Operator: Mac 411, how can I help you?

Male: Yes, hi. I am a heavy duty iWork Pages user and my friend was telling me about image masks. How can I use image mask to make my images look better?

Operator: Let me show you how.


Okay. Here we are in pages and as you can see, I have an untitled document where I just created a blank document. I am going to go ahead and drop and image into the document so you can see how easy this drop image is in there. Once you have the image in there, you can literally just click on the image and reposition to where you wanted to. Another thing that you can do is that you can select on either of these little square boxes to resize the image. So for example, I am going to resize it a little bit more and reposition it again by clicking on it, a cool thing that you can do with the image is if you click on the command key and then select on of these boxes, you can actually rotate the image with the anchor point. As you noticed, it is rotating on the center of the box so the anchor point is right here. If you hit command option key and then you rotate, it will actually switch the anchor point to one of the points. So for example, you switch it here. If select this box, it will switch the anchor point there and you will see what I mean. So, if I select this box by keep holding on the command and option key, you can rotate it on one of those anchor points.

I am going to go ahead and center it back here. So, I am going to go ahead and move this back to where I want to and that is the way that you can place an image on the document itself.

Now let us apply a mask to this image. So, the way to do that, what I just did is I clicked out of the actual image but you got to make sure that you have the image selected. Once you have the image selected, you want to go to format, mask with shape and then you can select the shape that you want. This will put on a variety of different shapes that pages offer. So for example, we will put on the diamond, and automatically, it puts a diamond mask on it. Now, the way to resize the mask is you got again this little corner square boxes that you can grab on and resize. So you can see that I am resizing my mask. Now, what you can do, once you do that, you can actually click on the image itself to reposition the image within the mask. So, anything within this area will show anything in the opaque area will not show.

So, once you have positioned the image the way you want to, you can let go. And now, we can also resize the image again if we want to and bring it up like this, so that way, it shows a little bit more. So, let us say that that is how exactly how I want it. Once you have got that done, you can click on your edit mask button here and now you have your mask that has been edited. And then you can just take this image around and reposition it to where you want to exactly.

Now, the same keystrokes work as before. If you would like to resize, you can click on the little corners. If you want to go ahead and rotate, you can click on the command key and then start rotating. If you hit the command option key, you can rotate on a different anchor point, the opposite of where you are clicking. So, if we do that here. So you have a variety of ways that you can manipulate this mask now.

Okay. What if you don’t want a mask shape that has been preset by pages? It is very simple. To create, just click on the image again, go to format, mask and this will just add a regular mask that you can then resize to your heart’s content. So, you can do a variety of things. You put it exactly the way you want to. So for example, we will do it more of this format and I am going to go ahead and reposition my image and select the resize where we position again, click on edit and there you have it. Now, you have a mask that is customized to your needs.

So let us say that you changed your mind about the mask and you want to apply a different kind of mask, just select the image, click on edit mask, click on your delete key and then that removes your mask. And then you can just go to format and rea