One of the general ideas of a mask is to hide what you do not want seen. We can use the same masking concept on our presentation slides to hide what we don’t want seen. We can also use masking to highlight parts of an image that we do want to feature on our slides. In this post I will demonstrate how to go about masking presentation slide images Microsoft Powerpoint.

Why mask images on presentation slides?

There are several reasons that we may want to mask images on our slides. As I stated in the introduction it can be used simply to hide what we do not want seen. This can be used for slides where you may want to place more than one image on the slide and frame or mask it to a shape. You may want to frame a single image into a shape to add some text on the slide. The list could go on.

Masking images in PowerPoint

1. In Powerpoint insert your image onto the slide.
2. Click on “FORMAT PICTURE”
3. CROP the image to the desired dimensions eg. If you want to mask into a proportional round shape then you would crop your image to equal dimensions.
4. MASK TO SHAPE
5. You can then make minor adjustments if needed using the formatting tools.
6. The masked image can be treated like any other image on a slide by moving into place, adjusting size, adding borders etc.

Masking to highlight elements on an image

There may be times where we want to keep the entire image on the presentation slide and highlight a certain element. This can be achieved using the masking tool with duplicate images.

1. Insert the image onto the slide ensuring the element you want highlighted is positioned on the slide.
2. Crop the image to the edge of the slide (you can skip this step if you want to)
3. Duplicate the image
4. Place the duplicated image exactly over the top of the original
5. Mask the duplicated image to desired shape (when doing this the image will look the same)
6. Change the style of the original image using transparency, filters or colour adjustments.

This now gives you the ability to add other elements such as text over the original adjusted image.

 Adjusting using filters or colours

We now have the ability to style the slide with the many options available to us inside PowerPoint. This can help highlight the desired element on the image. Some of the options include (but not limited to) placing borders, changing colours and using artistic filters. The examples below show some of these options used.

These are just some of the options available to highlight elements in PowerPoint. Of course we can take these to another level by adding transition and build effects to further bring the highlighted element to life. I will however leave that to another post. In the meantime I would love to hear your experiences with this feature and feel free to ling back to your own examples.