I just learned about all the neat things you can do on PowerPoint and I must say: mind blown! To be honest, I’ve only used it a handful of times in my life, and only for making and/or presenting simple slides. I had no idea the extent to which you can edit photos in PowerPoint. You can bring in your own photos or search for photos on bing to bring in to PowerPoint. From there, you can play with the sharpness or softness of the photo, the lighting, the colors, you can add neat filters, borders, crop, add text, etc..
Layering PNG Photos
Another thing I learned about is using PNG images to layer photos together. I learned that a photo without a background is a PNG file, so you can either search for PNG photos to import through bing, or you can create your own PNG photos to use. This got me thinking about connecting what I learned to my inquiry.
Connection to My Inquiry
I always wanted to learn how to remove the background of a photo using GIMP. So, I did just this. I brought an old photo of me (taken by Alyssa Hanke) and watched a YouTube tutorial to learn how to remove the background. It was actually more simple than I had anticipated. The YouTube tutorial I watched had 5 different methods for removing the background; I used the first method as it looked simple for photos with a background involving a relatively solid colour. First, I had to add an alpha channel to the photo, then, I selected the “fuzzy select tool” and ensured that the fuzzy select tool mode had the following options selected: “antialiasing,” “feather edges,” and “draw mask.” Then, I simply clicked on the background, and the tool was intelligent enough to select “like” colors, and I could thereafter press “delete” to remove it. The only tricky spots were in my curled hair: the background remained in the spots between the curls. I did my best to go in and manually remove these spots, but as you can see, its not perfect. Afterwards, because I learned about PNG files in class, I saved the finished product as a PNG file. I was then able to import this in to PowerPoint, and place it over top of an old photo of aster flowers that I took and edited in PowerPoint to give it a cartoony effect.
Editing the Background Photo
Before bringing in the portrait PNG, I first brought the background photo in. I used an old photo of asters I had taken, and then added an effect to make it look cartoony in PowerPoint. I looked at the lighting, sharpening, and border options and played around with them, but decided to keep it simple as I liked the aesthetics better that way. I think its important to try all the editing options first, though, just to get a feel for them and find out what you do and don’t like!
Saving the Photo
Well, I’ll admit it, on top of not knowing that you could edit photos in PowerPoint, I also did not know that you could save a slide as photo. To do this, I simply clicked and dragged over the entire photo I created to select it, then I right clicked on it, and selected “save as picture.” Yay! I will definitely keep everything I learned in mind for the future. I am so happy to have this knowledge on the abilities of PowerPoint, how to remove the background of a photo in GIMP, and… drumroll please… that a PNG file is one without a background!
Here is the original photos:
