Images play a huge role in making your PowerPoint presentations lively. A proper image can lift your business pitch or school project from zero to a hero. What do you do when the image you want is not exactly what you’re looking for? Maybe it is too big, needs some filtration process, or does not go with the theme of the slide at all.
Luckily, PowerPoint provides an arsenal of tools that help you easily edit images. In this blog, we’ll have a closer look at how anyone, even with no background in design, can edit the pictures within your PowerPoint presentation.
1. Adding Images to PowerPoint
Let us first upload an image to your slide. You can insert an image from Insert > Pictures, and it will then open a window to upload from your computer or insert from other online sources before doing the editing.
Once you insert your image in PowerPoint, you get many tools to tweak and morph it to fit your needs. You can make the image brighter, add effects, and even crop an image from within the application!
2. Image Cropping
One of the most obvious and very useful image editing capabilities of PowerPoint is cropping. If your image does not quite fit your slide design, cropping can be the solution.
Steps to Crop an Image
- Select an image.
- Select the “Picture Format” pane and click “Crop.”
- Crop off the edges of the picture using cropping handles as you like.
You can even crop to a shape! If you need your image to be in shape based on a circle or triangle, then you can use the “Crop to Shape” that appears under the cropping tool.
3. Change Brightness and Contrast
Sometimes the image may be too dark or too bright, depending on your slide’s background or theme. Brightness and contrast adjustment can help balance your image.
To Do This:
- Select your picture and go to “Picture Format”.
- Click on “Corrections”
- You can see sliders for brightness and contrast.
- Drag them around until the picture is just the way it should be.
You’d be amazed by how much of a difference these small things make.
4. Filters and Effects
Want your picture to have a little more personality? Try adding filters or effects to your picture. Take your image and make it black and white, apply a soft focus, or even add shadows and reflections to give the picture that modern effect.
How To Do This:
- Select a photo and go to the “Picture Format” tab to find the features for “Artistic Effects”
- Here, you may bring in some diversified effects such as blurring an image, strokes that are quite close to paints, and give your photo an outline that is quite sketchy, the trace of the pencil, and much more.
These effects will make sure your pictures blend perfectly into the theme of your presentation. Do not hesitate to experiment with a few different looks until you end up with one that fits your style.
5. Scaling and Moving Images
Ensure your image is not too large for your slide, and also not too small. You can zoom in or out quite easily by clicking on the corners and dragging it to the size you want. Just be careful with this, always using the corners to make it the size you want so you do not stretch your image.
Put Them Properly:
- Right-click the image and then click the menu “Size and Position” to perfectly place the image with the slide content.
6. Delete Background
Now, you’d think that PowerPoint is just any ordinary application, but wait until you see its neat feature of automatically removing the background from pictures. One great use of this is if you are dealing with a product shot or portrait and want to separate the main object.
This is How It is Done:
- Select the picture then under the “Picture Format” tab click on the “Remove Background”
- PowerPoint will automatically draw rectangles around what it thinks should be removed. You can then mark what to keep and what to remove.
Do watch our blog “How to Take the Background Out of a Picture on PowerPoint” to learn this step-by-step.
Bonus Tips and Tricks for Better Presentations
If you think this whole process is too much of a headache to handle, don’t worry! You can make things relatively easy by using premade professional presentation templates or free PPT templates online. Most of them come with built-in image placeholders and professional design elements that will save you a lot of time and effort in your presentation.
Still, to make your presentation even better, you can go through our blog post on How to Apply Impactful Image Effects to Your PowerPoint Presentation to get more tips and tricks. More so, if you are using Google Slides, check out our guide on How to Edit the Images in Google Slides Presentation and find out more about editing images.
Conclusion
Editing images in PowerPoint is very simple! Whether you are cropping, applying filters, or enhancing brightness, PowerPoint has everything you need to make those slides look professional!
But do not forget that, if you have to spend a little less time or make your presentation look just a little more perfect, you can use premade templates. The layouts are gorgeous and even have placeholders for images that make image editing much easier.
Mastering simple editing techniques on images lets you take your PowerPoint presentations to a level where they really rock and impress!
