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- [Tony] Images outperform text, hands down.
Remember that your audience are there to hear you
and not to read your slides.
If you can, when using images, go big,
as large as you can.
And wherever possible,
use full screen images.
Designers often call this full bleed,
and that means they meet
or exceed all of the boundaries of the slide.
The reason that these things are often best
is the view is most like our real life focus on a subject.
However, that does rely on you having
a large enough image to work with.
You can always check the size of a placed image
or pasted image inside of PowerPoint
by going to the formatting options and making sure
that the relative to original picture
size option is checked.
And it will then tell you the actual size.
As you can see here, this is 64%.
And there's a similar mechanism available in Keynote.
It is okay to exceed 100% by perhaps as much as 10
or even 20% a pinch.
But much further than that,
and your images are not going to be of much use at all.
They will look terrible.
And in the example here,
which is using a small web captured image at 100% there,
you can see that 120% is not much worse than that one.
But a 200, way, way worse.
300, way, way, way worse.
And 400, well, you can see it's not great at all just there.
So get the best images that you can.
When your images are smaller than the slide,
then always try and frame them within the slide area,
adding just a little bit more weight to the bottom,
in the negative space there.
And if you think about pictures
that you may have on your wall that are inside of a mount,
there's always a little bit more room
or quite often a little bit more room at the bottom there,
just to position it nicely within the frame.
So you can use that method here inside of a slide as well.
If you need to use captions with your slides,
then what you could do is create a small area at the bottom.
So you're using sort of a 3/4 bleed there, almost.
That's not a real term, by the way, I made it up.
But it's a sort of a partial border at the bottom,
where you can add your caption
or perhaps consider using a transparent box over method,
like this one just here.
And all this is,
this is the box that the text is in,
which is filled with black.
And then the transparency cut back to about 75% there,
so you can see through that just enough.
And just as a point, by the way,
while we're talking about transparency
and overlaying images,
never ever, ever use images like this as a background.
Your slide will be unreadable.
If possible, when you're using an illustration
like this one that you want to guide people around,
you could try zooming in and with your callouts there,
having them perhaps in each build.
But again, you need the resolution to do it.
And as you can see here,
or hopefully you can detect that's a bit soft,
especially in the text areas.
There's just not enough resolution.
So in an event like that,
what you could do is use it at the largest size you've got,
and use a focus technique.
And I'll show you how to do that.
What I'm going to do is select the image here
and then copy it.
So I've got a copy on the clipboard,
and I'm going to modify this one here
using the options here in PowerPoint.
So I can go ahead and go to the picture
and go to these picture options here for corrections.
I'm just going to bring down the brightness,
they're adjustments really, by the way, not corrections.
There we go.
So I'm just bring in the brightness on that one down,
and I'm going to go into color and desaturate this,
suck the color out of it.
So there we go.
Nice black and white-ish version there.
And then I'm going to paste down the original copy on top
and position it like that.
They need to be in the same location.
And then go for the crop options.
So if I go to the picture format here
and you can use masking, by the way,
in Keynote to achieve the same result.
If I go for the crop here, and first of all,
choose an aspect ratio.
I'm going to choose one to one.
Just there.
And then I'm going to choose to crop to a shape.
So I'm going to use a circle.
Just here, once again, I have to call up the crop.
Okay, and then just bring that down to the size.
I want it to be, pretty much like that.
And then reposition that crop area just there.
So if grab hold of the edge of that,
I'm always doing that, by the way.
(chuckles) Grabbing the wrong thing.
And there we are.
That's how we can use this focus technique
to guide our viewer around this illustration
in a nice, gentle way.
One final tip, don't use images stolen off the internet.
There are plenty of places
where you can get free content
that won't infringe the rights of others.
So try sites like Pixabay, Unsplash, Pexels,
and Wikimedia Commons,
if you don't have access to other images.
(upbeat electronic music)