Q: Okay, I'm new to this and the Help Menu and Idiot's Guide are not making full sense to me. I have imported an image with a white background (it's a tomato, so red-against-white) and I just want to clip the tomato out so I can then drag the tomato onto another part of my design. Please walk me through it before I have to commit Hari-Kari
A: hmmm. I'm not sure what 'clip the tomato out means' Do you want to put a clipping path around the tomato? If that's the case, it's pretty easy if you have that tomato on a perfectly white background. InDesign comes with a pretty good utility for automatically detecting white in images and making a clipping path around your art. Suffice it to say this is no where near the quality you get when you draw your clipping paths in Photoshop (or some equivalent) by hand. But this process below has worked just fine in some basic cases. K, 'nuff yabberin. Here's what you do. I assume you've already imported your tomato file, and it's sitting in a frame with a light-blue guide around it. - In the toolbar (on the left) choose the 'Direct Select' tool, it's the white arrow near the top. - Click right in the dead center of your tomato. If you did that part right, you now see a brown 'bounding box' around your tomato. In InDesign, this means you've selected the image inside the frame, instead of selecting the frame which is holding the image. (read that part again carefully) This allows us to make edits to the image directly...you'll notice you can drag it around and resize the art and it has no effect on the frame that contains it. Ok, so you've selected the image, let's continue: - In the menu bar go to Object>Clipping Path Options - In the dialog box, switch the drop-down menu to 'Detect Edges' and check the box for Preview on the right. - Now the first slider detects white. The more you push the threshold slider to the right, more colors close to white are going to get clipped out. - The 2nd slider allows us to prevent an important problem. See, these clipping paths can get pretty complex, depending on your art. For a printing device each one of those squares (called anchor points) on the paths you're creating are another math equation it has to solve. Throw too much math at the device and you're bound to get postscript errors. Raising the tolerance, while making your path less accurate, will reduce the number of anchor points. There's no telling how many is too many until you try, but generally we want to get that tolerance slider as high as possible. My personal technique is to push the tolerance too high, and then use the Direct Select tool and the Pen tool to make the final adjustments by hand. You can try playing with some of the options at the bottom, but I doubt you'll need them. Once you're done, click OK. Lastly, the frame that contains your clipped tomato, select it with the black arrow (select tool) and set its fill to 'None'. Use the control points on the frame to make it as small as possible without cutting off parts of your tomato. Now, still with the select tool, move the tomato anywhere in your layout.