From the course: InDesign Secrets

190 Make an image sandwich: Putting an image in front and in back of text for a magazine cover - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign Secrets

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190 Make an image sandwich: Putting an image in front and in back of text for a magazine cover

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- I've always loved this effect. You know, where you have sharp vector text seemingly intertwined inside a bit-mapped image. I remember in the early nineties trying to figure out how magazines like Sports Illustrated do this and finding out that it took a million dollar machine. So that's why I'm so happy that today I can do it in a few clicks between InDesign and Photoshop. Let me show you how it's done. The basic technique has to do with creating an image sandwich. Let's look at the Layers panel and I can see that I have an image with a text frame on top of it, and then another image on top of it. It's actually the same image. If I select that top photograph by clicking on this little box inside the Layers panel, and then hit the Delete key on my keyboard, it deletes that graphics frame, and now you can see that I've got the text frame sitting on top of the image. Now let's go ahead and look at that image in Photoshop. You can see that I have two layers in the Layers panel in Photoshop. Both layers are very similar, but the bottom one contains the entire image along with the background, and the top image contains just the photographer, with a transparent background. By selecting that photographer and cloning him onto a new layer, I can create this image sandwich effect. Let's go back to InDesign. In InDesign, after I've placed a graphic and then put the text frame on top of it, I select the graphic frame in the background, copy it from the Edit menu, and then go back to the Edit menu and choose Paste in Place. That's a quick way to make a duplicate exactly on top of the original. Now all I need to do is make that background go away, and I can do that by going to the Object menu and choosing Object Layer Options. I love Layer Options because it lets me turn on and off layers, hide them and show them, without having to go back to Photoshop. In fact, this also works with Illustrator files or even InDesign files that I've placed inside other InDesign files. But here we have a Photoshop file and we can see that we've got two layers, the same two layers that we saw in Photoshop. So, if I turn off Layer Zero, by clicking on that little eyeball icon, and then clicking OK, the effect is complete. I've removed the background from the topmost image. Once you've created your effect like this, you don't want it to accidentally get moved - like that. That would be bad. Let me undo that - Cmd Z or Ctrl Z on Windows. That's why I like to select those objects inside the Layers panel or on the page. I'll just do this by Shift-clicking on each of these boxes, and then going to the Object menu, and grouping them together. As a group, they'll stay together, no matter where you drag it. As you can see, it doesn't take much to build this really compelling effect. And sometimes you just have to think outside the box a little bit.

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