From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Importing graphics - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Importing graphics

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- [Presenter] It's time to turn our attention to pictures, graphics, images, whatever you want to call them. I have my magazine file open from the exercise files folder, and I want to jump to the last spread of the document. So I'll click this little button in the lower left corner of the document window. That's the last spread button. Okay, now the basic method for importing an image is to use the place command, which you can find underneath the file menu. Or you could press Command + D on the Mac, or Control + D on Windows. When you choose place, InDesign shows you a list of all the images or files that I could place right now, I'm inside my exercise files folder, and I'll scroll down here and look inside my links folder. I want to import a file called Bellflower Icon, so I'm simply going to scroll down here and then choose it from the list. Now, this is a .ai file, which is a native Adobe Illustrator file, and InDesign can import it. When I click open, InDesign loads that image into my place cursor. Now it's very important to pay attention to the place cursor before you click. This place cursor tells me information about what's about to happen. Right now, I see a little twirly icon, and that shows me that this is either a PDF file, or an illustrator file. They look the same. The edge of the place cursor is two dotted straight lines, and that indicates that if I click right now, InDesign is going to create a new frame like that, or I'm going to undo that by pressing Command or Control Z. And now if I move that cursor over this blank frame, the cursor changes. Now it's indicating that it's going to place the image into the frame. Now, in this case, I don't want it inside that frame, so instead, I'm going to click and drag. InDesign makes me a new frame, and then puts the image into it. So that looks really good, but on your computer, it may look jaggy or rough, and that's because you may not be in high quality display mode. For example, I'll go to the view menu, come down to display performance, and then turn on typical display. Now I'll zoom in to 200% by pressing Command or Control two. Now you can really see how bad that image looks, but you can fix it by going to the same menu, and choosing high quality display. That's much better. Oh, I guess I should add that high quality display only works when your images are up to date in the links panel. Modified or missing images will stay low res. I'll be talking about the links panel in a later chapter. Okay, for now, let's bring in another image. I'll go to the view menu and choose fit spread in window. Now, I'll go back to the file menu and choose place. Now I'll choose this Dahlia's image, but before I click open, I want to point something out. You always want to check to see if the replaced selected item checkbox is turned on. If you can't see that feature, then click the options button down here. That hides and shows these features, but you always want them visible. Replace selected item tells InDesign whether or not you want this image to go into any frame that you currently have selected on your page. And in this case, I do have a frame selected. So because that checkbox is on, InDesign will discard that image, and put this image in there instead. That's not where I want it, so I'm going to uncheck that box, and then click open. That forces InDesign to load the image onto the place cursor instead of putting it inside the frame. I'll put it over here inside this frame. Looks good, you may be wondering about how to copy and paste images from one application to another. You can technically copy and paste some vector artwork between InDesign and Illustrator. However, for a number of technical reasons, I strongly urge you not to copy images from Photoshop, or any other program other than Illustrator. However you choose to import your images, InDesign tries to be as flexible as possible, and this is especially true when it comes to what file formats you can use. InDesign supports all the regular file formats like jpeg, PDF, EPS. You can even import photos taken with an iPhone in the HEIC format. Even better, InDesign supports native PSD files, that's Photoshop files, and most native Illustrator files. I generally recommend using these kind of native files or PDF files when importing graphics into InDesign.

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