How To: Save, crop and resize image files
At a recent Toastmasters Club meeting, Tevis encouraged us to appreciate the impact of adding pictures to PowerPoint presentations. Unlike plain text, a memorable photograph adds to a talk without distracting from the speaker.
It was obvious from the discussion that some Club members did not know the basics of how to find, save and manipulate images. Since this is part of my day job, I offered to write up a series of simple ‘how to’ guides for Windows XP users.
In the first of the series, I’ll show how you can start to build up a library of pictures for future presentations by learning how to save, crop and re-size image files. These can be used in PowerPoint presentations, posters, magazine and newsletter layouts, websites and blogs.
Saving an image file
Putting aside questions about where to find image files, copyright issues and how to insert image files into PowerPoint – which I’ll discuss in a later posting – the first practical step to understand is how to save an image file.
I’ll take as an example the photograph of the book cover I used in my last blog posting. It was sourced from a Google Image search for the title of Harold’s book: 4 Steps to Financial Security for Lesbian and Gay Couples. (I had permission from the author to include his book in the profile, so copyright was not an issue).
Step 1 – Save: Right-click on the first file from the Google Image search results and you’ll be given the opportunity to ‘Save As’. Choose .JPG or .PNG and a name for the file that makes sense.
Step 2 – Crop: The image as saved includes white space on either side of the book cover. Right click to ‘Open With’ Microsoft Office Picture Manager. Then choose [Picture] [Crop] and move the left and right handles in until the white space is removed
Click ‘OK’ and [File] [Save] and overwrite the existing file.
Step 3 – Re-size: You can re-size images inside PowerPoint so they’ll fit your slide. But for newsletters and, especially, web pages and blogs, it’s crucial to have a source file that’s the right size (width and height).There’s also the question of file size (in MB’s).While a small book-cover image is not a problem, other images, especially high definition photo’s, will make your presentation file size very large. So shrinking it down in Picture Manager can be useful. Select [File] [Resize] and choose from a number of pre-defined width and height settings or reduce by a percentage of the original width and click [OK] to save.
Experiment with different sizes and see what resolution you get when importing into PowerPoint.
Putting it into practice
Here’s an image I purchased from istockphoto.com of a railroad yard.
I used the [Crop] function to select a narrow band of tracks to insert in a title slide
Knowing these simple steps for manipulating image files is useful for building an image library for your future presentations.
In my next posting I’ll deal with various sources for photographs on the web and all-important copyright issues.
What would it be like to play back all the images from even a half-dozen lives, lived wearing a Vicon Revue? Imagine a group of people in the same family or people who worked together all recording their separate points of view. What would this tell us? How would we even begin to make sense of it? Imagine they spent time together in the same room—what would it look like?
