This lesson is exclusive to members

Adobe InDesign CC - Essential Training

Opacity advanced, water marks and Transparency Effects in Adobe InDesign

Daniel Walter Scott

Download Exercise Files Download Completed Files

Contents

Certificates

We’re awarding certificates for this course!

Check out the How to earn your certificate video for instructions on how to earn yours and click the available certificate levels below for more information.

You need to be a member to view comments.

Join today. Cancel any time.

Sign Up

Hi there, in this video we're going to look at Opacity. So, we've put this in the background, kind of there's a watermark. We'll show you how to put on, every page like a watermark. But what we came here for is this guy. This is kind of transparency, but it doesn't nicely reflect with the background. Kind of a richer, rather than a washed out thing, that happens normally when you're just playing with opacity. It's something called Blending Modes. So let's go and do that now.

So the easy one, I'm going to make sure I'm on my 'Main Copy' layer. And I'm going to go to 'File', 'Place'. I was going to do a nice washed out watermark. So I'm going to grab the 'Green Logo4'. And I'm going to click, and drag a nice big version of it. I'm going to put it down here, like this. And I'm going to lower the opacity. We've done this in an earlier tutorial, so we're not going to spend too long on it. Nice kind of watermark thing. Now if you want it on every page, say it's a washed out image in the background on every page just make sure it's on your 'Pages' panel, and it's on your 'A-Master'. So double click 'A-Master', and put it on these two pages. It will appear in the background on all the other pages. I'm not going to do mine now, because mine's white, you're not going to see it.

One thing with transparency, is if you are working with it, is to make sure you get a proof made, because the opacity that looks on your screen, I bet you, if I open this actual InDesign document on lots of different laptops, you will see that they all look different. So, you might be thinking, "Yes, that's just the perfect amount of opacity." But when you send that off to your printer, it comes back, and it's either way too bright, or way too dull. I've done it before, I've just sent off business cards, came back, and you couldn't even tell I had a watermark, which was not a big problem, but I've had the other way, when proofs have come back and the watermark is really, really strong. It just over powers the white text as well. So get a proof down from your printer to say "I want you to print the front cover only." "Send me a proof," often it will cost you. They normally call that a wet proof. Or if you just print it in your office, easy peasy. Print it off, and check.

Let's look at the more advance transparency where we start looking at layer modes. First up, let's grab an image for this page 2, so double click page 2. 'File', 'Place'. Let's go to 'Image 1', click 'Open'. And I'm going to click, and drag it out a certain size. I'm zooming out holding down 'Command Shift'. Dragging it so it is roughly bigger than my page. And I'm going to go now and re-size it, and reproducing it. 'W' is to get all my guides back. Chuck it all in. The center there. And line it all up with my 'Bleed'. And you can use the 'Content Grabber', or double click it, and move it across. Click in the background to deselect. Now what I'm going to do is, I'm going to grab the rectangle tool. I'm going to draw a rectangle that kind of fits this little space where our pull quote's going to go. I'm going to give it a 'Fill' of 'Green at Heart Red'. Get back to 'Selection' tool. And this is where it's going to get interesting.

I want to do some stuff-- opacity is going to work, if I lower it down, but it ends up looking quite washed out. And that's not the effect I want, or all that we saw at the beginning of this video. So what we do is, turn the 'Opacity' back up to '100'. What we're going to do is play around with 'Object'. We're going to look at 'Effects', and we're going to play around with this one called 'Transparency'. So, slightly different from opacity. Very similar effect if you just leave it on normal. I'll lower it down, it looks the same as opacity. But what I'm going to do is start playing around with these things called 'Layer Modes'. You can see, instantly, the first one multiplies a whole lot better. You can just work your way through. Don't worry too much about this, this is not a perfect one every time. It will depend on the color you have at the top, in our case, red. If yours is blue, it will look different with these settings. So just work through your image, how it affects yours, and have a look through. Kind of ends up the one I want. Go through them all, find the one you like. You can lower down the opacity afterwards. Say you like color images not to be so strong. And that's how we do some more interesting transparency when you add this thing called 'Blending Modes'. Let's click 'OK'.

That will be it for this video. I'll see you in the next one where we start looking at rounding these corners. Fancy.