Subtitles of the Movie

In this movie I'm going to show you a couple of practical examples of how you can use the curves to your advantage. First of all, let me select the Pen Tool and what I'm going to do here is create a mask around this so that we can block out the background so this looks as if it's floating. So if I come over here I'm going to draw around this. Now I have to do this pretty quickly here, so I'm just going to click, click, click. I'm not going to worry too much if I don't get it right because I can always come back and edit again later, plus because this is a movie I'm not going to take anywhere near the same amount of time that I would do if I were doing it in real life. Again, I can use a combination of the things that I've learned so far; I'm holding down the Shift key to create a straight line here. Here I'm pressing and drag, press and drag, press and drag, press and drag, press and drag; again, like that, and as you get used to it you'll find it is a lot, lot easier. Again, I'm just clicking because it's kind of a straight line here. Now then what I can do is I'll just accept this like this and I'm just going to give it a color so that you can see it there. Let me Ð not too bright, we don't want to kill ourselves today Ð so I'll close this up. So, I'm going to select the picture now, and then I'm going to cut it, I'll go Edit Cut, and then I'm going to select this shape, you see it's basically the same size now, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to paste the photograph into this shape like that, paste into it, and look at that. There we have created a mask and it looks as if this is floating, so if I were to create a rectangle like this, let me give it a fill like this, and I'm going to have to send it behind it, and I know we really haven't really covered this, but don't worry too much about it, and we will Arrange, and Send Backwards, like that. You can see that this looks as if it's right behind it. We have lost all that background. Now once we have done this we can just zoom in here and we can select our shape and I can take the outline off. We'll set it to zero like that, and then I can come in and, using the Direct Select Tool, I can just select this and then I can obviously fine-tune it a little bit. If I need to come over I can add an Anchor Point like this and then come over with my Direct Select Tool and just move it in like this, drag like this, change my curves, and as I said, I'm just doing this very, very fast, but still it's not too bad at all here. We've got a lot of grass there and I can come over, just change my Anchor Point a little bit like this. If I need to come over and Convert Direction, I'll zoom in so that you can see it a little bit better, like that, and drag in like that, same here, like this, so you can see it. Anyway, I think you get the idea of how you can use your Bezier curves like that to create a mask. There it is in Preview Mode, not too bad. Let me switch over to another page here and I've got some text on the page. I'm going to zoom in on it Ð Control, or Command, Spacebar like that Ð and here what we're going to do is convert this text to outline so that we can edit it like anything else. Now converting text to outlines is something you may need to keep in mind if you're sending a file to somebody else and they don't have the font you're using. You can just convert it to outline and then it'll print just fine. They won't be able to edit it. At the moment this is just text. I can change this to something if I want it, I won't do that, but I'm going to select it with the Selection Tool, pull down the Type Menu and choose Create Outlines. Nothing really has changed. You saw that the frame got a little bit smaller but if I come in with the Text Tool I can't edit this at all. That's because it's now curves. But if I select the Direct Selection Tool you can see we've got the points all over this. Now what we can do now is just edit this text individually. I'm going to zoom in even a little bit more, like this, and then we can come in and select the points and just drag them down like this. I'll select this one, oops, I've got them all selected here. Drag this one like this, and then change the point out like that, drag this one back, and again it'll take a lot of fine-tuning. I'm doing this very roughly so that you get the idea of what you can do. I might want to come in here and delete a point like that, come back to the Direct Selection Tool and drag it so that we've got a nice smooth curve. Anyway, I'm not going to finish this one off. I'll just zoom out so that you can see it, but you get the idea of how you can just take text and then manipulate it. You can create logos in InDesign this way, although something like Illustrator is certainly a lot more powerful, but you Convert to Curves and then you can do whatever you want with the text except edit it using the Text Tool.