Adobe InDesign CC - Essential Training

Opacity, transparency and see through ness in Adobe InDesign.

Daniel Walter Scott

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Opacity, transparency, see through-iness is what the title of this video is going to be. And it's so that, this black box here, you can kind of see through. It's helping me see the text against this. I've done it with these green boxes here, you can see through a little bit. I'll watermark this logo. Page 2 is a big black box that is transparent. Let's go and do that now.

First thing we're going to do is grab the 'Rectangle Tool', not the 'Rectangle Frame Tool'. Before I start drawing anything, I'm going to-- what you might have to do is, make sure you have nothing selected, then go to the 'Rectangle Tool'. Make sure the 'Stroke' is set to 'None', and the 'Fill' of this box is going to be set to 'Black', not 'Registration', registration's bad. And I'm going to draw a box, roughly to go on the outside.

Now, it's on top of my 'Type', so I'm going to grab the 'Black Arrow', right click it. And I'm going to go to 'Arrange'. I'm going to 'Send Backwards'. And by chance, I only have to go back only once. Often, you'll have to right click again, and go 'Send Backwards' until eventually you get behind the white type. It depends on when this thing was added to the document. Because it was last added, it's on the top of the stack, so it's easy to get behind.

Next thing I'm going to do, I'm going to adjust this. This lady over the side here, because we don't want a black box covering her, but what I'd like to do is lower the opacity. Now, I just have her selected with my 'Black Arrow', and up the top here, there's this one called 'Opacity'. And I'm going to slow it down. Slow it is not the word, but I'll lower it anyway. You decide how it's going to work with the background image, and how low it should go. I might do the same for this green box.

So, go and do that, lower this one down as well. It's just for style points. Kind of looks cool, having it partly see-through, and it's the thing for this book you can see here on page 2. This big black box here, just a kind of a cool way of having text on a black background. And we're kind of showing part of the image, yeah, style points. Now we've done it for black boxes, you can do it for anything. You can select anything, lower the opacity, and have washed out text. It might be watermark for the logo, so let's add this guy down the bottom here. I'm going to shrink it down. Move him down here, but I'm going to lower the opacity, so he's like a little watermark thing in the bottom there, which I don't like. But anyway, that is opacity. Let's get on to the next video.