A few weeks ago I had a non-designer colleague dismiss a well-designed slide I used in a seminar saying, “That’s fine, but I could never do that—I don’t have Photoshop.”

The fact is that while Photoshop is indispensable for graphic designers, you can use PowerPoint’s increasingly sophisticated features to edit imagery and make more dynamic slides.

Here are some of my favorite techniques… 

Remove Background

Introduced in PPT 2010, this is one of the most impressive single features I’ve seen come out of Redmond in a while. You may have used the old “make color transparent” tool (which is still available in 2010), but that’s kids’ play in comparison. In fact, I think it even competes with Keynote’s similar Instant Alpha mask tool.

To use the feature, select the image and under the Format tab, click the Remove Background controls. PowerPoint will make an initial best guess at what to remove, but usually you’ll have to further tweak things by marking what to keep and what to remove. 

Here’s an example of an image with a fairly complex background that I was able to remove in a matter of minutes, using only PowerPoint.

To read more about this technique, head over to the Microsoft Office blog.

Note that there have been reports of areas suddenly reappearing at inopportune moments, but I haven’t experienced any glitches myself yet. If you’re worried, you can always cut and paste-special as a .png (see below).  

Semi-Transparent Boxes 

If a background image is too busy, you won’t be able to read text on top of it. So instead of cropping your image or putting your text in a clunky colored box, leave the image full screen and make use of a black or colored box with a gradient transparency applied. You’ll need to fiddle with the transparency settings and the size of the box a bit depending on your layout, but the effect will be to cause your image to fade to black, or darken just enough so text placed on top of it is readable. 

Sometimes, I’ll use 3 or even 4 of these gradient boxes on the edges of a picture to give it a feathered look.

An advantage to doing this sort of image “editing” in PowerPoint, as opposed to Photoshop, is that you can easily adjust the gradient boxes to keep up with changing text and content.

Picture Color & Corrections

The Format Picture function in PPT 2010 gives you a host of image correction and editing options including Color Tone, Sharpen/Soften, Brightness/Contrast and other artistic effects.

The tools that get the most workout on my computer are the Saturation and Recolor tools that allow me to quickly turn a photo black & white or create a duotone effect. When faced with a collection of imagery from many sources either on one page or in a whole presentation, changing the coloring of all images is a great way to bring consistency to your presentation.

Below is a before and after slide where I think the change to black and white helps create a more cohesive slide.

Combine Shapes

Microsoft chose to hide this new 2010 feature because, as one former Microsoft employee told me, it wasn’t quite perfected at the time of release. You won’t find this in any default ribbon, but you can easily add it to one of your ribbon tabs or to your Quick Access Toolbar. Go to…

File > Options > Customize Ribbon (or Quick Access Toolbar) > Commands Not in the Ribbon  > Combine Shapes

Once you’ve added it to your ribbon or QAT, you’re ready to roll.

This tool is very similar to Adobe Illustrator’s pathfinder tool which designers have been using for years to easily create unique and complex shapes by combining smaller, simpler ones. The possibilities are truly endless as you are no longer limited to PowerPoint’s default set of shapes. Now, you can combine any of those default shapes into whatever your mind can think up. I have used the tool to create exploded venn diagrams, for example.

The tool gives you 4 options: Union, Combine, Intersect, Subtract; you will get different results depending on which tool you choose and which shapes are on top of others, so the best thing to do is simply play around and experiment. Sometimes it takes a little trial and error. Here’s a quick example of how you might combine shapes to create a human icon.

Once you combine shapes, you can add transparency, gradients, 3D effects and shadows—all things that might not work with multiple overlayed shapes.

If you’d like a more complete tutorial, you can find one at Indezine.com, a great site for all things PowerPoint.

Transparent Imagery

While you can adjust the transparency of any imported image in PPT on the Mac, you have to fall back to a workaround on the PC: Create a shape box and then fill it with an image selected from you computer. You can then apply a transparency to this box. 

Making an image transparent is another way of fading an image in the background underneath text. (You can also play with the adjustment controls under Format Picture or place a semi-transparent box on top of an image.)

Logo Manipulation

I’ve been using PowerPoint’s Brightness & Contrast controls for years to change the color of logos on the fly. Got a black logo and need it to be white to work over a dark background? No problem, just slide the brightness slider under Format Picture > Picture Corrections… and you’ve got yourself a white logo. Obviously, you can also change a white logo to black. Below is an example of how I changed a black logo to white to work over a background.

Really Advanced Cropping and Stretching

The humble Crop tool can actually be quite powerful if you’re in a bind without access to Photoshop (as I have been on occasion.) Here’s a technique to expand a portion of the negative space of a photo to allow for text.

A. Import and size the photo to the page

B. Duplicate the photo, layer the two images on top of each other, and crop the top image in from the right to the point where the balloons end.

C. Move both images to the right on the page (crop the bottom image to the edge of the page if you like), then stretch the top image horizontally over to the left.

D. The eye won’t notice that the clouds and sky have been horizontally stretched, and now you have much more space to place your text.

This technique obviously works with only certain images, but it’s cool when it does.

Words of Warning

Doing your image editing in PPT comes with some caveats.

Because many of these techniques are non-destructive, and the unaltered image remains in the file, you may find on occasion that the effects do not show up when presentations are previewed on a mobile phone (“the photos are still in color on my BlackBerry!”) or when opened on older versions of PPT. Additionally, not all printers or PDF writers love transparency, so you may get some interesting results here.

If you want to be sure that your image edits are permanent in your presentation, consider…

Creating an Image with Paste-Special

Usually I recommend keeping everything you can in PPT as editable vectors—for example, it’s much better to use PowerPoint’s line and shape tools to create a graphic if you can, rather than importing the same design from Photoshop.

But occasionally, turning things into an image not only allows you to be 100% certain that your image effect will appear as intended, but you can also do some cool stuff to text, even if it just means using a non-standard font that others may not have installed on their system. 

To turn PPT items into an image, select your element or elements, Copy (cntrl-c) and then Paste Special (cntrl-alt-v) and select either JPG or PNG. Use a PNG if you want your items to be transparent (such as text.)

You can also compose a graphic or table in PPT and convert it to an image to be used as a small thumbnail in other presentations.

Other Photo Editing Options

If PPT still isn’t cutting it for you as an image editor, and you feel like you can’t justify purchasing the pricey Photoshop, here are a few other options: 

• Photoshop Elements – $70
• Google’s Picassa – Free
• Photoscape – Free
• Picnik – Free