Keynote scaling issue: photo and text

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The way that the Scaling Action has been implemented in Keynote is pretty crude -- as best I can determine, the function seems to take the actual pixels that the starting point image takes up on the slide, and then scales those, rather than using the original image's detail. It seems like a hugely inelegant approach for what is otherwise a pretty polished app graphically-speaking, and I can't imagine that it won't get fixed in future versions.

That said, you can produce a very nice effect if, immediately after you scale the image, you put on top of it a copy of the image manually scaled to the final size, using a very fast Dissolve Build. The Scale Action looks fine while it is actually scaling, it is only the final product that is blurry -- this technique solves this problem by plopping a non-blurry version on top of the final Scale state.

It can be a bit tricky to get this just right, especially since the Scale Action use percentage, but "manually" scaling an image only provides the actual pixel dimensions. I find it easiest to use simple multiples for the scale, as that allows easy determination of the manual image resizing (for example, if you use 200%, you can simply abut two copies of the small image together to get the final width, and thus can proportionally drag a third copy to size it to that width and height).

Also, you may find it helpful to use a small "target" shape to position the move, as that will allow alignment of other objects to the final position.

Here's a workaround I just discovered today, after trying to deal with the same problem.

1. Insert/paste the image you want to scale. It should be at the final size you want.
2. Create a build in effect like appear or dissolve. This is the first build order.
3. In the Build Inspector, create an action to scale down the image to where you want to start (say, 50%). This is the second build order.
4. Add an action to scale the image to 100%. This is the third build order.
5. Reorder the build in effect so it happens AFTER the scale down action.

What happens is Keynote first scales down the object (invisibly), then builds it in, then scales it back up to the original size. The quality of the scaled down image, the scaling effect, and the final image is very high.

Message was edited by: Mark Funk

That's what I do, too. I had a .key file laying around here somewhere of a map that I zoomed in on. Worked nicely!

This is a great tip, Mark -- it really makes the Scale action much more useful!

Darn, I thought I'd linked to the file in my old post, but I didn't. 😟