Synopsis
PowerPoint artistic effects are a powerful tool to create contrast and add visual interest. In this tutorial, I show you several of my favorite effects, and combinations of effects, with step-by instructions.
Video Script
Hi. This is Bryan Jones from eLearningArt. I just wanted to show you some ways when you’re building your eLearning conversations how you can take some of the focus off of the background and more focused on what they’re saying.
If you look at a typical background focus that doesn’t have characters in it. It’s all going to be in focus. And you have your characters in focus too. It can be kind of distracting. So I like to create some visual contrast.
I’ve done some other lessons around this as well.
I justd wanted to show you some of the difference. Here we are, this image here. Let me just pull that up.
If the background is fully in focus, it’s a little distracting. If you add a little blur effect to the background… and this character is blurred out too… but the blurred out background really puts the focus on this character here. So that can be a really useful effect.
A blur is just one thing you can do. Let’s run through a few others. Here I did a line are effect and colorized it. This is a cutout effect. This is a line art where we just colorized the lines. And there is like a pencil effect.
So I just wanted to walk you through what you can do and how that changes the feel of the conversation scene that you’re building.
If you haven’t already looked at it, you should check out the lesson on working with slide masters for these conversation templates.
Go to view, slide master. And you’ll see that I’m really controlling these backgrounds at the master slide level.
So let’s walk through really quickly what’s going on here. So this photo, if I right click it, and go format picture, then artistic effects, then let’s just reset it. Let me get rid of the picture color too. Reset.
So there was the original picture. Some of the things I like to do…
Let’s walk through first kind of a subtle effect. So you can go to artistic effects and if you set blur, you can crank up and down the radius. And that actually looks pretty good. You can still get a feeling for the background, but it’s not going to interfere with the characters when they’re up front.
One of the other things that I like to do is create line art. So if you go to photocopy. The defaults I don’t really like. It has too much color in it. What I do is take that transparency to 0. And I usually do 1 or 2 on here. And that looks ok. But I like it a little more suble. So that’s kind of cool.
And then from there, if I want to, I can also colorize it. So now if I go to picture, color, recolor, you can either go with the background color with the line art around it, which creates a lot of contrast. Or you can just do it with the lines as colored. And that’s pretty cool.
One of the other effects that I like to do is a pencil effect, a pencil sketch. That’s kind of funky. That’s maybe a little too much for me there. So let’s take the pencil size down a little bit and see what that does. It adds some visual interest and it’s kind of cool and creates some contrast since it’s black and white compared to the colored characters.
Let me reset that and if you wanted to go to black and white, you could go to picture corrections. Is that where it is? Maybe it’s picture color. The saturation. You can take the saturation down to 0. And that’s going to make it black and white. And that adds contrast too. For example, let’s just close out of that. And see here’s are character there where it’s black and white and it adds contrast.
Now kind of the cool thing here is if you wanted to have your whole template have the same look and feel. Go back into the slide master and lets say that what we wanted to do was the saturated, contrast, black and white look. WE can go back to this, format picture, we’re going to have to reset all these images. Essentially, we’re going to go to artistic effects, you’d reset it, go to picture color, saturation 0. Now let’s leave this window open while we’re going through this. We can click through here and take the saturation to 0. That one still has a blur on it, we’d need to remove that. But, you kind of get the point of what I’m trying to do here. I’m just going to flow all these through. This color is annoying me. Let’s reset that. It has the line art to. So we need to reset that too. Now I’d go back to it and say picture corrections, picture color, zero.
So I’d flow through all of those. Then when I go back into my presentation, that black and white effect is flowing through the entire thing.
