Lessons

Lesson Info

Working with Objects & Images

It's not a new file and we're going to choose the showroom theme here again that's my that's my favor because there's a little bit of texture on the background um but not enough to make it you know to crazy let's talk about objects and images ok so we all know that in order to make our presentation really pop we need to use some sort of visual aid whether it's arrows or boxes or images or video so in this case what we're going to do is we're going to play with some of the shapes so I'm going to delete the text box here and the first thing we want to do is let's look inserting a text box so to do that we come up to our action bar here on the toolbar and we click on the text box and we have a nice text box here we highlight inside of that and we can start typing okay that is a really simple text box at this point we can move that around our canvas we can go over to the formatting pain here and we can change the text on that we can change the font change the color lots of different option...

s to modify that we won't go into a lot of those add any features at this point but I would encourage you to play with a lot of that because that really helps your your presentations to really stand out in addition to that, we can choose to insert shapes so some of the shapes that we have access to our simple squares we can insert square with rounded corners, circles, triangles, all sorts of call out buttons, stars. One thing I wanted to point out with these shapes is that, depending on the shape, there are lots of different controls that we have with those shapes. So for example, if we bring in a narrow let's, go and expand that we can change the size of that arrow, we can change the colors. Some other properties will look out in the second, but we can also change how the air looks and to do that, you'll notice a little green dot here if we grab that green dot and move that around you consider that there are lots of ways that we can change the properties of that arrow to make it look exactly how we want to. Maybe we want to really thin line, or maybe we want to really thick lines. We have lots of options to adjust that every object is going to be a little bit different with that. So the star, for example, we can change the number of points on the star as well as the depth of the points coming off in some other options like that. So for this particular example of a shape, if we go over to our formatting pain and click on the style button at the top this is where we can change how this looks. So for example, if the top we have certain styles that are built in to the system we can change this from a default gray color to a red color we can change it to a yellow color or we can change it to something a little more interesting and custom if we use some of the options found below so for example we can change the phil from a solid color to a great idiot phil so now we have two options of colors to choose from so let's change that from a light red to the top to a dark red on the bottom so it's a nice gravy and phil we can choose a an advanced radiant phil which allows us to choose a starting color and an end ending color and then change how the grading actually works or add some more colors in there so it gives us more control there or weaken fillon image with and sorry phil a shape with an image. So for example, if we wanted to actually take ah picture of one of our products and insert that as the background phil farar for our arrow here we could do that we could do some really interesting things with how we portray or how we convey how cool our products are and by using some of these masking features part of the part of these shapes um let's see ok let's let's I want to show you some of the advanced features on the color picker so that there's a color picker that's built in not just in I work but on the mac so this is a system wide color picker and there are few really interesting things with this so looking at this option here we could see that we have a standard set of colors that were choosing from these colors that we see here actually are defined by the theme so these air dependent on the theme that we're using this particular theme is more heavy on the you know, reds and grays and yellow colors that's just the nature of this theme another thing might have more blues and greens and other colors so these are our set based on the theme if we click on the color picker button next to those this brings up the color picker window which opens up a whole new world in terms of adding colors to our objects. So we've got a few things here to look at so the initial view is ah a view that looks like a crown box with a standard set of crayon colors we can choose a green color we can choose a red color there are different options across the top here. The one that I really wanted to highlight here is this one here. That's the color wheel that gives us options for virtually any color we can conceive of. We can mix and match colors we can, we can choose different shades, different strengths of colors and even different capacities. So, for example, if we want a green will choose in the green section here, we can choose that, maybe that's, a darker green, and we can even choose that maybe the capacity is is drawn down a little bit, and what that allows you to do is to bring objects in from the back and let them kind of shine through those objects. The other thing that we can do in here in the color picture window is there is a there's, a an eyedropper here, this eye droppers really cool, because it allows us to go out and and find a color that we want to you specifically, and bring that and use that. So, for example, if I move my window here just a little bit so we can see the background, we could actually use that the eyedropper to go out and pick up on one of the colors of brown in the wallpaper that's, a really nice way of being able to ad that color specifically to that object, and we can also add these colors to our own custom color palette, which we have below here. So we just if we want to add this brown to the custom color palette, we simply drag and drop. We've added that to our custom palette. That custom color palette, by the way, is across all applications across your system. So if we, if we're branding ourselves with this certain syria's of colors, we can actually access these colors in any application, not just in kino or not just in this kino file. Yeah, I'm curious to know what you're processes as far as putting together some sort of just like a general presentation, do you d'oh? Where do you write your content? Like say, you're, you're still formulating everything that's going to go into, um, your slides do you actually write and draw? Did you actually write in the program, or do you use a different program? Tio do your text? Yeah, that's a great question so people do a little bit differently the way that I do it is I'll actually start with an outline, so I'll go into pages, for example, and create an outline, and that will actually help me to think through the flow of how that slide deck is going to go. So I will create the outline and then once I have that outline then I simply go into keynote and then start to add slides that will we'll go through and basically match that outline in the film world there is ah uh uh a theory of storyboarding out you know, the flow of a movie for example so they get together they storyboard had the flow of that movie s so it's sort of a way of storyboarding that process out I know some people actually will use the storyboard and say, you know here's a sheet of paper that well, that will be this slide and they'll actually hand draw diagrams on there to sort of rough it out and then they'll come into kino and though basically mimic what's on that story board into the slides I personally like to work off of an outline to build the slides and then in terms of actually adding content adding shapes and images and video I actually like to do that within the slide just real time and you know when I when I'm building a a slide deck that's critical what I consider to be critical meaning there's a big audience or it's a critical presentation you want to spend a lot of time on doing that you want to tweak everything so that it's just right you want to make sure that everything looks really good so going back and making subtle modifications constantly is not a bad thing. So you know, I find at least for me that I'm always refining the finer details in my slide deck. So hopefully that answers your question. Um, yeah, but the debt outline can really help tio go into making a really solid flow of your slide deck. Ok, let's, go ahead and close out of the color picker here. Couple of other things that I wanted to bring your attention to in terms of how we can change the properties on some of these objects, we can add borders toe objects. So for example, if we wanted to add a line around this particular object we can again shoes are color picker here we can choose the type of lines that we have around the object we can increase the size of those lines. We can add a reflection to the object we can change the opacity of an object. So for example, if we change the opacity on this one what it looks like it's doing is just it's just lightning. The image or the object in reality what's happening is that that object now is a little on the transparent side. So if we move this around to maybe my name, you can see that my name is now showing through that object and if we change that opacity back up two hundred percent you can see that that name will fade away because we're adding the opacity back to the object so there's a lot of really interesting things you can do with modifying the properties on your objects we can also flip objects around so if we want to change the way that the lighting looks, we can we can change that we can rotate a little hard to see let's change a different color so we can change the angle of the of the great and phil and if we go to the arrange tab on this bar, we can actually change the orientation of the object alone. Now one thing that you're probably picking up on this point is the reflection of the bottom is actually adjusting in real time with the rotation of that object. So that's really cool it's it's a simple little thing and I'm sure they spent a lot of time on working on that to make sure it looks really good. Um, so we can flip things and we can actually change the angle to a specific angle. So for example, if we want this to be a twenty six point three degrees, we can change that to twenty, twenty six point three degrees, ok, any questions about working with shapes? Okay? We're good with that perfect okay let's talk about I'm gonna bring an image in here let's bring this stock photo of some ipads into our slide deck let's resize that so it's a little bit smaller so this is a really nice stock photo some ipads and maybe we're talking about ipad training or something that has to do with ipads there's a couple of things that I don't like about this picture but the main glaring thing that I don't like about this picture is I don't like that white background okay we have a nice theme that we've chosen here show room um and it's got a nice subtle graig radiant background that's really nice but I don't like that stark white background on the image so there are a couple of ways that we can get rid of that one way is we could actually import this photo into photo shop or pixel mater or something like that and remove that background and save that either is a photoshopped file, a psd file or a png file with transparency and for those who work with graphics you know what I'm talking about with that that's more a little on the advance side but if you do that you can actually bring that image in and it maintains that transparency which is really nice because if you're working with photoshopped file and you say that as a photoshopped file with transparency all you have to do is bring that file and you don't have to export it and manipulated and and do lots of other things around it so that's one way it's a very emanuel way of doing that the second way of doing that is actually built right into key note and it's really, really simple to use and that is called instant alfa if you remember I mentioned that when we're talking about the tool bar earlier let me show you how that works so we're going to highlight the image will click on the image button on the side over here and we've got a couple of options here we can edit the mask and edit masking basically allows us the crop in image so if we have more maurine the emission we need we can use that mask actually bring those sides and and crop that image but the one that I want to go through in here is thie instant alfa so with the image selected we click on instant alfa and we have a little note at the bottom that says click a color to make a transparent it's that easy okay so what I'm going to do is if we bring it over here we can see that our cursor has changed and we're now looking for a specific color to make transparent it's enough I take my mouse and I click and hold you'll see all of that white areas now blue the blue is what's going to be set as transparent when I let go of the mouse so what I can do here that this is all white so this is really easy so I could literally just click on the white area and let go and we set that white areas try its current what we could do is actually while we're clicking the mouse we can move this and the more we move it the more it's actually grabbing additional areas and making that transparent so that's really useful for if you have an image of maybe a house with a with a blue sky the blue sky is not just a single color blue it's going to be a great agent from aa darker color to a lighter color or vice versa so maybe that would be a case where you'd click on a blue section and then drag until it captures all of those different variations of blue so in this case will go ahead and click and we'll let go it doesn't look too much different right now but when we click on the dunn button you can see that that white area is no longer there and just to show that that white area is no longer there let's go in and insert another shape let's make that a little bit bigger in this shape by default is in the foreground because we added it after the image so what we want to do is actually send that backwards will do that on the arrange tab will send that back let's, select the ipad image and you can see now that the entire white area is now transparent that's pretty cool what's really need about that too is when you start to add things like drop shadows to those images the drop shadow is not based off of the square image anymore. It's based off the the instant alfa so for example let's, go ahead and add let's. Delete this box here and let's make this bigger and let's center that on our page with our alignment guides so let's go back into style and let's add a shadow let's, go ahead and add a drop shadow and let's let's really make this obnoxious so that we can see what I'm talking about here but you can see that that drop shot her now is based off of the instant alfa not on the original square, which is really need ok just in terms of shadows were there a couple of other options here that we can work with? So this is your standard drop shadow. We can drop that down and choose a contact shadow so a contact shot. It was really nice because it gives you a nice, subtle contact shadow down here almost as if you're taking product and setting it on a table like that with some lights coming down from above that's a really nice shadow as well as a curved shadow so a curve shadow is really good for if you have an image on your slide that maybe looks like a button or a sticker or even a photograph where makes it look like it's sort of curling either on the outside or curling on the inside so if we just adjust how that curls there so this one is curling outward like that and then you can curl inward like that and just all sorts of control with that so it doesn't necessarily look appropriate for this image but you get the idea ok any questions with that? All right, perfect. Okay let's talk briefly about enhancing our images so I have this image here that looks to be a little maybe it's a little on the dark side maybe we want to brighten things up a little bit so we have a lot of control over the images that we use and we do that not through photo shop not through pixel mater or any other third party image out image editing application but we do it right within keynote there's two really good nice things about that one is that we don't have tio export the image out, make some changes and bring it back in just to realize that we need to make more changes to its we re exported back out make more changes and we go through that cycle over and over again but it's also nice, because when, when we make editing changes to a graphic in here, we're not actually editing the original image. So let's say, for example, this stock image of the ipads we want to bring that and make some modifications to the image we're leaving the original image alone were not modifying that one. We're just modifying the version in our kino slide, so to do that, we'll go ahead and highlight that image, and we'll click on the image tab again on the side, and we have a few options down here that we can we can adjust the exposure so that's just a quick fix there, and we can also adjust the saturation of these product images so we can all go all the way down to black and white if we wanted to buy d saturating there's another option where we can click on the enhanced button and that's going to give us sort of there, you know, we think you should do this to the image to make it look really good, and to do that, I would just click on the enhanced button, lets go and reset that and let's see what happens will click on enhance, ok? It looks like it added a little more contrast, so I'm not I'm not a big deal it's going to reset but if we want full control over editing our images and the way they look, if we click on this button right here, that will open up this adjust image screen and that's where we have full control over what are images look like if you're good with working with levels and you understand how those work you can adjust the levels, you can also adjust the exposure just like we could before in the saturation. But also the contrast, the highlights, the shadows weakened, dean oise an image we can change, the temperature we contented. We have a lot of control over how we edit our images right from within the keynote application. So in this case, I think it looks pretty good, so we'll just leave it alone, okay? Let's, talk about layering our images. This is a concept that I think we need to understand and building our slide backs and working with graphics because the more graphics you use them, or images and objects you use, the more complex it can become. So if you don't understand how layers work, it's going to make it really difficult for you to actually build a slide in a way that makes sense not just to yourself, but also to your audience, so let's, take just a minute here and and go through. That so just as a really simple example, and we touched on this a minute ago just very quickly, but I want to go in a little more death. I'm going to bring in a couple of images here, so here's one image we're working with, I'll bring in this image here, and we now have different layers, and the way that the layers are organized by default is the first image you add to the screen to your slide will be the background most layer as you add more images or more objects that will add that on top of each other it's very similar to paper on a desk if you look at it in that terms, if you put a piece of paper on a desk that's going to be a background later, if you add another piece of paper on top of that that's gonna be another layer on top of that and another layer and another layer in some cases, we actually want to add things on her slides in a certain order, as we think of adding those objects. But we want to change the way that they the way that they work in terms of the they're layering, so to do that what we'll do is so first of all, let's say, for example, this one we want to bring to the foreground for whatever reason so we'll highlight that image and will click on the arranged tab over here and at this point we have four options. We can send a layer backwards one level or we can send it all the way to the back, or we can bring it forward one level or all the way to the foreground. So depending on what you're looking for in this case, we only have two layers, so sending it back and and all the way back is the same thing, bringing it forward and all the way forward is the same thing, so to do this well, let's, go ahead and bring this one to the foreground. We'll highlight the image and bring that to the front, and now we can see that we've taken that background image and brought it to the foreground at this point. Now we can set transparency on it or do whatever we want if we added more layers so let's go in at a couple of more layers here. Now it gets a little more complicated because, you know, we've got lots of different layers on there, one way that I told that I used to personally keep track of the layers and what's on top of what is, I just kind of staggered them out. Just like I've done here, and I can see that this image here is behind this image, which is behind this image, but I can't tell if this one necessarily is is behind this one or in front of this one, and simply dragging and dropping that over to that image will help, too, to keep that straight one recommendation that I would have for apple at this point, and I think this would really blow the socks off of people that do a lot of working. He knows what to develop some sort of a tool, like a three dimensional tool that would take their two dimensional slide and rotated up and visually see how they're how the layers were stacked and then the high that feature and make it go away. Once you've organized and dragged and dropped, I think that would be a really cool recommendation. Maybe I should build on selling, maybe I should. So in this case here we can we can actually take this and we can move it back. One layer or sorry all the way to the back. Let's, bring that back to the front, or we can move this back. Word one layers and now you can see that it's behind the most foreground layer. But still in front of this layer and we can continue moving that back and back and forward and forward and adjust things so in some cases it might make sense to have the layers in a certain order and again as you're doing more complex things that that will make more sense to you as you muse more objects maybe it makes more sense to customize your toolbar so that those backwards and forwards buttons are actually right on your toolbar um if you use that feature a lot that might be a really good idea okay, so we've talked a lot about images and we've talked about howto manipulate them and how to add shadows and how to set transparency and things like that how do we find images okay, so if you're a photographer you have lots of images to choose from already have a library if you are a designer of goods you probably have a lot of stock shots of your own to choose from in building your slides but what if you're building slides that that maybe you don't have a lot of imagery on? How do you find images and maybe that's a good question for you guys how do you find your images when you're working with with stock images that aren't necessarily your own? Do you have places you like to go and find images photographs taken okay so using your own perfect and that's great for for marketing your own material. That's. Great. How about you, john? Um, actually, I like flicker with the creative commons. Oh, perfect. And a lot of stuff under flickered and I have to have some of my stuff there too. So yeah, okay, great. So that's it's a great option. There are lots of services out there. Getty images is one shutter stock is another one. Um, I stock photo is another one there's a lot of different services out there that would the light to go out and search a massive library shutter. Stuck I know is a really good one because it allows you to search for very specific things. For example, I'm looking for a red house on a on a rainy day, right? And you can you can go out and do a search for that, and we'll bring back red houses taken on our with her photos taken on a rainy day. So it gives you a lot of control over the search ability of your images. But there are lots of options out there of finding great images to use to enhance your slides.