Synopsis
Crop to any shape in PowerPoint, including a circle. This lessons includes an additional technique that allows part of the image to overlap the circle crop, so that it appears as if the image is coming out of the circle. This works really well with pictures of people.
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Video Transcript
This is part two of a two or three part series, depending on how far along I get, showing how you can be cropping an image like a character or another picture inside of a circle, and in this case having the head overlap, to create some visual interest. And this is going to be in PowerPoint.
In the last video I showed you how you could enclose the character within, and now we want to look at how you get the head to be –to be outside there. And I actually want to show you first what’s wrong with using this method to get the — the head outside. So actually saw an interesting screen cast that – that Tom Kuhlmann did, where he found a– a tricky solution to this.
Basically the problem that you’re going to run into, if you were to just take the – the image that you had cropped and you scale it up, you’ll see that it doesn’t quite align with the circle. And what Tom did is by adding a border to that, and then making the top transparent, where the head was, it actually covered that up. And I can point you to where that screen cast is, but essentially we just took this – this circle crop now it’s – it’s a – the ratio is a little different. Now 3.39 and 3.36 is bigger than the three circle that I had there, and then I have a border that I added to it.
And I’ll show you guys how to add the border in a follow-up video if – if it’s necessary. But that works pretty well right? But you – you do run into that problem. What if you didn’t want the border? Well now it’s not flush. So I played around with it and found a way to do this flush, and what you need to do actually is – is the shape union approach.
So what you’re going to want to do is create a space for that head to go into and do a – a picture fill. So if we were to take this shape, and now we just draw another shape, let’s say up here gives her room for her head, and I control click, and I can go – here I have it on my – on the quick access tool bar, I suggest you do the same. Shape union, I have a single shape, let’s remove that border so – actually we can just do it here.
Remove border. And now we want to do a fill, and we’re going to fill it with Alice in there. So we go format shape, we’re going to fill it with a picture, and there she is. And we’re going to tile her so – so that she can go up above that circle. And actually it’s helpful to have a circle that’s three by three so we can see if she’s overlapping.
Let’s go ahead and do that right now. Okay. I went ahead and drew a circle that was three by three, and I put her there, and look let’s go ahead and send – let’s get rid of the – rid of the border, and send it to the back, and you know that’s pretty good. Maybe you want her to – we’ll have her overlap that much for this one, for the exercise.
But you’ll – you’ll see – see how her feet came up there? So I went ahead and I drew the circle, make sure there was no border. And then I filled it with the picture. But it tiled and since it was tiling, it’s – and it went into that rectangle that I drew at top, it added her feet there. So now you need to go back and make – make a correction.
But you’ll notice that problem went away, and if I go to align both of these. So I grab that – that circle, and I grab her, and I align them bottom and middle, you’ll see I don’t have that same – that same issue as I do right here along the border with it not lining up.
It lines up perfectly flush. So that’s cool. But now we need to get rid of her feet up there. That’s just a weird thing to have the feet. So you can actually now go back, and it’s kind of cool, since this is a shape here, we can go back to the drawing tool format, not the picture, but the drawing format, and we go to edit the points.
And you’ll see if we just drag these edit points down, we’ve now pulled her within that area. Well, let’s go ahead and pull her in. And there you are. So now we have a perfectly flush character along the edge there with the head popping out. Pretty cool! Hope you found that useful.
