Using the New Background Feature In Mac Pages

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to use the new background fill feature in Pages.

MacMost is brought to you thanks to more than 600 viewers just like you. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you could read more about the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.

So a new feature in Pages version 10.0 is the ability to easily fill the background of a section with either a color, gradient, or an image. Let's take a look. So to set a background for your Pages document you need to get to the Section sidebar. Now the Section sidebar has moved. If you go to Document you won't see it here between Document and Bookmarks where it used to be. Now it's under Format. To see it you need to select the background. To select the background you need to click somewhere where there isn't an element on your page.  

So if I go to View, then Show Layout you could see the body text here and anywhere I click in there is going to select the body text. You see the blinking cursor. There's also the Header and the Footer. That's an element as well. But everything else, the space around it, is blank. When I click on it it's going to select the background. I'm going to click right here. You could see now I've selected the background. So I'm under Format and it shows Section. So this is the background for the Section. So I can have multiple sections of my document and each can have its own background. 

Now notice all of the other stuff from the Section sidebar that was previously there in Pages is still there. There's Headers and Footers, Page Numbering, all of that. At the top here we've got this background section. It may be collapsed like that and you could click here to open it up. You could select what type of background you want or click here and simply select a color. So if you just want a quick color you can do that by clicking this block and selecting a color and then the background of the document is set to that color.

Now when you do that you're choosing here Color Fill. No Fill is when you have no background. Color Fill is a single color as the background. Again you can use these to select a single color from those color chips there. But you could also click here to select a color and you can click on the Color Wheel here to see the Color Picker and you can use the variations of the color picker to select a color like the Color Wheel here. I can click in this Color Wheel and select another color. It's brightness. I can even set Opacity which is just going to basically blend it with the white in the background. It's not typically something that's useful for a pdf or a printed document.

Now you have many other options besides a basic color fill. I can do a Gradient Fill. A gradient fill will then go between two colors. Let's just zoom out here so we can see the entire page. So you can see now it goes from this light blue to this dark blue. So I can change these colors. I can use the Color Wheel here or just pick from a color chip and change it to something else and you can see it blending between those two colors now. So you can choose any two colors to blend between. Now you can also choose an angle. So you've got this little dot here. I can move that around in here to choose an angle for the gradient or I can set it manually. I could also use these arrows here to go to 270 degrees or zero degrees. Basically vertical or horizontal. 

Your next option is to go to Advanced Gradient fill. This adds a few things. First you have a bar here that shows you the colors. You've got your one color on the one side and another color on the other side. You have a middle arrow there and you can use that to basically favor one color or the other. But also you can click anywhere in here and add a third color. When you do that you get this other arrow at the bottom with a color chip in it. I can go and select another color for that. Something like that and now you can see I've got three colors there. I can move these around. I can move the middle spots around as well to get any desired effect I want.

I can add more colors by clicking here just below again. So I can add more colors like that. I can set these to various things and I can create a whole rainbow of things. Adjust them and move them around to get exactly the effect I want. I still have the ability to do the angle here or set it manually. If I need to quickly switch the order of these if they are in the wrong order I can reverse everything and it swaps everything out and I can go back.

I also have the option to switch to a radial gradient by clicking here. So basically they are circles from the center. I still have all these controls here. By the way if I want to get rid of one of these I can just drag it away. So I can drag these all away to go back to my two again there. Then I have that middle point. I can drag all of these elements around to create what I need for this radial gradient to fill here.

Now you can also go to Image Fill. The image fill will then use an image. You can see it represented here and then it will fill the entire background with it. There are many ways for the image to fill the background. One is to choose the original size. So you can see here that default pattern. That only fills a portion of the page there. I can go to Stretch which will stretch it out so it fills the entire thing. I can also go to Tile which then will tile that element. When I do that I can choose a scale so I can scale it. So you can see there it start you can see the individual tiles when I scale it out far enough. So I can scale to fill so it goes to just the right size so it fills everything. Which is kind of the opposite of Scale to Fit which goes to the minimum size. So in other words the width is going to fit but there's going to be empty space at the top and bottom.

You can choose your own image for this by clicking Choose and selecting a file or you could simply drag and drop from the Finder into this little drop zone here. You drop that in and you could see your image there. Of course usually you want to use a pattern here. But if you do have a photo it will then scale it to fill, there's scale to fit. I can do original size. I can have it stretch so you can see stretching there is going to make it not proportional anymore because it's going to make it fit both horizontally and vertically. I can have it Tile here and if I scale it down you could see the tiling with the photo there.

Now you can also go to Advanced Image Fill. What this will do is it will take the image there and then also apply a color to it. So you can click in here and see some sample colors. So you can tint the photo. When you do that a lot of times this makes the background a bit better especially if you're using it for a background to a flyer or something like that. You can also click the color wheel here and choose all sorts of different things. You can see the Opacity here. If you set it to 100% it's just going to fill it. So you go down very low it's barely going to tint it. So 50% is the default with these chips here. 

If I simply want it to fade it what I would probably do is go to the sliders. Then go to Grayscale Sliders. Then you can use a grayscale here. Set it to be something pretty high. Set it to be something pretty close to Opaque there and you could see it really fades it out and washes it out. So now I can have some text over this. I'll paste some text in there. You can see the text is quite readable over the background but you can still make out what the background is. 

I just want to show you just how these are different per section. So I want to put the cursor here at the beginning and insert a section break. So now I've got two sections here. It's going to copy over all of the settings for the background. But I've got this first section here and this second section starts at page two. So in this first section if I go and take the background and say set it to Nothing you can see it's nothing for that first whole section. The second section remains the same. Anything I do here, like I'm just going to change it to a basic color fill, you can see it affects the entire section of thumbnails accurately so the background in use there.