Synopsis
You can easily recolor ClipArt in Microsoft PowerPoint if the files are in the EMF format. This video teaches you step-by-step how to ungroup and recolor ClipArt.
Video Script
Hi this is Bryan Jones from eLearningArt. Today I’m going to show you how you can ungroup clipart and then recolor it in PowerPoint. So let me actually get right into PowerPoint and show you what I did. So this is the end effects that we’re going to want. And let’s just move those out of the way and pretend like we don’t have them.
So the first thing I’m going to do, this is a piece of clipart, I’m just going to duplicate it. So if I hold control, I can duplicate it, bring it over here, and now I want to ungroup it. So let’s go to ungroup, yes, ungroup, okay. Now we have all the pieces broken out and we can start the recoloring.
There is usually a piece on top here, yeah that’s just a blank box, let’s get rid of that. And let me… I like having this selection and visibility pane open just so I can see things. So let’s go ahead and recolor the hair. So I can just right click and here I could just make his hair brown.
So I have the recent color brown in there, and I could make his face maybe more skin-toned, that looks pretty good. And I want to… I’m going to hit control there to get the whole tie. I like to make his tie blue, or orange, or whatever I want. And there we go, make that, his shirt, yellow. All right. So maybe that’s not the prettiest thing, but that’s fine.
Then I can just over here, I had – I added a gradient in there, and you can do that too. So let’s go ahead and show you how to do that. If I just right click format shape, then let me bring this into here so you can see it, and instead of a solid fill, if I go to a gradient fill.
All right. That doesn’t look quite right, but if I here select a color, and let’s get that – that there. Maybe I don’t want it quite white. Let’s say I want it going to that. Maybe that’s not quite strong enough. Let’s get a darker color there. There we go. A little bit more color.
And then you can drag these around and you’ll see the gradient changes in his face, I think that looks pretty good. Maybe – maybe like that. I can do the same thing with the hair. So instead of that being just a single color, I can go to gradient and no, that color is not going to work there. Let’s go ahead and make that a dark brown, and then maybe here we go to a light brown, and you know, let’s say I wanted the gradient to be more light and just, you know, just the tips are dark.
Now that – that’s actually the opposite of how it would be. Let’s go dark on the top, and then the tips are going to be light. There we go. And that’s how you do some recoloring. And really quickly, I just want to show you some other things you can do here.
Let me duplicate this one as well, so I can do control D to duplicate, drag it over. I really like… If you haven’t used the copy past format, it’s a really big time saver. Let’s go ahead and ungroup this guy, so let’s go to group, ungroup, yes, group, ungroup, let’s get that top piece off there, delete it.
Let’s say that I wanted that same gradient on the face. If I actually do control shift, C, and then I click on his face, and then I do control, shift V, it carries that same gradient over. So I could do that again, if I just do control, shift, V since I already have it in my – there we go.
And let’s say… And again, I wanted to make that yellow, I could go control, shift, C and then make him yellow down there. And that’s a really big time saver. Now you can also then save these out as individual images. You can save it as an EMF again.
You know, you can go to save as picture, so then the – with the save window here, if you just want to save it as an EMF, you can do that as a Windows meta file, or you should do a PNG. And the reason you want to do one of those two is it keeps the – it keeps the transparency. Or you can also just – if you do a copy, and then you go paste, you can actually paste it as a picture, and it will pull that in as a PNG.
The advantage of this now is that you don’t have all of these separate objects, so it actually reduces the number of objects on a slide to – this is just now a single object. So that’s a – a good reason to do that. The EMF would be as if you wanted to – if you wanted to keep it so you can scale it.
Anyways, I hope you find that useful. I’m doing a bunch of lessons right now on icons, and clipart, and regrouping, ungrouping, recoloring. So had to eLearningArt.com, or look at my Screener or YouTube pages to stay tuned for more. Thanks.
