Use custom masked shapes in iWeb

May 26, '06 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

I've read on a few Mac forums of people who are looking to mask their photos in iWeb not just with a rectangle, but with any shape. People have suggested to simply composite something in Photoshop, but not everyone has Photoshop -- and if you don't have the latest Mac, it can make a simple task into a long tedious one. iWeb doesn't have built in capability to make custom shape masks, however Pages 2 (along with Keynote) in iLife iWork '06 does. iWeb is essentially Pages for websites, so it accepts a lot of the objects created in Pages, including custom shape masks.

Start by creating the shape you want in Pages, either with the standard shape tools or with the "Draw a Shape" tool. After you've created your shape, you'll need to mask an image using your shape. It doesn't matter what image you use. (You mask a shape and an image by selecting both and then choosing Format > Mask with Shape.) After you've got a masked image, select the object and press Control-Option-Command-I. That keystroke converts the masked image into an image placeholder, which will allow you to change the image via simple drag and drop.

After you've done all that, you can simply copy the object and paste it into iWeb. Again, since you turned it into an image placeholder, replacing the image is really simple ... much simpler than having to load a compositing application like Photoshop and redoing all the effects. You can easily duplicate the object and place them all over your site with different images inside each of them.

The great thing about this technique as opposed to using something like Photoshop and then exporting as PNG is that you can not only move the image around and resize it, but you can also modify the shape: resize, rotate, etc. The downside is that you are limited in the types of shapes that you can choose from.

One more tip to finish this up is that you could make a blank page in iWeb, and paste all your custom shape masks in there. You could uncheck the "Include page in navigation menu" box in the Inspector, and you'd be left with a page to store your custom shape masks. From this page, you can copy objects you want to use in another part of your site without having to either find where you previously used them, or having to recreate them in Pages.

Here's a sample page I made using all custom shape masks created in Pages.

This is clearly a workaround until Apple eventually migrates this feature from Pages into iWeb.

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