Duotone Photos
I’ve been showing you how to use PowerPoint to quickly create stencil and lace effects. Now, let’s look at creating duotone photos. In addition to making a photo look very modern, duotone is a useful technique for using less than stellar photos.
While the cat might be photogenic, the background is not. I want to move from the photo above to the duotone below, which is suitable for adding a quote.
The first step is to crop the picture as closely as possible.
But unfortunately, once enlarged you see the photo is a little blurry. This won’t be a problem going forward and it shows how this technique can cope with less than perfect photos.
Going to Picture Corrections:
Brightness was set to 65%
Contrast to 100%
Picture Color: Saturation was set to zero.
There is a bit of guesswork here, as I had to bring up Brightness enough to wash out the dark corner of the chair the cat is on, yet leave as much detail as possible. You’ll note that this brings out a lot of light spots on the pupils as well.
Why not just Recolor the picture to Black and White? In this case, I felt that recoloring removed too much detail from the photo. In the case of a different photo, recoloring might be the quickest and easiest method. I’d definitely try it first and see if I liked the results.
I’ve drawn a rectangle and filled it with a bright colour for contrast, this has been placed under the photo.
Now I can make the white portion of the photo transparent, by selecting Picture Tools>Format>Color>Set Transparent Color and clicking on a white portion of the picture.
What’s also hard to see in the above picture is that the photo has a lot of small grey artifacts in the borders of the fur. This is exactly what we added in when making the lace picture earlier, but here it is unwanted. An additional step is required for this photo (again for some photos it might be unnecessary).
But before I do that – I’m going to use the Ink command and touch up the pupils to remove some of the glints. Ink is only available in Office 365.
After filling in the glints on the pupils, I grouped the ink layer with the photo. Then I copied and pasted the photo (and ink layer) as a picture. PowerPoint remembers all the photo editing done to a picture (which is why the Reset command works) and applies those steps cumulatively. I want to start fresh and apply the Recolor command to strip out the grey artifacts without losing a lot of detail. After recoloring the photo to 25% Black and White I set the White color to transparent
Again, I grouped the photo with bright background rectangle, pasted it as a picture and this time set the black portion as transparent. This is similar to the photo stencil.
In the final step, set a gradient fill in your chosen colour scheme to colour the duotone.
The main elements of this technique are applicable to a number of photo effects. Try them out and see what you get!
This post is originally from 2018 If you want help with the newest and classic features in PowerPoint drop me a line at catharine@mytechgenie.ca