Free photo editing for presenters
Here’s a photo editing tip that can save you hundreds of dollars if you need to edit photos to use in presentations.
Last week I was in Wellington, NZ to study the craft of Presentation Zen (or ‘PZ’) from the sensei himself, Garr Reynolds. Garr is a great guy — engaging, warm, generous (lots of schwag!) and a talented presenter. He teaches that ‘Death by PowerPoint‘ can be avoided by using slides that convey emotion rather than information, using images and design rather than big blocks of bullet-point text.
I’ve been mimicking elements of Presentation Zen design for a while now, inspired by the work of others (such as @trib, @liubinskas and @factoryjoe) but this was my first chance to learn the whole thing first-hand. It was ground-breaking and thought-provoking stuff – I’d highly recommend doing the course.
But much to my surprise, I knew something about designing presentations that Garr Sensei did not — how to create great images for slides on your Mac, on the cheap…
About your image problem
The Presentation Zen style of presentation design calls for great images. Garr recommends using stock photo services like iStockphoto.com when you need to (and if you attend his course he’ll give you iStockphoto coupons for free photo credits – yay!) and he also recommends taking your own photos.
In my experience, taking my own photos doesn’t usually work out. Most slides need space for at least a few words, so an image needs either a large area of homogeneous colour I can run type over, or I need to crop the image, mask it, and/or anti-alias the edges so the subject of the image can be lifted from the original photo and dropped smoothly onto a slide background. Real-world photo backgrounds usually have lots of stuff in the background and I don’t have access to a photo studio or large, homogenous background in a well-lit space.
On the left, a photo from the real world (the Webstock PZ class at lunch) with all sorts of stuff going on in the background. On the right, a stock image from iStockphoto, with a plain white background - much easier to use in presentation design.
Have you paid your Adobe Tax?
You need image editing software to do things like crop, mask and anti-alias an object. Garr’s been presenting for decades and is a presentation designer, so for him the time and money required to buy and learn the Adobe suite of graphics software makes sense. But those products cost hundreds of dollars (I call it your “Adobe Tax”) and for people who don’t want to be designers, they aren’t easy to learn.
For me and the vast majority of part-time presenters, is there a cheaper, easier way? Turns out the answer is yes, for those of us on a Mac running the current version of OSX.
Preview: your overlooked best friend
In each OSX installation Apple includes some basic free apps, and one of those, Preview, pops up regularly as the app that shows you the contents of an email attachment if it’s a PDF, text or image file. By default, it’s the viewer for many common file types. Other than that, the other functions of Preview remain a mystery for most of us.
Delve a little deeper into Preview and all sorts of hidden treasures are revealed. Preview can make an easy and effective image editor for a lot of common tasks. It supports transparent background in the PNG image format (referred to as the ‘alpha channel’ by professionals) and with it you can select areas of an image by colour so they can be cropped out. It also has a lasso selection tool for isolating an object by its outline. It also has a feature called Extract Shape specifically for pulling objects out of a photo. It even has some good controls for changing image properties that will allow you to adjust exposure, saturation, temperature, tint and more.
…but very few people seem to know they even exist!
Here's where Apple hides the best tools in Preview
The Instant Alpha and Extract Shape tools are a bit hidden — you’ll have to click and hold down on the selection button on the Preview toolbar to see them. The colour adjustment features are hidden in the Adjust Colour item in the Tools menu.
(By the way, if you’re wondering why I have so many more buttons on my Preview toolbar than you have, it’s also worth checking out all the other features hidden in Preview. Go to Customise Toolbar… in the View menu to see more cool things you can do with Preview, like annotate and bookmark pages in a lengthy PDF…)
教師を展開！(Extract the Sensei!)
Let’s start with a perfect example — a fuzzy, poorly-lit photo I took of Garr in the workshop on my iPhone. If we can extract something clean and useful from a photo as bad as this, we know we’ve got a useful tool.
I'd like to take Garr out of the background to use in a presentation slide, let's do it using Preview.
Let’s take Garr out of that background and insert him into a different background.
First, use the Extract Shape tool to remove most of the background. Using the tool, drag around the outline of the person or thing you want to extract. You’ll see a red line following your mouse around the image. If you don’t get it quite right, don’t worry — once you’re finished drawing around the outline, Preview will add a draggable outline to the image and you can fine-tune your outline by dragging the little square points in and out, and up and down, until you’ve got the outline nailed.
Using the Extract Shape tool, you'll get a red outline indicating the path you've drawn
The background area that will be discarded is greyed-out
Once you’ve completed this step, Preview will automatically put you in Instant Alpha mode to allow you to fine-tune the crop still further (you can also select Instant Alpha mode from the Select button on the toolbar at any time.)
Instant Alpha is easy to use — just select the Instant Alpha tool, then click and drag on the coloured areas in the image you’d like to remove.
Using Instant Alpha, click on a colour you'd like to remove, and then drag the mouse towards the other side of that colour area. The area you're selecting will turn pink. If Garr starts to turn pink, you've selected too much! Don't worry, just drag the mouse back in the opposite direction a little way.
Here’s our extracted Garr. But before we leave Preview, let’s use the Adjust Colours panel to improve his brightness, contrast and saturation a little:
Let's add a little colour to Garr, brighten him up and soften him a little to remove some noise from the image.
ドロップは、先生！(Drop the Sensei!)
Now we’ve got the sensei we want, we could just drop his image onto a background in PowerPoint or Keynote, but to reward you for reading this far, I want to tell you about another great little tool I like to use to add drop-shadows, reflections, perspective, rotation, elevation and borders to images like these.
Take the time to check out Picturesque, from Acqualia. It costs USD$35, but that’s way less than the Adobe Tax, and it’s a super-easy way to add shiny effects to images. Here’s Garr with some additional depth and a nice border courtesy of Picturesque.
Sensei now has a nice shadow, border frame, all masked and anti-aliased and ready to drop into Keynote.
Picturesque really comes in handy when you need to jazz up a screen dump or product box shot, like this:
Original screendump on the left, Picturesque's improved version on the right. Enough said!
を提示する準備ができている先生！(The Sensei is ready to present!)
Anyway, here’s our final Keynote slide with Sensei in action:
Here's our Sensei, in Keynote, ready to go.
PS: special thanks to the most excellent Mike and Tash from Webstock for putting on the Southern Hemisphere’s best geek events!
EXTRA UNZUD BONUS VIDEO: One night while aimlessly flipping between channels in my hotel room I saw this freaky NZ martial art.
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