Instant Alpha and Masks: Saving the effect

Posted by | Posted in Tips | Posted on 08-13-2007

Instant AlphaOne of the amazing new features of Keynote is the Instant Alpha. Together with Keynote’s Masking, they make a pair of tools that are not only good for use in Keynote but in other applications as well… if only the Mask could be copied out of the application. You see, the problem with the feature is that if you select the masked or apha’d image, copy it, then paste into another app (anything except the other iWork apps or iWeb), you either get the entire image (with the case of masked images) or the image with a white background (in the case of alpha’d images). There are ways to work around this limitation by doing a little extra in Keynote before you copy OR by using the other iWork apps. First, Keynote plus work.

Keynote plus… nothing?
In order to save the effect of Instant Alpha or Masks using only Keynote, what you’ll need to do is to create an extra shape (I use the rectangle) and change it’s Fill and Stroke to None. Essentially, it’s an invisible shape. However, selecting this shape along with your masked object before you copy forces Keynote to store the additional information required for the masking in your Copy. When you paste, you’ll see your creation just as you intended it. Of course, you’ll also be seeing your invisible rectangle too, but seeing something that’s invisible doesn’t really bother many people!

Utilize your resources
You may have bought iWork ’08 for the cinematic presentations of Keynote, but let’s not forget it comes with two partners, Pages and Numbers. Strangely enough, neither of these programs have the copying limitation that Keynote has. So, if you just Copy the masked object in Keynote then Paste into Pages or Numbers, the image you copy from either of those programs will paste into any other app with the transparency preserved.

I’d love to see this fixed in a future version, but for now one of these workarounds for the limitation will do nicely!