you. It's not perfect, but it can be surprisingly good at finding what's important in an image and cropping to it. InDesign cropping and fitting features are essential for getting your images to look just the way you want them on your page. Take a few minutes to practice each of these techniques and you'll find yourself really heading toward InDesign mastery.

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