Creating a Magnifying Glass Effect With Mac Keynote

If you need to focus on part of an image during a presentation, you can use a magnifying glass to zoom in on the area in a fun way. You can build this effect using and shape and three transitions. This also creates a nice element to use in iMovie or other video projects.



Check out Creating a Magnifying Glass Effect With Mac Keynote at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.
Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to create a pop-out magnifying glass effect in Keynote.
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So let's say you're giving a presentation and you're showing an image. There's a certain part of that image that you want to focus on. There's no built in effect for that but it's pretty easy to build kind of a magnifying glass that pops out of the image to enlarge a portion of it.
Here I have a blank Keynote presentation and I'm going to start by dragging an image into it. I'm going to center that image here and what I want to do is I want to focus on one of these windows. So I'm going to add a shape and what makes most sense is to add a circle shape. But I could use any shape. I'm going to put that here over the window. I'm going to hold the shift key down as I do it to keep the circular shape and doesn't become oval. I'm going to get it perfectly positioned over the window. Now I'm going to drag and drop that same exact image again but this time into the shape. When I do I'm instantly in the mode where I'm moving the image around to fit into the shape. The masking mode.
Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually lock this image on top of the other image. Notice that is snaps into place so it's really easy to get perfect. Then I'll hit done. Now I have a circle with the image in it that's the same scale so it appears invisible because it's actually locked to the same area. At this point I could actually just grab a corner there and enlarge the entire thing, move that to another section, and I could be done. But I want to animate it.
I'll Undo to get it back to where it was. I'll go on the right here and click on Animate and Action and Add an Effect.
The effect we want to add is Scale. You can see that it puts a little default scale in there where it gets a little bit bigger. To make it even bigger still I'm going to grab a corner here and drag that to make it nice and large. Now I can Preview this and see what happens. The next thing I want to do is I want to move it out of the way. So I'm going to click Add Action here. I'm going to select Move. It's going to give me the default move just a little bit to the right, like that. I'm going to actually drag it to the upper right hand corner. Use the arrow keys to move it a little bit away from the edges there.
Now I've got it moving from its original position to the upper right hand corner. But the problem is it's going to do one after the other. So it's going to enlarge and then it's going to move. If I click Build Order I can see this. First it's going to scale and then it's going to move. So I want to select Move here and say start that with Build 1. You can see it joins them together. It's going to do both at the same time now. So now when I preview this it's going to both Move and Scale and I get my effect.
Now let's add a border and a shadow. So to do that first I'm going to click outside of that so the preview goes away. I'm going to select the circle that I know that's there and I'm going to go to Format and I'm going to create a border. I'll just use the default there but you can set a color and all of that. For Shadow I'm going to create a Drop Shadow.
So now we'll go to Animate again. Show actions in Preview and you can see it does that. One problem though is that at the beginning of the animation here I've got the circle and drop shadow and it kind of looks odd. So I'm going to add a third type of animation. I'm going to Select it. Show Actions and I see those. Add another Action. This time I'm going to add Opacity. I'm going to say I want it to transition to 100%. So end at 100%. How do I change the beginning of that? Well, I'm going to click away from it again and click it so I select it without all the animation stuff. I'm going to go to Format and then Opacity here and I'm going to change that to zero. Make it disappear along with the border and the shadow.
So now we want to make sure that all three animations happen at the same time. So I'll go to Animate and go to Build Order. I'll see that Opacity is now happening after those other ones. I want to have that start with Build 1 as
well so all three happen together. Now when I Preview you can see it does that. So it starts off with nothing there. Then it becomes visible. It enlarges and it moves all at once.
This is a great effect to use in presentations. You can even do more than one on a single slide. You can also, of course, export any Keynote presentation as video. So you can use this in your iMovie projects.
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