Adding Your Image to a PowerPoint Presentation

Microsoft PowerPoint is a popular presentation program used for creating slides and on-screen presentations. Photoshop is a great tool for creating backgrounds for these presentations or refining head shots that may appear on the slides.

Because PowerPoint does most of its work on-screen, an easy way to transfer the image from Photoshop to PowerPoint is with the Clipboard. While inside Photoshop, just select the portion of the image you want to use, copy it by pressing Ctrl+C (z+C on a Mac), switch to PowerPoint, and paste the selection by pressing Ctrl+V (z+V on a Mac). If your image looks less than desirable, try saving the image in a file format that PowerPoint accepts, such as TIFF, and then importing the file into PowerPoint.

Tip

The transfer method recommended in the previous paragraph holds only if you’re creating an on-screen presentation or plan to print the presentation on a non-PostScript printer. If you want to print overheads on a color PostScript printer, don’t use the Clipboard to place the images into your presentation program. Instead, import the image into PowerPoint as a TIFF file.

As you can in page layout programs, you can move the image around, change the dimensions, and wrap text around it in PowerPoint. If you plan on displaying the presentation on-screen, you may want to give some thought to the size of the image. For example, if you intend for the image to serve as a background for a presentation that takes up an entire 17-inch monitor, the image should be 800 x 600 pixels or larger. A good size for a head shot may be 300 x 200 pixels. Experiment to find the image sizes that work best for you.

Tip

Because the boilerplate templates that ship with PowerPoint aren’t the most awe-inspiring creations, you can create custom, artistic backgrounds for PowerPoint in Photoshop. Experiment with filters, the PatternMaker feature, and all the new brush options. After your background is done, save it as a TIFF and import your background image into PowerPoint.