Hey,
it's Camille and I'm here to show you how to remove the background from an image
or to make the background transparent in the latest version of PowerPoint and
very quickly before I jump into how to do this,
I want to show you some examples of what a background that's been removed will
look like.
In this first example,
I have the silhouette of a face of a woman.
You'll notice that this picture is actually bigger than just the silhouette and
that's because it had a white background beneath it that I removed in order to
have the gray background of the slide come through.
In this next example,
I have man here and I removed the background behind the man and you can see if I
go to reset the picture that this actually had quite a complex background behind
him,
but I was able to remove it in order to have the slide background appear through
it.
This next example is a similar situation with a woman you can see that the
picture is actually a lot bigger and I've actually removed the background from
her as well,
and the same goes for this man here.
Now to remove the background from a picture,
you actually have two methods to do this in powerpoint.
Number one with a set transparent color tool,
and number two,
with the remove background tool,
keep in mind that neither option is available for vector graphic files such as
svgs wms and DRWs.
So if it's not working for you,
chances are you have one of those file types and you may want to consider
switching over to jpegs or pngs.
So let's look at each of the two methods.
Method number one,
the set transparent color tool.
First,
insert a picture onto your slide and then make sure you have it selected.
Once you have your picture,
go up to the picture tools format tab and find the color command within the
dropdown menu.
You'll see the set transparent color tool.
Click on it,
and your cursor will turn into a little pen with an arrow.
If you now click on the area that you want to remove PowerPoint will take that
area and turn it transparent.
This works super well.
If you have stock photos or product photos,
any kind of photo with the background is very,
very crisp.
Keep in mind that while this tool is pretty amazing,
it does have limitations.
For example,
it can be quite hard to separate the object you want to keep from the background
you want to remove.
If the two are quite similar,
like in this example,
it will not work if your background isn't a uniform color or if it has a
gradient like in these two examples here.
Also,
it can be quite hard to remove background around strands of hair,
like in this example,
so in conclusion,
this method is the fastest and most effective way I know of to remove the
background from a picture directly in powerpoint.
If the picture and it's background are very simple and straightforward.
If not,
you'll need to go to method number two.
So method number two,
the remove background tool.
First,
you'll need to insert a picture onto your slide.
Once you have the picture select it and then go up to the picture tools format
tab in here,
find the remove background command.
When you click on it,
you'll notice that powerpoint turns your picture Magenta.
What you need to remember is that the Magenta parts are what powerpoint is
telling you,
it's going to remove from the picture and the areas that are the original color
as in the original picture.
These are areas that PowerPoint are going to keep.
Now in this situation,
we have a pretty clean first attempt.
PowerPoint is trying to guess what you want to keep and what you want to remove.
Now,
here it's done a pretty good job,
but I still need to make a few edits,
so what we're going to do is you can actually select one of these two tools,
mark areas to keep or mark areas to remove,
and these will help you tell powerpoint what you want to remove and what you
want to stay in your picture.
So I'm going to select mark areas to keep here.
Once I click it,
my cursor will turn into a little pen here that I can use to draw onto this
picture,
so I'm just going to draw in.
You'll notice that I'm drawing in a Green Line which indicates you know green
for go,
so please keep this in the picture.
I'm going to draw it in roughly and powerpoint will adjust the Magenta areas and
the color areas indicating what will be removed in the picture once I close out
of this,
I'm just going to keep drawing it in and seeing if it gets it right.
There you go.
There's a little bit here and draw that in.
There you go.
Once you have this as you like it,
you can either select keep changes or you can just click away from your picture
and the changes will keep turning your background transparent.
Now in other examples,
it might get a little bit more complicated.
This was a pretty straightforward photograph in this picture.
It's going to take a little bit more,
so let's go ahead and see what that looks like.
Picture tools format tab,
remove background,
and you'll see that powerpoint actually guesses pretty well,
but there's still some critical areas that are missing including part of the
head and the rest of the body.
So let's go in and do the same thing that we did before.
This time.
What I recommend is to zoom a little bit in just so you can really fine tune the
details here.
So let's.
I'm going to hover my mouse over his head because I want to zoom in there and
then I will use my mouse cursor to adjust the positioning and I will select mark
areas to keep my cursor turns into a pen and then I'm going to draw in here over
his head to make sure that his forehead comes through.
There we go.
It's pretty good.
Then let's go and see where else it work is needed.
Going to make sure his watch stays in there
and oops,
I scrolled down too far.
So if this happens to you,
don't worry,
you can select your picture.
Picture tools,
format tab,
remove background,
and you'll notice you can continue editing your picture.
So let's scroll down.
Make sure we don't go too far,
just down to here and I'm going to select mark areas to keep and continue
drawing this in to make sure that we get his hand.
That worked pretty well.
Let's go a little bit further to check.
All right,
that's looking pretty good.
Let's go over here to the right and let's also draw in the bottom portion of his
body.
That's good.
Oh,
it looks like when we made some adjustments Powerpoint also adjusted up here,
so let's draw that in and that looks good.
So let's select keep changes.
I'm going to zoom out and make sure that everything is in there and it's looking
pretty good.
So if at any point you want to go back to the original picture and discard any
of the changes that you made,
you can do one of two things.
You can either go to the remove background command and select discard changes,
or you can select your picture and go to the reset picture.
This will reset your picture to how it was originally before you made any
changes to it.
Those are just two methods to go back to the original photograph.
Keep in mind that while this tool is pretty amazing,
considering it's a built in photo editing tool directly in powerpoint,
it does also have its limitations.
For example,
it can be quite hard to separate the object you want to keep from the background
you want to remove.
If the two are too similar,
take this picture.
For example,
my arm here is too similar to the background.
They're both quite gray and it's hard for powerpoint to know the difference
between the two.
Also,
it can be hard to remove the background around the strands of hair,
like in this example,
or maybe if you have very small fine items like the binder rings in this picture
or the pen,
and finally,
if the background is too complex or if it has a gradient,
it can be quite tricky as well.
So in summary,
while method number one is by far the fastest and most effective way to remove a
background from your picture in powerpoint,
it only works for a small percentage of the photos you're likely going to be
using in your presentations.
So you want to make sure that you're familiar with method number two,
as you'll most likely be using it often,
and if that still doesn't work,
you'll either need to look for a new picture that works better or consider going
over to photoshop to get the job done.
Also,
if you'd like to make your picture fully transparent,
instead of simply removing its background,
you can check out our video on that here and just to give you an example of the
kinds of cool slides you can create once you know how to remove a background.
Here's an example of a slide I quickly created in powerpoint with a removed
background picture here was the original picture and here's a picture with the
background removed or actually faded out and the picture background added behind
it.
So now you can see the background coming through behind this picture and it's a
kind of a cool effect you can achieve here in powerpoint as always,
for more helpful videos and resources for making,
working in powerpoint,
less time consuming and painful.
Check out the links below in the description.
Thanks for watching this Nuts and Bolts training tutorial and I'll see you at
happy hour.