From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Transparency, drop shadows, and effects - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Transparency, drop shadows, and effects

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- [Speaker] What is the number one coolest, most amazing feature in InDesign? Well, XML, of course. No, no, no, I'm just kidding, it's transparency. So let's look at how you can apply transparency effects to any object in InDesign. Now, I'd like to apply an interesting transparency effect to this graphic down here. So I'll select it and then zoom into 200% by pressing command or control two. Now, let's open the central headquarters for all transparency effects, and that is the effects panel. It's over here in the dock on the right, or you can choose it from the window menu. This panel lets you apply a transparency effect to any object on your page, whether it's a graphic frame, a text frame, a line, or whatever. The first thing we're going to do here is change the opacity. That's this field in the upper right corner. That's how transparent this object should be. Right now, it's set to a hundred percent, so that's zero transparency. You can't see through it at all. But if I change this to say 50%, now it's 50% opaque or 50% transparent. You can also use this little slider to the right of the field to make it more or less transparent. The second transparency effect you can apply here is the blending mode. That's this little popup menu on the left. There are a lot of options in here. In fact, almost all the options from Photoshop and Illustrator are listed. So for example, we could change this to multiply. That kind of burns the effect into the background. That's almost impossible to see. So let's change this to screen. Screen is the opposite of multiply. It's kind of like shining lights on a screen. Where multiply always makes the effect darker, screen always makes it lighter. In this case, I'm going to choose overlay. I like that, it's kind of like a watermark on the water. Now let's zoom back to fit the page in the window with a command or control zero, and I'm going to select this text frame over here on the left. Let's apply a paper fill and also a black stroke, and let's make that stroke thicker, say six points. That looks pretty good. I'll zoom back into 200%. Now I'd like to see through that white just a little bit, so I could go to the effects panel and change the opacity to say 80%. But the problem with this is that it makes the entire object semi-transparent, even the stroke and the text. I don't want that, so let's go ahead and change this back to 100%. Instead, what I want to do is change the opacity of the background fill, but not the text or the stroke. Fortunately, the effects panel lets you do that. It all has to do with what is selected in this list. Right now, object is selected, which means the opacity and blending modes are going to be applied to the entire object. In this case, I'm going to come down here and click on fill. Now, any change you make in the effects panel will only affect the fill of this object. So once again, I'll change this to say 80%. It may look similar here on the screen, but believe me, it makes a big difference. The background fill is transparent, but the text and stroke is nice and solid. InDesign has a bunch of other transparency features too, like drop shadows. Everybody loves drop shadows because they make things pop. So while this frame is selected, let's put a drop shadow behind it. I'll do that by clicking the little FX icon at the bottom of the panel. You can see all of the different transparency effects here. Oh, actually, I should point out that this same menu also shows up here in the control panel. It does the same thing. So let's go ahead and choose drop shadow, and up comes the effects dialogue box. This gives you a lot of control over exactly where this drop shadow will sit and how it looks. Most of this is pretty self-explanatory, so just try playing around in here to get the effect you want. In this case, I'll just click okay. Now again, these effects aren't just for pictures. For example, let's click on text here inside the panel, and now I'm going to go back to that pop-up menu and choose, oh, say bevel and emboss. I'll make this size a little smaller, and let's change the style to say pillow emboss. When I click okay, you can see it applied that effect to just the text inside the frame. So that's cool, but I should point out that you can only apply transparency to all the text in a frame, not to just individual words or letters. By the way, you can see there's a transparency effect applied to this frame, not just because you can see it on screen, but also because over here in the effects panel, there's a little FX icon in the right column. So this is an important tip, how can you get rid of a transparency effect after you've added it? The easiest way to do that is to just drag that little FX icon in the panel down into the trash can.

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