Locked lesson.
About this lesson
Make the selected part of a picture transparent to either cleverly crop parts of the picture, or make parts of the picture transparent to overlay in front of other pictures without obscuring them.
Lesson versions
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Exercise files
Download the ‘before’ and ‘after’ PowerPoint presentations from the video tutorial and try the lesson yourself.
Remove Picture Backgrounds.pptx251.3 KB Remove Picture Backgrounds - Complete.pptx
998.6 KB
Quick reference
Topic
Removing the background from pictures.
When to use
To overlay images without obscuring objects behind them.
Instructions
- Select the picture, click the Format tab, and then click Remove Background.
- The square or rectangular marquee (used to select parts of an image) helps you focus on the part of the picture that you want to keep.
- You can Mark Areas to Keep either as a single dot or as a line drawn with the pointer.
- You can Mark Areas to Remove the background either as a single dot or as a line drawn with the pointer.
- You can delete a mark by clicking Delete Mark and selecting the mark.
- You can discard or keep all changes.
Also note:
Click the slide outside of the selected image or the Keep Changes button to finalize the changes. The changes can also be undone at a later time by selecting the picture, on the ribbon clicking the Format tab, and then clicking Reset Picture.
Login to download- 00:05 This video is about the tool in PowerPoint that allows you to remove the background of pictures and the easiest way to find that option is to click
- 00:12 on a picture, the format tab on the ribbon, and in the adjust group, is the remove background button. So I click on that; immediately, a
- 00:22 marquee line with handles is applied to that picture, which is this little rectangular box here, and the pink areas are actually the masked
- 00:31 areas that will form the transparency. Now I can grab the marquee box itself and position that on the slide, as well as adjusting the handles. And
- 00:42 I’m going to focus on this particular gentleman who’s writing on the whiteboard, so as much as I can do with this particular marquee set of lines
- 00:50 the better, however, notice that there’s still a little bit of the lady’s head available. So, holding the CTRL key on the keyboard and the scroll
- 00:58 wheel of the mouse I’ve zoomed in a little bit, we can mark areas to keep if we wish, we can mark areas to remove. I click on the button and my
- 01:08 mouse turns into a little pencil icon. So I can either click and drag to draw a line, or in fact I can just do a single click and draw a little dot
- 01:19 and keep working around on that image until I’m actually happy that I’ve got the result that I want. And with a little bit of trial and error it will
- 01:28 eventually get fairly close. Now I’m fairly happy with that; if I wanted to delete one of these marks I could in fact click the delete mark
- 01:35 button, or I could discard all changes. But, as I said, I’m happy with that so I click keep all changes or even just a simple click off the
- 01:44 picture and PowerPoint sets that image in terms of the work that’s been done. So I use the CTRL key on the keyboard and the scroll wheel on the
- 01:53 mouse, zoom that down a little bit, and so there is our picture with the background removed. Now I’m going to combine these pictures in a very
- 02:01 clever little artistic effect, so I will select that picture, go to the format tab, artistic effects, add a pencil sketch. Select both images on the slide
- 02:13 by going CTRL A on the keyboard, the format tab, align button, notice align to slide, align middle, now there was no movement in the
- 02:24 pictures because they are indeed already aligned to the middle of the slide. Align, centre, and there we go except the picture that I just did
- 02:32 all that work on has disappeared, and one of the really cool things about PowerPoint, but as long as you know, is that pictures and objects on a
- 02:40 slide can appear in layers. So this picture is on top of the picture that I worked on. So if I right click on that, send to back, I can send
- 02:49 backward a little bit if I had multiple objects, but send to back and there our marquee and masked transparent picture has popped up to
- 02:58 the front. That’s a very cool effect. Now it’s a little bit fuzzy along the edge there, so PowerPoint’s not a totally high end graphic
- 03:05 program, but it’s not too bad and we could do a little bit more work to refine that. So remember the tool to remove backgrounds of pictures. It’s
- 03:14 very simple to use, you get this marquee line with handles, the pink area is the area that will be transparent because that’s the mask. You
- 03:24 can mark areas to keep or remove or delete marks and simple click off the slide. Now, I’m going to go CTRL Z, which will undo that last
- 03:34 effect that I applied because I’m very happy with that. Remember also that not only can you undo, but you can also select the particular
- 03:42 picture and reset that back to its original format. So it’s a very useful tool to use and you’ll need to experiment with it to get the effect that you
- 03:51 desire.
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