From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Resizing and rotating objects - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Resizing and rotating objects

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- [Instructor] It seems like nothing's ever just the right size on your page, but that's okay. We can resize it. Let's talk about how to scale objects and what kind of gotchas you need to look out for. The first gotcha is staring right at us. See here, when I select that image, I can look up in the scale field here in the control panel or the properties panel, and it says a hundred percent, but I am positive that this image is scaled down, so what's going on? Well, when InDesign scales a frame, it normally sets this value back to a hundred percent, but that's just the frame. The image inside the frame can be different. So remember, you can double click on an image to select the image inside the frame. Now, when we look at the scale feature, we can see it's been scaled to 37.8%. If you double click again or press the escape key on your keyboard, it goes back to the frame, which is a hundred percent. That's just something you need to be aware of. Now, most of the time when I want to scale an object or a group of objects, I just use the selection tool. I'll just select that image, and then you can drag one of the corner or side handles. But when you do that, it only changes the size of the frame. So let me undo that. Command Z or control Z. So you have to remember to hold down some modifier keys to scale both the frame and the image inside. First, the command key on the Mac or control key on Windows tells the selection tool to scale both the frame and what's inside the frame. So command drag will scale it, but it scales it disproportionately, so we better undo that Command Z or Ctrl Z. Instead, you need to add the shift key to command shift or control shift on windows that scales it proportionally. Now, if you need more precision instead of just dragging and eyeballing it, you can use the scale field up here in the control panel or in the properties panel. But before we use the scale fields up here, you want to make sure that the reference point is set properly. That feature is over here on the left side of the control panel or in the properties panel. This feature tells InDesign what should anchor, what should not move. Everything else will scale around that point. Right now, it's set to the upper left corner, and that's not right for this. I want the upper right corner to stay fixed, so I'll click on that. Now, I'll come over to the scale field and choose a different percentage, say 75%. But of course, as I said earlier, it resets itself to a hundred percent. Now, one last option for scaling, which is important to see because it's not immediately obvious. I know that I want this to be exactly 884 points wide, but don't set that over in the width field here because that will just change the frame. It doesn't scale. Instead, I want to use the scale field, so let's change this 100% to 884 points. We can just type that in. Now, this is a little strange because I'm replacing a percentage with an absolute value, but it works because as soon as I hit return or enter, the whole thing gets scaled to that size. Now, of course, you can scale your text and vector art like Illustrator art all you want, but scaling bit mapped images like this Photoshop JPEG image here, this does have an effect on its quality. If you scale a bit mapped image up, its resolution goes down, scale it down, and the resolution goes up. It's just something to keep in mind when scaling images on your page. Okay, now let's rotate this object over here. The easiest way to do that is to go up to the control panel or the properties panel, if you like using that, and click one of these two rotation buttons. This one rotates it clockwise, and this one rotates it back counterclockwise. Of course, that just works in 90 degree increments. Notice that it's rotating around the upper right corner because that's what the reference point was set to. In this case, I'm going to change this to the center point, and this time let's rotate it in more fine increments, which you can do with this field here. The rotate field, you've got a pop-up menu here from which you can choose presets or you can type your own value, for example, 25 degrees. Of course, if you like working more interactively, you can also just select an object on the page with a selection tool and then move your cursor just outside one of the corner handles. When you do that, the cursor changes into this little double-headed arrow that indicates that if you click and drag, you'll be able to rotate it, but in this case, it always rotates around the center point. Now, notice that while I'm dragging, you'll see a tiny little readout next to the cursor that shows you exactly what angle this object is at. Now, when we let go, you'll see the object rotated. Scaling and rotating images are essential when laying out your pages. Now in the next movie, we'll look at another important skill making copies of your objects.

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