From the course: PowerPoint 2016 Essential Training

Formatting and adding effects to pictures

From the course: PowerPoint 2016 Essential Training

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Formatting and adding effects to pictures

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- Now that there are pictures added and in place, let's jazz them up a bit with backgrounds, shadows, and other effects. With your picture highlighted, change to the Picture Tools Format tab that appears when you click on the picture. The first thing we can do is make corrections to the image. We can soften the photo, making it a little bit more blurry. And you can sharpen it, making it a little more crisp. You can also change the brightness. If you hover your mouse over each setting, you'll notice that you get a live preview of it on the right-hand side. You can add artistic effects to your picture such as turning it into a watercolor painting. And you can also recolor it. You can completely desaturate the photo and you can also recolor it according to a color in the PowerPoint presentation's theme. Once all your pictures and photos have been added to your presentation, you can compress them to reduce their file size. We learned earlier how to swap out the photo, but if you do make changes and you decide you don't like them, you can reset your picture. It will reset it how it was when you inserted it into the slide. You can also add Picture Styles. I'm going to click the down arrow next to Picture Styles and I have a lot of preset choices to choose from. I'm going to hover my mouse over them. I'll choose one that looks nice and now I can add some effects to it. If I click Picture Effects, I can choose from Preset effects such as, 3D curves, chiseled bevels, and other options. I can add shadows, reflections, glows, I can even soften the edges of a photo. Let's add a perspective shadow to this photo. I'm going to move it over by clicking and dragging with my mouse so that it nicely fits on the slide. We've made a lot of changes to this photo, and as you'll notice here on the left, we have two other similar slides. Rather than have to remember all these changes that I made to this slide, we can use a tool that comes in PowerPoint to copy and paste the actual formatting. It's called the Format Painter tool. With my picture still selected, I'll go to the Home ribbon tab and select the Format Painter icon on the left-hand side. Now I'm going to go to my next slide. The icon changes when I hover my mouse over it, you can see the paintbrush. I'll click once on the picture and instantly, that picture gets the same formatting applied to it. Let's do that one more time. With my picture selected, I'll click the Format Painter icon, go down to my remaining slide, click the mouse and instantly, all the formatting changes are applied. Now I have three great looking slides that look the same. Let's head down to our Slogan slide. It looks a little bland. There's a lot of text in these slides. I'm going to add a nice colorful image. I'll select Insert, Pictures, I'll browse to my Assets folder and I'll choose this nice, bright, colorful phone-box picture from London. I'll click Insert. Here's my picture. I'm going to make it a little bit bigger so that we can work with it. This picture's nice, but it's a little big. I'm really just interested in the phone-boxes. On the Picture Tools Format tab, click the Crop button. If I choose Crop, I can click and drag on the black lines that appear. This is how I can crop my photo. I'm going to only include the items that I want to appear in the photo. I'll leave a little bit of the houses. There's one more thing I can do. In addition to cropping the photo, I can also click and drag within the photo to get the exact placement that I want. When I'm happy, I'll click the Crop button again, and now I can resize my photo. This looks very pretty. I'll move this one up so that we can have a little more room to play with. I'm going to add just a few photo effects to it. I'll change back to the Format ribbon tab. And now, I'll choose a nice, soft, fuzzy filter. Now our slides are starting to have a little bit more color.

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