Cropping and cutting pictures

if you found the image isolation tools in PPT better than the mask/instant alpha tool in Keynote/Pages...I think you might be living in a different reality than me. You do know you can continue to click and drag and click and drag the instant alpha tool till you get something usable right?

If you want to mask with a custom shape, there are a few ways to do it in Keynote.

If the object is roughly a standard shape, you can start by masking the image with an existing shape. Do this by creating the shape on the canvas, then drag the image onto the shape from the Finer or Media Browser. Then once the shape is masked, you can edit the path of that shape to fine-tune it. Double-click to edit the mask, then go to Format -> Shape -> Make Editable. Now you can edit the bezier path by adding and removing points (hold down option and click on the path to add points), and adjusting the bezier handles.

Another way to do this is to start with a free form shape on top of your image. Drop you image onto the canvas, then use the Pen tool (last item in the Shapes menu on the toolbar) to start drawing your shape, on top of the image. Once you're done with your shape, select it and the image, and choose Format -> Mask with Selected Shape. Once you've done this, you can still edit the shape using the steps above.

Note that masking can be combined with Instant Alpha -- you can Instant Alpha around a shape, then mask it closely with a shape instead of having to individually remove parts of the image far away from the object of interest.

ah, I had used the PPT tool a while ago, but the last version must have been better than previous. It sounds like it's sort of a mix of an instant alpha tool, along with an added lasso for removing big chunks of image. I guess I'm just really used to using Photoshop for any serious image editing that I don't find the instant alpha tool all that lacking, but I can see what you're saying.

Precisely. 🙂 This is how I was doing it before Instant Alpha. The briefcase on this page (the faded one in the background)
http://www.makentosh.com/tipsfromtheiceberg/Blog/Entries/2006/2/27The_Case_of_the_Casecase.html

The MacBook Pro on this page
http://web.mac.com/makentosh/tipsfromtheiceberg/Blog/Entries/2006/3/23You_CAN_take_it_withyou.html
and this page
http://web.mac.com/makentosh/tipsfromtheiceberg/Blog/Entries/2006/3/15Time_for_the_MacBookPro.html

and these surfers
http://web.mac.com/makentosh/tipsfromtheiceberg/Blog/Entries/2006/11/16Duplication_done_rightright.html

were all masked in Keynote using the above technique before bringing over to iWeb.

Message was edited by: Kyn Drake

One more thing: If you're using Leopard, you can open the image in Preview, then under the Select toolbar item, choose "Extract Shape". This lets you draw a lasso around the object you want to extract, similar to the lasso tool in PPT, but much more advanced (it tries to be smart about finding edges). Then either save as a transparent png, or copy and paste the image to get it into Keynote.

The only disadvantage is that, since Preview gets rid of the pixels, you can't go back and restore the image from within Keynote.

(For more information about Preview's extraction tools, check out "Extracting an item from a busy background" in Preview's Help.)

Actually, if you want to do that, draw pixel perfect lines, then you just do a single click at each pixel corner. Clicking and dragging creates a curve, just clicking creates a corner. If you accidentally create a curve, double click the point to turn it back into a corner. I've used a variation of this to do pixel art and it works.

Tulse, I been wondering how I might solve a problem with keynote my presenter's notes are going to the screen via my projector and my slide presentation is sitting on my macbook screen how do I reverse this, must be a toggle or something?