13 Ways To Make Images Stand Out In Pages Documents

There are many better ways to use images in a Page document other than as a plain rectangle. Learn about borders, tinting, shapes, instant alpha, shadows and even using them in charts.
Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's look at some ways to have your images standout in your Pages documents. 
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So it's easy to add an image to a Pages document. Just Drag and Drop it in or use the Media Browser to add it. But instead of just having it be there as a plain rectangle there's a lot you can do to make it more interesting. For instance here's an image I brought into this example document and I could simply add a border to it to make it more interesting. Now a standard border like a line isn't going to do much. It's just going to draw a black line around it. I can change the size if I want but what really helps is if I choose one of the other kinds of borders like a picture frame border. Like that. There are a variety of other kinds of borders that you can use as well to help the image standout. But you could also use a line and then choose a special type of line. Like maybe a border like this, or a border like this to make it more interesting. Maybe change the color of the border. Something like that. Or better yet click here at the Color Wheel and that brings up the Color Picker. Then you have an eyedropper tool. Now you can select a color from inside the image and use that as part of the border. So now the border matches a color inside of the image. 
Now using a border is a good first step. But you can also add a Shadow. So right here under Shadow, if you don't see this click here to expand these options, and you could select one of several different kinds of shadows. A simple drop shadow, a contact shadow you could see just at the bottom there, and a curved shadow. This makes it look like it is an actual physical photo kind of sitting on top of the page. You can change the amount of blur here. You can change the offset. You can change the angle, the offset. You can make it darker and you can change the color. So it doesn't have to be a black drop shadow. For instance, you can use a color and make that more of a glow for the photo than a shadow. Combine that with a border for some interesting effects. 
Now you can also add a Reflection. This is an interesting option here where you get the reflection underneath the photo like that. You can add an amount for the reflection so make it just barely noticeable if you want. Now you also don't have to use the image as is. If you go to Format, Image here you can click here and adjust all of these different things about the photo. So the Exposure level, for instance. Contrast. Saturation. You can desaturate it to black and white or make the colors more vivid. You can change the Highlights, Shadows, Sharpness, Remove Noise. It works just like a lot of the tools inside the Photos App except you're only modifying this image here inside the document. You're not changing an original before you import it. You could also play with the levels here to do various things. For a quick adjustment of these just use the Enhance button right here and it will try to do its best automatically.  
Now you don't have to use the image just straight like this. You could rotate it to draw attention to it. So go to Format, Arrange, and then you've got Rotate right here. You can change the angle manually like this just to get a slight rotation. You could also do it right here by going to one of these points and then using the Command key and now dragging to get the rotation right. You can see how it will do tenths of a degree as well.  So you can adjust this to make it something where now the image stands out because it is at this angle. 
You also don't have to have the image by itself in a rectangle like this. You can actually put it in a shape. If you already have the image there you can go to Format and then Image and then Mask with Shape. Then convert the box from a rectangle to another shape. Like for instance a rounded rectangle here. You can see it changes to a rounded rectangle. I can drag the edges out like that. I've got a green dot here and I can change the radius for the corner to go with the rounded rectangle. That's going to work with borders as well. So I do a line border where you can see how it follows it. You could use a variety of other shapes like this instead of just a rounded rectangle or you could instead create any shape you want. Use the Shape Tool here. For instance I'll use this one here, under the Arts Category. Bring that in. Let's make it larger and I can drag and drop this image into it. Now I can adjust its size, position it here, and then Done. You can see how now the image fits inside that shape. Guess what! You can still add a border to it if you want. Notice how the text wraps nicely around a shape like this. You can select this, go to Format, Arrange and then change the text wrapping option. Have it fit in a rectangle around it. You can use the Text Fit button there. You can increase or decrease the spacing around it so that the text can wrap tighter to it.
Now if you have an image like this you can have it automatically wrap around in the white space by going to Format, Image and then Instant Alpha. Then click on the part of the image that is the background. Then you can drag and adjust the area, release, and now you can see how it wraps around the image like that. Now whether you put this inside a shape, like a circle shape, or you use Instant Alpha sometimes it might be useful to have this in the middle of the page. But the text wrapping is weird. You have to read from one side, jump over the image to the other. But what really helps is if you change to a two column layout. So I'm going to select all the text here. Go to Format, Layout and change to two columns instead of one. So now with this two column layout I can put objects in the middle between the columns and it is still easy to read. I just read down one column and down the other column on this page. 
You can also use Instant Alpha and then Pin an image to the right side, left side, top or bottom. So let me take this image right here. I'm going to use Instant Alpha and I'm going to grab the sky, like that, and now what I'm going to do is I'm going to put this at the bottom of the page. Let's zoom out here, like this, put this at the bottom of the page, stretch it all the way across. Now you can see how this is kind of like this image coming out of the bottom of the piece of paper. Look at how much more interesting that image now is on the page rather than in just being in a box by itself. 
Now you can also draw on top of an image. All you need to do is use is another shape. So let's go and, for instance, create an arrow here. It's an arrow shape independent of the image. But we could have that arrow point to something in the image. Let's go and set that to No Text Wrap here so it is not going to actually effect the text at all. We could have that inside the image there. Change the style to make the line standout somehow. Maybe add a shadow to it. We can have an arrow. We can do a circle instead. A circle like this. Arrange. No Text Wrap. For Style let's set it to a border for something but take away the Fill and now we can circle something if we want. So you can annotate using Pages here. Not with the same annotation tools you might find in Preview and other places. But with just adding more shapes, text boxes, and other things on top of the image. 
Now you can also create a Loop, which is a circle that focuses on a certain area. One way to do that is with Preview. I'm going to take the original image, double click on it to open it in Preview. Then I'm going to click on the Markup Tools button here at the top, click on the shapes, and select the Loop here, which is the bottom right tool. Then focus in on an individual element. Use the green button to zoom in or out. Use the Blue little button there to drag the size of the loop and get what I want. Then with the Deselect, nothing selected there, I can do Copy and then go back into Pages and Paste. Now I get that image without ever having to Save a file and with that Loop as a part of it. You can also do it by using two images. So I'm going to Option Drag to duplicate this image here. Then I'm going to resize it to make it really big. So I can see the area that I want. Go to Format, Image, Mask With Shape and do a oval and then I'm going to recenter on where I want it. Then Done. Now I've got this Loop here. I can shrink it maybe a little bit. I can go to Format, Add Style, Add Border like that. Place it maybe a little outside the image if I want or inside the image. Maybe I can even add another shape like a little triangle like this. Put it right there. Have it point to a certain spot. I'll go to Format, Shape & Lines, Make Editable, and change corners of this and then have this shape go under it. Arrange, Bring to Front and then I want to select both of these shapes here and then go to Format Arrange, No Wrapping there so they don't interfere with the text and I can have kind of a neat little pointer to this item here. 
Now in addition to having photos inside of shapes you can have them inside of letters as well. Let's create a text box here. In the text box I'm going to type a single letter, like A. I'll select it and I'm going to change its style to make it something that's a little more bold. So maybe I'll go with Arial Black here. I'll Bold that on top of it and I'm going to make the letter nice and big. Then I'm going to shrink the text box down. Now I've got my letter. So under Format, Text, under Text Color I'm going to switch that to Image Fill. Then you can see it does this little default pattern here. But instead I can Drag and Drop an image into it. Now you can see that image appears as the fill for that letter. I can set it to Scale to Fill, Scale to Fit, Tile if I want. Stretch or Original Size. Probably Scale to Fill is your best bet in most cases. Now I can use whatever letter here I want. 
You can also Tint an images. Let's go and bring this image in here. Then I'm going to shrink it down and I'll double click on it to change the cropping like this. Make it something nice and square. I'm going to move it here to the left and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to tint it. Now you may think the way to do that is Format, Image and then go to the Controls here and then there is a tint. But this can only do so much. It can tint a little bit more to the green. A little more to the blue. But instead let's forget that for a second. Instead just Desaturate it to black and white. So saturation to a negative 100%. Then I'm going to add a shape and do a box and have that box fit perfectly over this image here. So it snaps to it. For the box I'm going to go to Format, Style and then I'm going to change the color fill to a color. Let's do blue here. Then I'm going to change the opacity to 50% and now I've tinted it blue. Now I'm going to grab both of these here and Option Drag to drag a copy and another copy and another copy and another copy. When I click to select it's just going to select the box that's on top and I'm going to change the color without changing the opacity. So I'm going to make this one red. Going to make this one green. Going to make this one yellow and this one I'll make purple. Now I've used a couple of simple techniques to create a really cool Warhol effect for this image.
Now perhaps the most bizarre, but still useful technique, is to actually use images inside of charts. So I'm going to create a chart here. Let's do the obvious ones. Do a pie chart like this. Let's say instead of colors we wanted to use images. Well we can. I'm going to select this wedge here in this pie chart. Notice I can go to Style here and there's color fill. I could change that to Image Fill and then I can drag an image into it. It sizes it strangely. So what you want to do here is change Scale to Fit to Scale to Fill and now you can see how it fills that. You can even go to wedge and change the distance from center to bring it out. Or you can add other images for other wedges really easily. Again you've got to go into Style here and change to Scale to Fill. So you can use an image instead of a color. You can even tint these really easily. So select this and instead of Image Fill do Advanced Image Fill. Then drag in and now you get the same thing but now you can choose kind of a color tint. So I can do like a bluish color tint for that. For this I'll change this as well to Advanced Image Fill and I'll drag this image in here and now I will choose a different color like that. That's for the same image. You can do it for other charts as well. So here, for instance, is a Bar Chart. I can go into one of these. Change the style. Change it to an Image Fill and then drag an image to be used for the bars. What is really interesting is using one of these kinds of charts here and you can drag an image into either one of these. I'm just going to go to Format, Style, change to Image Fill and then drag this in here and then drag this in here. You can use Advanced Image Fill if you want to tint it as well.
So there are a whole bunch of interesting ways to use Images in your Pages document other than just sticking them into a plain old rectangle. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.
Comments: 2 Responses to “13 Ways To Make Images Stand Out In Pages Documents”

Doug Smith
1 year ago
Most helpful YET!
Michael
Thanks Gary. There was so much excellent tuition in this tutorial regarding what is actually possible when manipulating shapes and photos in Pages. Regards Michael
Comments Closed.
13 Ways To Make Images Stand Out In Pages Documents

Comments: 2 Responses to “13 Ways To Make Images Stand Out In Pages Documents”

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