- Understanding File Formats
- Sizing and Optimizing Photos
- Using Clip Art
- AutoShapes
- Preparing Logos with Transparency
- Acquiring Images with Digital Cameras & Scanners
- Creating a Photo Album
- Adding Custom Borders
- Enhancing Photo Appearance with PowerPoint
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Acquiring Images with Digital Cameras & Scanners
You’ll often need to bring original photos into your presentation. These may come from photos you take with a digital camera or from a flatbed scanner. It is important to understand how these devices treat digital images and to know how to import them into Microsoft PowerPoint.
Digital Cameras
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The good news is that most digital cameras can take a picture large enough for use in a presentation. However, you’ll want to look for cameras with features like a good lens and a flash to help you take better pictures. Besides camera quality, there are three major issues to consider when working with a digital camera:
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Transfer of Images—Be sure to load the drivers required for your hardware. If you work with several different cameras, you may want to get a USB card reader that supports multiple formats.
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Image Size—Most digital photos are much larger than you’ll need for a presentation. This is because images are generally intended for print output. You can use the Compress Pictures command (see Sizing and Optimizing Photos) or an image editor like Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements.
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File Format—Digital cameras usually write files to one of three formats. JPEG, TIFF, or a camera raw format. PowerPoint can read JPEG or TIFF files for use in a presentation. Camera raw files will need to be converted.
Flatbed Scanners
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A scanner allows you to convert photos or documents into digital images. Doing this can be useful for inserting photos that were shot on film and printed or printed items like a newspaper story. There are several scanners available that are reasonably priced (in the $99 range). Be sure to look for one that has a minimum optical resolution of 300 pixels per inch.
Older versions of PowerPoint offered an Insert From Scanner command. This would scan the image and insert it directly into
your slide. This could lead to bloated files, however, so Microsoft decided to leave it out of the current release. In PowerPoint
2007, the recommended workflow is to scan images directly to a disk and save them as files (JPEGs or TIFFs work best).