Make people and objects stand out on your slides

Dec 13, 2010 by AnaFxFz    3 Comments    Posted under: Photoshop, Presentations

In this post I will demonstrate a technique to make people and/or objects stand out on pictures of your slides. I used Photoshop, Illustrator and PowerPoint to redesign this slide, but you can achieve similar results using only Photoshop and PowerPoint (or Keynote).

The slide below is part of the “Enchantment” presentation. Yesterday, Guy Kawasaki asked me to review this slide and see if I could find a better way to highlight who in the picture he was talking about.

In the original slide we used the butterfly. For each click, a butterfly appeared next to the character that Guy K. was talking about during his speech. It worked well in the original design of Enchantment, which had the blue butterfly. But the “Kawasaki” origami butterfly of the new design blends with the background and doesn’t really highlight anything.

Here is a technique I came up with in order to improve this slide’s animation:

1) Start by extracting each character out of the picture in Adobe Photoshop:

-I like to use the “magnetic lasso tool” to select people or objects. You can also use the “extract” filter, which didn’t work very well for me in this case. I think it’s just a matter of personal preference, some people work better with the extract filter.

-After you select the character, copy and paste it in a new Photoshop document with no background. Note that Photoshop creates the new document based on the proportions of the image that you just put in your clipboard (when you copied the selected character), so you don’t have to worry about re-sizing the new file.

*Attn.: Click images to make them bigger and see details.

-If necessary, use the eraser tool to correct the edges of the extracted image. Also, if photoshop automatically creates the new file with a black background, just delete the background layer.

Here is the final png file of the extracted character:

2) Create an Illustrator file using a black-&-white version of the original picture as background.
*Note: You can skip Illustrator and assemble the animation directly in PowerPoint or Keynote. I decided to make one image for each character using Illustrator, which made things easier inside PowerPoint.

-Place all extracted characters inside of the same Illustrator file, but outside of the artboard. Then work with one at a time to produce 5 different images.

-Drag the character onto the artboard, placing it on top of his/her original position in the black-&-white background. Add some drop shadow to help the colored portion of the image stand out even more. The X and Y Offsets of the Drop Shadow will depend on the position of each character in the picture.

3) In PowerPoint, put one image on top of the other and add an entrance animation effect to all of them. To make smooth transitions between characters, use the “Fade” effect and set the speed to “Very Fast”:

Here is the final animated slide:

The change from one person to the next happens “on-click” when Guy Kawasaki is delivering the presentation.

*Note: the little boy was not included in this animation because he’s not actually mentioned in Guy Kawasaki’s speech.
*The music was added only for this blog post demonstration. ;)