Adobe InDesign
I’m fairly O.C.D. about things when it comes to my InDesign layouts. For example, having bleeds is not enough, they must be EXACT amounts, no more and no less.
Here’s a great way to fix images that bleed inside InDesign… no switching to Photoshop or fiddly image resizing is necessary!
Read more “Add Bleed to Your Image Right Inside InDesign”
Adobe InDesign
If you’ve been in the design business long enough, you probably remember a time when adding a padded keyline around images in magazines, newspapers and booklets was all the rage. Rage is a great description!
Read more “Using InDesign Styles to easily add a padded keyline to your images”
Adobe InDesign
When you’re working in a full color document in Adobe InDesign, you may occasionally want to see how the image looks in grayscale rather than full color. Normally this would require you to convert the image to grayscale in your favorite image editor. But you can quickly get an idea of how it will look without even leaving InDesign.
Read more “Quickly preview your color images in grayscale without leaving InDesign”
Resources
Adobe InDesign
When you have a large image placed inside a small Adobe InDesign Frame and you want to resize the Frame to show the entire image, there’s no reason to do it manually. As with so many of InDesign’s features, there’s a handy shortcut to do the job for you.
Simply select the Frame your cropped image resides in and double-click any corner Frame Handle to quickly resize the frame to fit the entire image placed in it. If you don’t want the entire Frame enlarged, but want the full width of the image to show, double-click one of the side Frame Handles. And of course, if you want to keep the width of the Frame intact, but resize it to display the full height of the image, double-click either the top or bottom Frame Handles to do that.
As you can see in the image above, the photo Frame on the left is cropped, but double-clicking on the Frame Handle on the side resized the Frame to show the full width of the image I have placed inside it.
Resources
I recently posted the above Instagram image (which of course shows up in my personal Facebook feed), and got a few email requests asking if I had a larger version of the image. Rather than offer it over email, I’ve opted to share it here instead. Feel free to use this 2,592 x 1,936 3.4MB JPG image in any manner you see fit.
Adobe InDesign
While placing an image into a single frame in Adobe InDesign is simple, placing that same image and having it span multiple frames isn’t quite as obvious. But it can be done, and it’s actually quite easy.
The first thing to do is to create your image frames using a Polygon tool or creating a custom shaped frame with the Pen tool. The next step is to select each of the frames you wish to combine with the Selection tool (solid arrow).
With all your frames selected, visit Objects>Paths>Make Compound Path (or simply hit Command + 8). As you can see in the image above, when you convert multiple frames into a single Compound Frame, it essentially becomes a single frame again – even though you can still manipulate each frame independently. Now simply place an image in the Compound Frame and size it accordingly.
Adobe InDesign
Often times I look at an InDesign file someone else built and something just doesn’t look right about an image. Sure enough, I check the image scaling and find out that the horizontal and vertical scaling doesn’t match.
The easiest way to check the scaling of your images is to select the image with the Direct Selection tool in your InDesign Tools panel; it’s the second arrow tool (the white one) in the panel. Once the image is selected, the Control panel across the top of the screen will show you the image scaling. If the numbers don’t match, you can easily make an adjustment by typing the same numbers in both input boxes. Of course if you have the Constrain Proportions button clicked (the link icon just to the right of the scaling fields), you need only enter a percentage in one of the input boxes and hit enter to have the same percentage filled in both fields.
General
idée inc. has a fantastic image-search tool that looks through over 10 million Creative Commons images on Flickr based on the color of your choosing. 
You simply click the color palette on the page to select up to 10 colors at a time and the site displays a wall of image thumbnails which use a predominant amount of the color(s) you chose. While clicking a single color yields impressive results, clicking a few more colors displays a new set of thumbnails (extremely quickly) with remarkable results! I find this site to be incredibly useful, and worthy of bookmarking.
General
The Graphic Mac was one of the many Twitter users featured over at Smashing Magazine this past week in their article Effective Twitter Backgrounds. The article discusses different ways you can brand yourself, your company or your product on Twitter via the use of the background image customization on your Twitter page. 
Adobe InDesign
InDesign offers a plethora of ways to place new photos and graphics into your document. Adobe has also made it simple to replace an existing image or graphic with a new one. To replace an existing photo or graphic, simply hit Command + D (Place) and choose your image as normal. But when you’re ready to replace the existing image, hold down the Option key and click the photo or graphic you wish to replace. The new image will be placed inside the original image container. This is especially useful when you load your Place cursor with more than one image at a time to replace several existing images. If you only wish to replace a single photo or graphic, simply select the existing image first, then go through the normal method of placing an image.