Bagel Belly Blog

Keynote and fading images

I've been trying to work out how to nicely fade images into slides in Keynote, like in this example. Unfortunately, there's no simple way to do it with just Keynote. You can add masks to an image to crop the visible area, but you can't fade the edges.

One workable solution I've found after some experimentation (i.e. hours of cursing) is to use The Gimp to doctor the images before I add them to Keynote. I found a tutorial on making a faded frame with quickmask which does the trick, though it misses out one all-important step: if the image you load does not already have one, you need to add an alpha channel before the transparency will work.

So, now everyone knows my GetTogether slides will have some faded images.... ;-)