Creative Mentor

Creating contact sheets in InDesign is as easy as placing an image…

Contact sheets are a popular way of viewing a range of images quickly. InDesign CS4 now lets you create your own contact sheets by the familiar “File > Place” command.

To create a contact sheet go to “File > Place”, select a range of images (select one image then hold shift to select a continuous row of images) from the dialogue that appears and choose “Open”. At this stage you’re doing nothing other than placing images, the key now is to use the keyboard shortcut “Command + Shift” (Mac) / “Control + Shift” (PC). With this shortcut held, click and drag (don’t let go) on your document page; you will see a grid appear, indicating the arrangement of the rows and columns within your contact sheet. You can let go of the keyboard now, however you don’t want to release your mouse yet. Before you release, you can customise how many rows and columns appear and arrange the images to suit. All you need to do is use your arrow keys. Left and right will increase/decrease columns, up and down will increase/decrease rows.

If you have selected 10 images to place with an arrangement of 2 columns x 3 rows, you will find the place cursor will still be active with the four remaining images. Create a new page and follow the same steps to place the remaining images.

For more information on this topic via Adobe help click here.

[Click play to watch video tutorial, will commence once downloaded in full]

Posted by Neil Oliver in Feature, Links