And we're back once again. And in this lesson, we're going to learn how to insert and edit pictures in our presentation. The actual mechanics of getting a picture into PowerPoint is quite simple. What is more challenging is picking the right picture, and then manipulating it what's inside PowerPoint so that it looks professional and it's consistent with the overall style of your presentation. Let's see how I created this slide from the introduction using the various PowerPoint features. Let's begin with a blank layout.

The idea that I think is well known and often associated with PowerPoint, his death by PowerPoint, what sort of a visual can I create to replicate how some audience members feel when confronted with a bad PowerPoint presentation? So here's how I started I went to the Insert menu and clicked on the online pictures and I did a search on death. Now Microsoft used to have a really good clip art gallery that it cluded traditional clipart as well as some free stock photography. More recently, it's defaulted to this new Bing search, which I don't find to be particularly helpful, but I still use it as a starting point. When you're looking for images, what you're looking for is high quality images. stock photography is wonderful, but finding free stock photography can be a challenge.

While it may be easy to find photographs on the internet, you must be mindful of copyright. So in general, I try to avoid using images off the internet, unless they are generic. For instance, the PowerPoint logo I used earlier in the presentation. Most clipart looks like just that clipper. The only way clipper works is if you have an entire matching set of clipart throughout your presentation, which is rarely feasible and thus I rarely use it. If you're artistic enough to create your own art that too works exceptionally well.

Even if you're using stick people, as long as your drawings are not horrendous and they convey a similar look and feel, then that too doesn't tend to diminish the professionalism of your presentation. So the key thing we are looking for is consistency and high quality images. So this Reaper guy looks pretty good. The other reason I like using a simple white canvas for my background of my slides is that there's a lot of images that have a white background, so I don't have to change it later. Thus, I can insert this image right into my presentation, and it just looks like he's standing there. If I had a color background or was using a Microsoft template, the image would look just odd because of the white fill in the picture.

Next, I want to mock up a presentation screen. Let's go back to my online pictures, search and this time enter cemetery. I also look at the shape of the picture and How that will look on my slide. Notice that a tall narrow image is not really going to look like a presentation screen, whereas this first picture could work out. Now, how do I get the words on top of the picture, I use PowerPoint to create a lot of my own graphics and images. And let me show you how to do this.

Let's just put this image on a slide of its own for a moment and make it fill the entire slide. Anytime I'm using an image that doesn't have a white background, you have two choices. Either you fill your entire screen with the image or you frame it, which is what we will do in a second. Nothing looks less professional than an image that's just been pasted onto a slide. Next, let's put a block rectangle over the middle and put the words we want to appear on the box. Now to format the rectangle, it's easy to adjust the color by clicking on the object and how Having our secret Format menu appear on the ribbon.

However, we also want to make this box semi transparent, which is not one of the default tiles on the ribbon. To access this right click and click Format shape, which will bring up the formatting pane on the right of your screen. Now we can adjust the transparency level of the rectangle so that some of the background image shows through. Hey, that looks pretty good. Let's use that and turn all of this into one picture that we can use for our projection screen. To convert everything on this slide into just one picture object, we will go to our home menu.

From here you can select all which will select all the objects you have on your active slide. You can deselect or reselect any objects on the screen by holding down your control key and using your mouse. Then copy and paste as a picture Now we have an image that we can use for our screen that we can easily rescale by grabbing one of the corners of the photo. Always resize pictures using the corners of the image. If you grab the top, or the middle of the photo, the pixels get stretched, and the photo looks funny and you lose your professional look. Now, because this image isn't going to be stretched over the whole slide, we should look to frame it.

And to do that, just click on the image itself. And once again, this will unlock another one of those secret menus on our ribbon, called the Picture Tools Format. I use this menu item a lot. Let's select a frame for this image from the gallery to make this look like our projector screen. But let's say I want my Reaper guy to stand a little in front of the screen as if he was presenting. And the problem we have here is that virtual screen is covering up our Reaper guy.

We need to move this picture to the back To do this, go to your home menu, and under the arrange tile, click on the send to the back. You can also right click on any object and access this ability to move images to the front or the back of your slide. Well, that's one problem solved, but we created another as our white background from the Reaper picture is now evident and covering up a portion of our screen. Well, we can also remove that background by once again clicking on the Reaper picture this time, which unlocks that Picture Tools Format on our ribbon. And we can now select the Remove background tile lineup the parts that you want to keep and PowerPoint will automatically remove the white background. This is a more recent addition to PowerPoint and I love it.

Now we just have the Reaper with no white background and we can put him so that he's standing in front of the screen. I know that was so cool. One last thing we need, we need an audience. And once again, let's go to the online pictures and search for an audience. Here's an image that looks interesting. It's a long flat image of an audience that could go along the bottom of our screen.

Let's download that. Whoa, whoa, that's kind of small. As I grab the corners of this picture and make it larger, notice how the image is getting a little fuzzy. Normally, I don't like that as this too, tends to be one of those little things that can degrade the quality of your visual aid. However, in this case, because it's just a rough silhouette, I'm going to live with it for this imagery. Now, this image itself is not quite perfect.

I have this speaker guy that I don't want to include in the image. Once again, it's easy to remove him, click on the image and bring up our Picture Tools Format menu once again, this time click on the crop button. This allows you to cut him out of the Picture, I use crop all the time to make images into the right shapes to fit my screen space. Lastly, I don't like this greenish color of the people in the front row, I want them to be more darker. To fix this, you can select the color button and choose from among the various options. Finally, look at my Reaper guy.

He's very sharp and my audience is kind of fuzzy because of the lower quality image. I can't improve the image of my audience, but I can degrade the quality of my Reaper image, just so he doesn't stand out quite as much. To do this, how about we play around with the artistic effects? Finding and editing imagery to support your message makes a huge difference in how your presentation is received and remembered by your audience. So keep in mind three themes that we discussed in this lesson. First of all, choose professional drawings and stock photography and avoid clipart like the plague.

Secondly, embellish and create your own slide imagery by mixing and matching different elements. And finally, learn how to edit imagery using the Picture Tools Format menu. That's all for this lesson. So until next time,