Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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There are a lot of visual techniques that seasoned PowerPoint users can do to make a presentation look more professional.

In a recent project, I populated a series of slides with clip art images; albeit professional clip art that I had acquired a while ago. The word came back from the client that they would like the clip art replaced with stock photos.

I had to agree, and fortunately a co-worker had a subscription to Shutterstock.com.

Here are the same slides side by side with a stock photo on the left, and the old clip art image on the right.

Figure 13

There is no question that simply by adding an image instead of a drawing to the slide, it makes the entire look and feel dramatically more professional.

Shutterstock.com is not any better or worse than many similar sites I have looked at. It comes with a fairly good keyword search capability that brings up panels and panels of relevant thumbnails.

Figure 14

Like most of these sites you can either download an image directly or add it to a "Lightbox" — which smacks of professional photographer-speak...

Figure 15

All the Lightbox does is provide an intermediary gallery where you can compare your prospective images before deciding to download (purchase) them — depending upon your subscription you may have unlimited downloads, in which case you can download the files directly.

Figure 16

In the download panel you can decide which size or quality of image you want; again if you are buying them individually this could affect the total cost.

Then all you need to do is assemble the photos in the download folder and decide which images will best replace which clip art.

Figure 17

If you have a dual monitor setup, it’s even easy to drag and drop the JPEG images directly into PowerPoint. Otherwise, once you have established a project folder, your best bet is to use the Insert > Picture > From File command to bring the images into your slide(s).

There are also more sophisticated techniques for bringing an entire set of images into PowerPoint and creating a Photo Album.

This is a great idea for stock images because you can save the Photo Album with the name of the set of images, and then open it side by side with any other presentation and drag the image slides into the appropriate part of the presentation to which you want to add them.

The nice thing about JPGs in PowerPoint is that they stretch quite well and will project just fine. Your need for higher resolution will probably only arise if you need to print full page or larger versions of the slides or use the images in a brochure.

There is quite a bit more that you can still do to the photos to make them even more visually dramatic, particularly in PowerPoint 2007.

In the newer version you can select the image and give it any of several Effects.

Here we added a subtle bevel to the image and a shadow effect.

Figure 18

Unlike older versions of PowerPoint, in 2007 you get an entire Image editing and enhancement tab on the Ribbon. One of my favorites is the Picture Effects drop down list which has Bevels, Shadows, and several other interesting and professional looking enhancements for images.

Figure 19

Another favorite that will get tiresome eventually but is extremely professional looking and hard to do in current versions of PowerPoint is Reflection — in 2007 it simply requires adding the effect to the image.

If you prefer something a bit more dramatic, you can use the Picture Styles gallery to check out some very interesting enhancements — this one is a Bevel/Perspective.

Figure 20

In the foregoing screen shot, I haven’t even set the effect — I am capturing the "Live Preview" as I look through the gallery. I can preview any and all of these image effects before setting them into the slide with the image.

Besides the Effects and the Picture Styles, you still have the basic crop, contrast and other image editing tools in the Picture Tools contextual tab that pops up when you select a picture in PowerPoint 2007.

A feature I also like is the ability to Change Picture — with an image selected you can immediately substitute another one from a file — it’s not a big deal but it avoids a few keystrokes in terms of deleting one image and then inserting another.

What I like is that the effects including animation attached to one picture remain with the substitute.

By keeping a clean look on the slide and avoiding line art or clip art, and using professional images, you can end up with a presentation that truly outshines the more conventional PowerPoint dreck that you see around.

Shutterstock.com was perfect for the project mentioned above but there are entire libraries of stock and royalty free images all over the web.

Jupiter Images and Corbis are two other services that are extremely popular; a search on Google for stock photography is a good place to start. Another way to acquire images is to take the collateral material from a client, like their full color brochures, and scan and crop them into a folder for reuse in PowerPoint.

Even an average scanner will provide decent resolution images for screen display or even projection. Obviously the better quality your digital camera or scanner is, the better the photos will look in your presentation.

Partial List of Stock Photography (rights managed and royalty free images):

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