4. Working with Pictures
In This Chapter
- Variations on Inserted Pictures
- PowerPoint as an Advanced Picture Editor
- Text That Follows a Picture Around
- Inserting Many Pictures at Once Using Photo Album
- Picture Manager: The Hidden Application
Pictures are one of the most commonly inserted objects in PowerPoint. Few people know that PowerPoint can actually manipulate the pictures after they have been inserted into a presentation. Let’s take a look at what you can do with pictures in PowerPoint.
Variations on Inserted Pictures
You’re undoubtedly familiar with the basics of pictures. You go to the Insert tab in the Illustrations group and click Picture, select your favorite picture from your hard drive, press OK, and voilà: You have a picture in your presentation.
Now, if you save the presentation, where is that picture saved? There are a few possibilities.
Regular Embedded Picture
By default, pictures are saved inside the presentation. That’s why you can typically copy a presentation to another computer, open it in PowerPoint on that machine, and all the pictures show up. Here are the advantages and disadvantages of this method:
Advantage
You can copy your presentation to another machine and pretty much be guaranteed that all your pictures will show up there, with very little headache.
Disadvantages
All your pictures are saved inside the presentation, so your presentation file can get pretty big.
Because PowerPoint is working on copies of the images, if you change any of the original pictures on your hard disk, you need to remember to update the image you’re using in the presentation.
Linked Picture
Okay, let’s say that you don’t want to stuff the picture into your file. PowerPoint also lets you link to external pictures.
Let’s go through the steps of inserting a picture again. On the Insert tab, go to the Illustrations group, click Picture, and then select a picture. Instead of just clicking OK, press the down arrow on the right side of the OK button. Don’t see it? Look at Figure 4.1.
Figure 4.1 There is a hidden menu next to the OK button. Note that this looks different in Windows XP and Windows Vista.
Select Link to File. Now, instead of embedding the entire picture inside your file, it just references the picture that’s already sitting on your hard disk. Here are the advantages and disadvantages of this method:
Advantages
Your file size will be smaller.
If you update the image, the image in your presentation is automatically updated.
Disadvantage
If you move this presentation to another machine, you must make sure that you copy those pictures over, too. Otherwise, when you open the presentation, your picture won’t show up and you’ll see the red X icon you’re used to seeing on broken web pages (see Figure 4.2).
Figure 4.2 Broken picture produces a red X.
Note
In our example, we’re linking to a picture on the same computer. If you instead link to a picture on another machine or hosted on a server, save your presentation, and the presentation is opened on another machine, PowerPoint warns you about the dangers of external content. This is another potential disadvantage of linking to pictures.
Linked Embedded Pictures
Office has a third insertion option that lets you do a hybrid of embedding and linking. This option embeds the picture into the PowerPoint file, but it also updates the picture if the original image is ever changed.
Again, go to the Insert tab in the Illustrations group, click Picture, and select a picture again. Click the down arrow on the right side of the OK button and select Insert and Link.
Note
In PowerPoint 2003, this option didn’t work well because it required Photo Editor, which Microsoft replaced with Picture Manager in Office 2003. In even older versions of PowerPoint, linked and embedded pictures did work, but they required going to the Insert Object dialog and using the Create from File option. Linked embedded pictures are back and much easier to use in 2007.
Here are the advantages and disadvantages of this method:
Advantage
The picture updates whenever the original image on your hard drive updates. The PowerPoint file caches a temporary copy of the image so that if the presentation is moved to another computer, the last known picture still shows up. This is the best of both worlds.
Disadvantage
This method tends to bloat the file size quite a bit, even more than a regular embedded picture.
Note
As with linked pictures, be careful when adding linked embedded pictures that reside on a different machine. If you open the presentation on another machine, the picture shows up, but PowerPoint warns you about external content in the presentation.
PowerPoint as an Advanced Picture Editor
Select one of the photos that you inserted earlier in the chapter when we discussed adding pictures to your presentation. The Picture Tools Format tab should now appear, as shown in Figure 4.3. This is where the main picture editing tools reside. The sections that follow explore some of these tools and how to use them.
Figure 4.3 Picture Tools Format tab.
Preset Picture Effects
If you play around with the large Picture Styles gallery in the middle, you can experiment with some of the preset effects. Expand the gallery by clicking the More button at the bottom right of the gallery (see Figure 4.4). Just click a preset picture effect that you like, and that effect will instantly be applied to your photo.
Figure 4.4 Canned picture effects gallery.
Common Picture Adjustments
Typical PowerPoint users normally get by with just the canned picture effects, but you’re more advanced than that, so let’s dig in a little deeper. The Adjust group on the left side of the Picture Tools Format tab lets you fine-tune certain aspects of your pictures, such as
We look into a few of these in the following few sections, in addition to some other picture effects that we find particularly useful.
Note
Most effects that you will learn about in Chapters 12, “Formatting Shapes, Text, and More,” and 13, “Demystifying 3D,” can also be applied to pictures. Try applying different shadows, glows, and reflections to pictures, for instance.
Brightness/Contrast
These are no-brainers. Select a picture and make it brighter or darker, or adjust its contrast by going to the Picture Tools Format tab, going to the Adjust group, and selecting Brightness or Contrast (refer back to Figure 4.3). If you want to select a value that isn’t an increment of 10%, choose Picture Corrections Options at the bottom of either the Brightness or Contract drop-downs, and you can get really fine-grained, such as 27% brightness.
Recolor
The recoloring feature, also known as a duotone effect, is an effect that takes the darker colors in the picture and turns them into one color and takes the lighter colors in the picture and turns them into a second color. Algorithmically, that’s the only thing happening. To make this easier, PowerPoint throws a nice, pretty list of these at you in a gallery under the Picture Tools Format tab, in the Adjust group under Recolor (see Figure 4.5).
Figure 4.5 Recolor gallery.
The following sections go into more detail about each of the Recolor options.
Dark Variations
For these:
- The darker colors in your picture turn into shades of black.
- The lighter colors turn into shades of a given theme color.
For example, if you select the blue dark variation, the darker colors in your picture would become shades of black and the lighter colors in your picture would become shades of blue.
If the theme colors aren’t enough, you can also select the More Dark Variations item near the bottom to choose any color you like. We’ll talk more about themes in Chapter 11, “Dissecting Themes.”
Light Variations
These options do the opposite:
- The darker colors in your picture turn into shades of a given theme color.
- The lighter colors turn into shades of white.
For example, when blue is one of the theme colors for your presentation, there is a blue light variation in the drop-down list. If you select it, the darker colors in your picture become shades of blue and the lighter colors turn into shades of white.
Color Modes
Finally, there are four other recoloring effects in the Color Modes section of the gallery. These effects give pictures a retro look. From left to right in Figure 4.6, these color modes are
- Grayscale—The picture becomes shades of gray.
- Sepia—The picture changes to a brownish/gray color.
- Washout—Turns the picture really white, as if it has been overexposed.
- True black and white—This turns your photo into a truly two colors, black and white, which usually doesn’t look great. Normally, instead of true black and white, you’re better off using the grayscale effect.
Figure 4.6 Color mode effects.
Sepia is new, but the others are old PowerPoint 2003 effects that have been carried over.
Note
In previous PowerPoint versions, such as PowerPoint 2003, only metafiles (mostly used in clip art) had recoloring features. A dialog would list all the colors used in the metafile, and you could change each individual color to another color. In the early days of PowerPoint, bitmaps could be recolored like this as well, but that feature was removed long ago. These features were designed for the days when images were just a handful of colors, but this approach didn’t scale to the modern era, where pictures typically contain millions of colors. So, color-by-color remapping was completely removed in PowerPoint 2007.
Compress Pictures
Compared to previous versions of PowerPoint, 2007 does such a good job compressing pictures in your presentation that there’s really little need for you to do much else. By default, PowerPoint 2007:
- Compresses pictures every time you save
- Saves pictures to 220 pixels per inch, which is fine for printing and onscreen display
- Permanently deletes any regions of the picture you crop out
To change any of these three defaults or to compress pictures even more than the default (you can compress to 150 or 96 pixels per inch to save even more disk space), select a picture and then go to the Picture Tools Format tab. In the Adjust group, select Compress Picture, Options.
Caution
The three defaults mentioned previously are the default when you first install PowerPoint. If you’ve ever changed these settings, you might see different defaults when you open the Options dialog.
Change Picture
Say that you’ve inserted a picture of your friend Willow and applied a lot of operations to it, but then you realize that you actually intended to apply those edits to a picture of your friend Melody instead. The Change Picture option (Picture Tools Format tab, Adjust group) lets you swap out the underlying picture file but keep all those effects and animations on the picture.
Set Transparent Color
Another neat tool is the Set Transparent Color wand. Go to the Picture Tools Format tab, to the Adjust group, click Recolor, and then select Set Transparent Color (an odd place to put it because technically you’re applying transparency and not “recoloring”).
After you click Set Transparent Color, your mouse pointer turns into a wand. You can then click on any color in the picture, and that color turns transparent. This isn’t quite the same as simply “erasing” part of the picture, but it’s similar. You’re choosing one color and yanking it out of the picture.
Making parts of the picture transparent lets you create nonrectangular pictures, which can give your pictures a more interesting look. If you have anything behind the picture, such as a custom slide background, it shows through the hole. In Figure 4.7, we’ve clicked the bottom of the picture, which cuts out the bottom-left of the photo.
Figure 4.7 The bottom-left portion of the picture is now transparent.
Reset Picture
It’s simple. This tool removes all the edits to the picture that you’ve done in PowerPoint. Say that you cropped something out or applied a recoloring effect, and now you realize that it was a horrible mistake. Just click the picture, go to the Picture Tools Format tab, and in the Adjust group, choose Reset Picture. The picture is restored to its original state.
This is possible because the .pptx files you save in PowerPoint contain your picture and some instructions (in XML) telling PowerPoint how to change the picture before it’s shown onscreen. Reset Picture is just stripping out these instructions.
The downside to Reset Picture is that it truly restores everything. If you played with the size and the width, those changes are gone. Any picture brightness/contrast adjustments are gone. You’re reverting the picture back to how it was on the hard drive before PowerPoint did anything to it.
Cropping
Cropping has been around in practically every picture tool throughout time. It lets you chop off parts of the picture you dislike or don’t need to focus on a specific portion of the picture.
How to Crop
Just select the picture you want to crop, click the Picture Tools Format tab, and in the Size group, select Crop. Doing this makes black crop handles appear around the picture (see Figure 4.8). Drag a handle to outline the parts of the picture you want to keep, which will remove the outer parts of the picture that you don’t want. Then click the Crop button again to commit those changes.
Figure 4.8 Crop handles are used to create the area to be cropped from your picture.
Reverting Crops
If you change your mind, as usual, use Undo (Ctrl+Z) to revert your last change. Or, to undo all your crops, go to Picture Tools Format tab, Size group, and click the box launcher in the bottom right. In the Size and Position dialog, click the Reset button at the bottom.
Caution
New to 2007, PowerPoint helpfully tries to reduce your file size when you save by automatically removing any cropped region. The downside to this is that using the Reset button in the Size and Position dialog or using the Reset Picture feature to restore a picture to its original state has no effect after the presentation has already been saved. It won’t bring back cropped regions because they’re truly gone. So, after you crop a picture, don’t save the presentation unless you’re sure that you never want to see those portions of the picture again, or be sure to save a copy of your original pictures.
Changing the Picture Shape
One fun effect is changing the shape of your picture. Select a picture and go to the Picture Tools Format tab in the Picture Styles group and select Picture Shape. Select your favorite shape from the list. You’ll never use a rectangle again! See Figure 4.9 for an example.
Figure 4.9 Heart-shaped picture.
Another powerful alternative for creating an interestingly shaped picture is to create a shape with a picture fill, described in the “Shape with Picture Fill” section later in this chapter. If you use that alternative, PowerPoint disables some of the Picture Tools Format abilities such as Reset Picture and the Picture Styles gallery. But, you then have the full power of PowerPoint shapes and can set a completely custom shape path (on the Drawing Tools Format tab, go to the Insert Shapes group and click Edit Shape), and you can type text inside your picture. It’s definitely confusing that PowerPoint offers two ways to do something similar.
Text That Follows a Picture Around
One common challenge in PowerPoint is being able to associate text with a picture so that the text moves when you move the picture. The common tactic that people take is to create a picture and a text box and use Shift+click or Ctrl+click to multiselect the two and always move them together. But that’s a pain to manage, and the ideal solution is for the text and the picture to just move together without you having to think about it every time you want to move them a little. The following sections give some techniques for getting over this PowerPoint hurdle.
Group Picture with Text
One way to get a text and picture to work together is to create a text box (Insert tab, Text group, choose Text Box) and a picture. Select them both and then group them together by going to the main Home tab, the Drawing group, the Arrange section, and then clicking Group. As shown in Figure 4.10, when the text or picture is clicked, bounding boxes appear around both items. Now, you can move the entire group around as one unit.
Figure 4.10 A picture grouped with text.
New to PowerPoint 2007, you can select, edit, and move around individual items inside a group. In previous versions of PowerPoint, you had to first ungroup, make your edits, and regroup them, which was much more painful. The new PowerPoint 2007 functionality makes captioning much easier.
Shape with Picture Fill
Another way to associate text with a picture is to create a shape with a picture fill, and then type in the shape. To use this method, do the following:
1. Insert a shape onto a slide by selecting your favorite shape: Go to the Insert tab, the Illustrations group, the Shapes group, and then click somewhere on the slide.
2. Fill it with a picture by selecting the Drawing Tools Format tab. Under the Shape Styles group, click the Shape Fill drop-down and choose Picture. You might need to resize the shape to make the picture look decent.
3. Now to add text, just type, and the text appears in the body of the shape (see Figure 4.11).
Figure 4.11 Type inside a shape that contains a picture fill.
By default, the text appears centered in the middle of the shape, which might not be what you want. You can change this by selecting the shape, going to the Format Tools Format tab, and clicking the box launcher at the bottom-right corner of the WordArt Styles group. In the Format Text Effects dialog, choose the Text Box category on the left. Here, you can adjust the text positioning using the Internal Margin settings at the bottom of the dialog. For example, to get the text to float below the shape as a caption might, increase the value of the Top number until the text appears where you want it to appear.
Inserting Many Pictures at Once Using Photo Album
Need to insert a gazillion photos into PowerPoint? Maybe you want to show your crazy vacation photos to your friend, or you need to catalog product photos for a presentation to a vendor. Don’t insert them one-by-one like we spent six hours doing one sad afternoon. Instead, use PowerPoint’s Photo Album feature.
Note
Photo Album has been around since PowerPoint 2002 but was hard to find in the old menu system at Insert, Picture, New Photo Album. In PowerPoint 2007, it is much more discoverable because the Photo Album feature is right on the Insert tab.
Using Photo Album
PowerPoint’s Photo Album feature is pretty easy to use, as you will see in the steps that follow.
1. To get started, go to the Insert tab’s Illustrations group and click Photo Album. You’ll see the Photo Album dialog shown in Figure 4.12.
Figure 4.12 Photo Album dialog.
2. Using the buttons on the left, you can insert pictures from your hard disk. You can also insert text boxes to interleave some text between pictures. Everything you insert shows up in the middle list.
3. To reorder the items you’ve inserted, click the two buttons that have arrows on them to move things up and down the list. Click Remove if you made a mistake and want to remove something from the list.
Note
Previous versions of PowerPoint let you insert Photo Album pictures from a scanner or digital camera, but this was removed in PowerPoint 2007. The feature had remained static for several releases, and the PowerPoint team felt that most people would be more successful using the software that comes with their scanners or digital cameras.
4. Click the Create button, and now you’ve got a bunch of pictures inserted into PowerPoint (see Figure 4.13).
Figure 4.13 It’s easy to insert several photos at once using the Photo Album feature.
Here are a few interesting things you can do on the Photo Album dialog:
- Under the picture preview on the right are picture tools that let you make minor adjustments to each picture (see Figure 4.14). You can rotate it 90 degrees left or right, adjust the contrast of the picture, or adjust the brightness.
Figure 4.14 Photo Album picture tools let you make quick adjustments to your photographs.
- In the Picture layout drop-down, you can choose how many pictures you want to appear on each slide and whether you want a title to appear on each slide (see Figure 4.15). The Fit to Slide choice puts only the picture on the slide and disables other Photo Album options such as Frame shape, Design template, and Captions Below All Pictures, so choose another Picture layout option, such as 1 Picture, if you want to use any of those features.
Figure 4.15 Photo Album layout features.
- The Frame shape drop-down lets you choose if you want a frame to appear around each picture. PowerPoint 2007 adds several new options here, including Center Shadow Rectangle. Here’s a complete list of them:
Rectangle
Rounded Rectangle
Simple Frame, White
Simple Frame, Black
Compound Frame, Black
Center Shadow Rectangley
Soft Edge Rectangle - There are two Picture Options check boxes on the left. The first, Captions Below All Pictures, puts a little caption box under each inserted picture. This option will be grayed out if you choose Fit to Slide for the Picture layout.
- The other Picture Options check box, All Pictures Black and White, as the name suggests, makes all the pictures you insert black and white. This is cool for making your pictures look older than they really are.
Edit Existing Photo Album
After you’ve created a Photo Album, it’s easy to go back and change your mind on some of these options. To do this, just go to the Insert tab’s Illustrations group and choose Photo Album again; only this time, instead of clicking the main Photo Album button, click the arrow at the bottom part of the button. Then, choose Edit Photo Album (see Figure 4.16).
Figure 4.16 Click the bottom half of the Photo Album button to edit a Photo Album.
Picture Manager: The Hidden Application
Though not a part of PowerPoint, Picture Manager is a reliable Microsoft Office application that comes with PowerPoint. With Picture Manager, you can manage your picture collections and make quick photo edits. It’s the fastest way to
- Crop a picture
- Change a picture’s file format, say from .jpg to .png
- Resize a picture or compress a picture to reduce its file size
- Autocorrect a picture’s brightness, contrast, and color
Picture Manager also lets you set the brightness and color manually, rotate and flip a picture, and remove red eye.
Let’s walk through some of these features.
Note
Picture Manager was first introduced with Office 2003. It officially replaced Microsoft Photo Editor, which was present in Office 2000 and Office XP. Although Picture Manager has a more polished user interface, it’s missing many of the Photo Editor effects such as chalk, charcoal, and watercolor. Photo Editor, on the other hand, doesn’t allow importing images from cameras or scanners, it has fewer color correction options, and it couldn’t print pictures on Windows 2000. Many users complained about the replacement when Office 2003 was first released, but Picture Manager is probably here to stay.
Quick Edits in the Edit Pictures Workpane
To edit a picture in Picture Manager, use Windows Explorer to locate a file, and then right-click it, choose Open With, and select Microsoft Office Picture Manager (see Figure 4.17).
Figure 4.17 Launch Picture Manager by right-clicking a picture in Windows Explorer.
Click the Edit Pictures button on the toolbar (see Figure 4.18). This brings up the Edit Pictures workpane.
Figure 4.18 Bring up the Edit Pictures workpane by clicking on the Edit Pictures button on the toolbar.
Auto Correct the Picture
Next, choose what you want to do with the picture. Let’s quickly fix the brightness and colors. Just click the Auto Correct button at the top to kick that off.
Look better? If not, undo the change by pressing Ctrl+Z or choosing Edit, Undo Auto Correct. Then choose File, Save (Ctrl+S) when you’re sure that you’re ready to save the changes.
Cropping the Picture
Now let’s crop part of the picture to chop off the part of the picture that we don’t like. Click the Crop link on the Edit Pictures workpane. Notice how eight black handles have appeared around your picture (see Figure 4.19).
Figure 4.19 Crop handles appear around the picture.
Note
You can crop within PowerPoint as well. See the section titled “Cropping,” earlier in this chapter.
Drag the handles around to cut off parts of the picture. Or, to be more precise, enter numbers in pixels in the workpane to specify exactly how much of the picture to crop off. Click the OK button on the workpane when you’re finished making changes. Again, if you change your mind, you can undo the change, but remember to save the file when you’re certain about your choices.
Making Pictures Smaller
Next, let’s look at resizing the picture. This is most useful when you want to reduce the size of your pictures before you email them to someone or upload them to a web page.
Click the Edit Pictures button again on the toolbar to get back to the main Edit Pictures workpane (refer back to Figure 4.18).
Compress Pictures
Let’s do this the easy way. Click on the Compress Pictures link at the bottom of the workpane. Select one of the compress options such as Documents, press OK, save (Ctrl+S), and you’re done (see Figure 4.20). To be honest, though, I rarely use this option because I want more control over the resize...which brings us to resizing.
Figure 4.20 Compress Pictures workpane.
Resizing
Go back to the main Edit Pictures workpane again by clicking the back button on the toolbar. This time, click the Resize link. Here, you get a myriad of picture resizing options for setting a custom picture size or a percentage of height and width (see Figure 4.21).
Figure 4.21 Resize workpane.
For example, enter 60% in the last text box to reduce the picture to 60% of its original size. Click the OK button at the bottom of the workpane. Again, you can undo the process if this didn’t meet your expectations and save the picture when you’re completely done. Usually, it takes me a few iterations of doing this before my pictures look exactly right.
Picture corrections can be combined. Use Auto Correct first, crop the picture, and then resize it. Until you actually select File, Save, your original picture isn’t affected, and you can undo changes you aren’t happy with. This lets you experiment until you’re sure that you like all your changes.
Auto Correct, cropping, and resizing/compressing are the most common uses I have for the Edit Pictures pane, but you can explore the rest of the Edit Pictures links for manual brightness/contrast corrections, color corrections, rotate/flip, and red eye removal.
Why Not Just Use PowerPoint?
“Aren’t these in PowerPoint already?” you might ask? Features such as cropping, compressing, and brightening pictures are certainly available in PowerPoint itself, but Picture Manager allows you to make these edits outside of the context of a presentation.
Say that you want to resize and brighten a picture before you post it on your web page. Although PowerPoint 2007’s new user interface is impressive, doing a pure picture task like this in Picture Manager is much faster than trying to do this in PowerPoint, which is focused more on presentation creation than picture editing.
Changing a Picture’s Format
With a picture open in Picture Manager (see “Quick Edits in the Edit Pictures Workpane” in the previous section), select File, Export. This brings up the Export workpane (see Figure 4.22).
Choose a different file type for the Export with this file format option. Then click OK to export the picture.
Note
In most Office applications, you change the format of the file by going to File, Save As and then changing the Save As Type. In Picture Manager, the Save As Type drop-down is grayed out. So remember to use Export when you want to change file types.
Batch Editing
Everything we’ve described so far affects one picture at a time, but one of Picture Manager’s most powerful capabilities is managing large collections of pictures and editing them all at once. Perhaps you need to correct brightness on a few dozen product catalog photos before adding them to a presentation. Or maybe you need to crop the screenshots you took of your hot new website before including those in a presentation.
Instead of opening one picture through PowerPoint, let’s now start Picture Manager normally. Click the Start Menu button and choose All Programs, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Office Tools, Microsoft Office Picture Manager.
In the left pane, choose a folder that contains a lot of photos, such as your My Pictures folder. In the middle pane, select a picture by clicking on it. Then hold down the Ctrl key and click other pictures until a few of them are selected. You can also press Ctrl+A or choose Edit, Select All to select all the pictures in the directory.
Now, you can apply what you learned earlier. Click the Edit Pictures button on the toolbar to bring up the Edit Pictures workpane. Let’s say that you want to make all these selected pictures 60% smaller. Click the Resize link. Enter 60 in the third box under Percentage of Original Width x Height. Click the OK button at the bottom (see Figure 4.23).
Figure 4.23 Resize multiple pictures at one time.
This batch-editing feature works with all the editing features described in the previous sections on using the Picture Manager.