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Participating Frequently
February 4, 2025
Answered

InDesign Effects Info

  • February 4, 2025
  • 2 replies
  • 366 views

Greetings!  In the Layers panel of Photoshop you can see what sort of adjustments, filters, etc. have been applied to each layer.  The descriptions are indented below each layer.  Is there something similar in InDesign?

 

Thanx,

Jay

Correct answer Mike Witherell

Select your object and go to the InDesign > Window > Effects panel.

2 replies

Joel Cherney
Community Expert
Community Expert
February 4, 2025

Not really. Working in InDesign means working with objects, not working with layers. If you go to the Window -> Layers panel, you can click on the little triangles and expand a list of each object in a given layer on a given page.

 

The title of your post seems to mean that you want to know about what effects are applied to objects. Like a drop shadow, right? If you open the Window -> Effects panel and select an object, and it has an effect applied to it, then you can mouse over the little "fx" icon and the tooltip will tell you what effects are applied. Or you can open the Effects dialog with your object selected (Control + Alt + M), and you can see which effects are applied. That's the closest I can think of to the Layers panel, as far as "adjustments, filters, etc." go. 

 

However, InDesign doesn't work like Photoshop, at all. Is it really "effects" (transparency, drop shadow, etc) that you're looking for?  That's not really how we build stuff in InDesign. So if you're a seasoned Photoshop user with comparatively little InDesign experience. and want to see the basic structure of the document, "effects" aren't what you're looking for. 

Mike Witherell
Community Expert
Mike WitherellCommunity ExpertCorrect answer
Community Expert
February 4, 2025

Select your object and go to the InDesign > Window > Effects panel.

Mike Witherell
jay_9092Author
Participating Frequently
February 4, 2025

Thank you for that.  I guess for things like stroke type, weight, fill, etc I would need to check the Control Panel?

Joel Cherney
Community Expert
Community Expert
February 4, 2025

That's where you'd find locally applied formatting. So if you drew a box and selected it, you could alter the stroke weight from the control panel. There are also separate panels for Stroke, for Swatch, et cetera, with more controls. But if you're working with an object that's not unique, it makes more sense to make an Object Style (Window -> Styles -> Object Style) where all of the object's qualities can be assigned at once.