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ekalpakoff
Participating Frequently
May 23, 2023
Question

Copy and Paste images with transparancy

  • May 23, 2023
  • 1 reply
  • 692 views

I am trying to copy an image from the web that has a transparancy layer and paste it into InDesign.  It does paste but the background is black and I cannot for the life of me change it without first going through Photoshop. Both the fill and stoke of the image and object are set to transparent so IDK what else to try.

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1 reply

James Gifford—NitroPress
James Gifford—NitroPress
Legend
May 23, 2023

Copy and paste is a limited transfer medium, and losing transparency is just one of its "feature."

 

Web images cover a vast range of file and image types and qualities. It's a foolish time saver to drag them directly into layouts in any app.

 

Save images from the web and process them in Photoshop — size, resolution, color model, transparency, crop, etc. It's always always always worth the few extra minutes unless you're just slapping together school flyers.

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    ekalpakoffAuthor
    Participating Frequently
    May 23, 2023

    All my work is mostly throw together and time is limited. Essentially I copy pictures of product images from webpages to describe a package of what I am selling a customer. I want to spend as little time and effort as possible. Not a publisher. I am often finding more and more .webp images and I assume these are harder to import that standard PNGs?  I haven't been in the publishing game in a loooooong time and honestly don't know jack about .webp

    James Gifford—NitroPress
    James Gifford—NitroPress
    Legend
    May 23, 2023

    I can't really make these things add up. If your goal is minimum time and effort, InDesign probably isn't the right tool for a number of reasons. (Mainly in that it has no "helper" features to enable slapdash amateur use, as many freebie and OS apps do — it will assume that if you do something, it's because you intended to.)

     

    Your point with WEBP is just a reflection of that. This is a new, craptastic format 100% optimized for web advantage, and I was disappointed when InDesign added direct support for it, simply because it's going to promote frustrated amateur attempts and methods. Getting it to work as you want is... not simple, since it is one of the formats that can actually contain a wide variety of component elements — more of a "package" than a format in itself. It is, in my experience so far, almost unusable for projects without careful conversion to a more standard layout/print/export format.

     

    There's not really any intersection between the pieces here. You don't have to become "a publisher" to master the basics of InDesign to a level where even one-shot, throwaway projects are easy, but it's either learn those basics (and the complexities and nuances of things like graphics formats and conversions, even "basically") or... use a simpler tool like Word or PowerPoint, or be endlessly frustrated by details like this one (loss of transparency on pasting images). There's probably some quick, direct fix for your immediate problem, other than my suggestion of processing the image, but there's a parade of other problems waiting for you with your methodology.

     

    ID is just not an amateur's tool, whether it's an amateur user or amateur processes.

     

    Consider the old maxim here... if you don't have time to do it right, do you have time to do it over?

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