I recently gave a presentation to the local Chamber of Commerce called, “How to Ace Presentations.” (I didn’t choose the title.)
One of the topics I included was a discussion of a simple persuasion method:
- Start with the problem
- Then present your solution
- Finally, show proof
Here are the 3 slides I used.
It’s hard to find a series of images that work together, in this case the broken egg and the whole egg. Actually, that wasn’t hard; I found them both in Microsoft Office’s Image Gallery. But how could I indicate the concept of the solution? In this case, the bottle of glue represented the solution. I certainly wasn’t going to find a bottle of glue and an egg together.
Here’s a close-up of the middle slide.
So I took a photo of a bottle of glue that I had in the house. Then I did the following:
- I removed the background of the egg and the glue bottle, using PowerPoint 2010’s Remove Background feature.
- I rotated the bottle of glue so it pointed to the egg.
- I gave both the same shadow treatment, in this case one of the Perspective shadows, as you see here.
This gave the two images a similar treatment, so that they looked as if they belonged together. My audience liked this slide! What do you think?
I usually do all of this in Photoshop. This post makes me want to get PowerPoint 2010!
I’ve never tried using one of my own photos in a presentation, but you’ve inspired me to try, as I’ve got PPT 2010 at home. On slide 2, there’s strong light around the glue’s nozzle, on the right, whereas the egg is lit from above. I wonder about laying the bottle on its side when taking the photo (perhaps holding it in place with putty) so that it’s strongly lit on its edge rather than on its top? To make pictures go together (or to fit the colour scheme of the slides) I sometimes use PPT 2007’s Recolor option on… Read more »