Backgrounds

Have you taken or found a cool picture and wondered how you can turn it into a powerpoint background, but you don’t have a program like adobe photoshop or macromedia flashworks. What if all you had was Powerpoint?

Well it just might be easier than you think. While you may not be able to do all the slick effects possible with some of the other photo programs you can still come up with a usable worship background from one of your photos. Here I have taken a picture that I took at our recent Palm Sunday service. Let’s turn it into a background slide you can use for Power Point or Media shout or even other publications.

First I opened up Microsoft powerpoint. Then I clicked insert > file > palm.jpg.

Second I selected the photo and then found my photo toolbar. I choose brighten and brought up the brightness of the photo. Depending on your photo you may also want to reduce the contrast of the picture or if you wanted to eventually use lighter text on top of the slide then reduce the brightness.

Third I added a text box, I chose the papyrus font and typed in the Text “Hosanna”. I changed the text size to 117pt, then I rotated the text and placed it on the left hand side.

Fourth I created a rounded corner rectangle auto shape from the auto shape menu. I wanted to use the auto shape as a place to eventually put text so I drew a fairly large square on the right hand side of the slide. I went to format auto shape, chose to fill it with white and then set the transparency to 45 percent.

I think that slide would do great as a title slide or for some small announcement but what about a slide to use for song lyrics. With just a few changes I found a way to make a slide for such a purpose.

First I selected the slide and clicked ctrl+d which duplicated the slide.

Second I selected the large rectangle auto shape and dragged it over to fill the entire slide.

Third I selected the “Hosanna” text, rotated it back to horizontal, shrunk the size to 60pt and placed it in the bottom right hand corner

Fourth I chose the text box, right clicked chose order>bring to front. This placed the text box in front of the text so you can see the text faintly behind the box.

This created a slide that I would use for a song background or maybe a scripture background.

Finally to save the slide as a photo choose file>save as> jpeg and named my file palmbkg. When the box comes up that says “do you want to export every slide” I chose every slide. This creates a folder on my computer with each slide saved as a jpg image in the folder.

As you can see this is an easy way to create background files. However you are somewhat limited to the photo effects you can use. If you do have adobe photoshop then please check out this easy to follow photoshop tutorial posted on life in student ministry. Adobe Photoshop has also just launched Adobe Photoshop Express, which is free and can be used to crop, change colors, add cool effects like blur, sharpen, and more.