When you have a brief message, how do you make it appear substantial on a slide? A good option is to add a photograph or collage of photographs that will visually support or add to the brief message. These photographs should be nicely laid out and appealingly formatted. Let’s look at some ways to do this.

The effects applied to the four pictures below are interesting and visually pleasing. It is a good example of (1) choosing a set of photographs carefully to tell a story; (2) laying them out in a stylish format; and (3) applying effects that are engaging.

1. Choosing the pictures is up to you, but be sure that the collection you choose tells a story. They should not be the same object shown in different ways.
2. The layout can be include overlaps, “lists” of photographs, or horizontal and vertical fields with uniform spacing (as in the example above); but they should be symmetrical and balanced.
3. The effects are interesting. They were created in PowerPoint (it doesn’t matter which version), and they are not difficult to produce.

As mentioned, this collage is comprised of four photographs. Each of the four photographs has two versions: a black-and-white version and a color version. To get a black-and-white version of the color photograph, simply format as grayscale in the Format Picture menu. The next step is to perfectly overlay the color photograph onto the black-and-white version of the same photograph. The last step is to crop the color photograph so that the desired part of the photograph is “highlighted” in color. Simple.

In PowerPoint 2007, however, you can tint the black-and-white photograph, which looks really good in some instances (see below). You can still achieve this look in pre-PowerPoint 2007 versions, but it requires that a colored, semitransparent box be placed over the black-and-white photograph – an extra step, but still pretty simple.

Look at the effects below. They are quite stunning and would complement a brief message on a slide.

The two examples above are pretty enough to be on a title page.

The same process that was used to develop the horse collage was used for the top handshake, except the grayscale photograph was tinted. The color photograph was just cropped horizontally.

The second handshake uses three photographs: each has been tinted a different color and then cropped so that they collectively make up one photograph.

These effects take very little time to format, but the results are professional looking and eye catching. Try it out when you have a few minutes so that the next time you have a sparsely populated slide, you’ll remember this idea and the techniques to create something special.