Using Color Modes In Adobe InDesign CC

Hey there, in this video we're going to look at Color Modes in InDesign. What are Color Modes? Basically it's how these colors interact with the background colors. So this black here isn't just transparent. It's doing something a little nice with the background. You can see, this orange box here, or this orange circle has a nice kind of interaction with the background as well. These are called Color Modes. Let's go and look at how to make those now.

Color Modes are kind of an advanced thing. Mostly done in Photoshop, but you can do it here in InDesign, and I'll show you what they do. Let's grab the Ellipse tool. I'm going to click, hold, and drag out a big Ellipse. If you hold 'Shift' while you're dragging it, it makes a perfect circle. If you hold down the 'Option' key on a Mac, as well, so 'Shift Option', or if you're on a PC, it's 'Shift Alt'. You can drag from the center, that can be kind of handy. I'm going to drag this up here, and I'm going to put it-- I'm just making kind of a background thing. I'm going to send it all the way to the back. And then move it in so it's just above my image there.

Now I'm going to pick one of the colors, I'll pick this orange here. And Color Modes are in 'fx'. I want to go to 'Transparency', that's the one I use the most. You can go to 'Object', 'Effects', a long way, and go to 'Transparency', it doesn't matter. You get to the same place, and what we're looking for is this one here called 'Blending Modes'. 'Normal' is what it is by default. We'll just go look at some of the other options in here. 'Multiply' often gives us kind of the thing we're looking for. And that's what I'm looking for, just some sort of connection with the background because if you just go to 'Normal', and lower the opacity, it's kind of like washed out kind of color. Whereas if you use one of these Blending Modes you can get some more interesting connections with that background color.

Now, 'Multiply' is not the only one. Go through the range and see what you might want to do. You can see, there's some interesting effects. I'm just doing it because I want a different effect. And we got a 'Hard Light', let's go crazy. So that is Blending Modes. We'll use it quite a bit in this course.

The other thing I want to do is this thing here, maybe this image is just a bit too bright. So I'm going to grab the Rectangle tool, and I'm going to use another Color Mode. The one I use the most is 'Multiply', so I'm going to put a big rectangle over the top of this. I'm going to fill it with Black through the top here, click on 'Black'. And I'm going to send it to the back again, bring it forward one. So it's just above my image, and I'm going to go back to that Transparency mode. We're going to use 'Multiply'. I'm going to lower the Opacity down a little bit, so we get this kind of like, nice, I don't know-- darkening the background, that's all I'm doing.

That's it for Color Modes, let's look at the next color trick.