When you’re working in a full color document in Adobe InDesign, you may occasionally want to see how the image looks in grayscale rather than full color. Normally this would require you to convert the image to grayscale in your favorite image editor. But you can quickly get an idea of how it will look without even leaving InDesign. Here’s how you do it:

Simply draw a box on top of your image and fill it with black, then in the Effects panel, set the Blending Mode in the drop-down menu to Saturation. This will give your image a sudo-grayscale appearance. It’s not perfect, but it’s a quick enough method to preview what it will look like (see the image above, original image on the left, adjusted image on the right).

For some extra fun, you can fill the box with a color and change the Blending Mode to get some neat effects.
In the image above, I filled the box with a bright orange color. The box on the left has the Blending Mode set to Saturation, the box on the right is set to the Hue Blending Mode.

Grab a copy of this T-Shirt image template, they’re perfect for client presentations. I’ve shared similar items before, but this is the first one I’ve seen with a folded T-Shirt as well.

A simple double-click will resize an image frame in a variety of ways

Simply select the Frame your cropped image resides in and double-click any corner Frame Handle to quickly resize the frame to fit the entire image placed in it. If you don’t want the entire Frame enlarged, but want the full width of the image to show, double-click one of the side Frame Handles. And of course, if you want to keep the width of the Frame intact, but resize it to display the full height of the image, double-click either the top or bottom Frame Handles to do that.

As you can see in the image above, the photo Frame on the left is cropped, but double-clicking on the Frame Handle on the side resized the Frame to show the full width of the image I have placed inside it.

Click the image above to download the full size image

I recently posted the above Instagram image (which of course shows up in my personal Facebook feed), and got a few email requests asking if I had a larger version of the image. Rather than offer it over email, I’ve opted to share it here instead. Feel free to use this 2,592 x 1,936 3.4MB JPG image in any manner you see fit.

The first thing to do is to create your image frames using a Polygon tool or creating a custom shaped frame with the Pen tool. The next step is to select each of the frames you wish to combine with the Selection tool (solid arrow).

Creating Compound Path Frames in Adobe InDesign is easy

With all your frames selected, visit Objects>Paths>Make Compound Path (or simply hit Command + 8). As you can see in the image above, when you convert multiple frames into a single Compound Frame, it essentially becomes a single frame again – even though you can still manipulate each frame independently. Now simply place an image in the Compound Frame and size it accordingly.

The easiest way to check the scaling of your images is to select the image with the Direct Selection tool in your InDesign Tools panel; it’s the second arrow tool (the white one) in the panel. Once the image is selected, the Control panel across the top of the screen will show you the image scaling. If the numbers don’t match, you can easily make an adjustment by typing the same numbers in both input boxes. Of course if you have the Constrain Proportions button clicked (the link icon just to the right of the scaling fields), you need only enter a percentage in one of the input boxes and hit enter to have the same percentage filled in both fields.