OfficeArt Effects Series #3: Duotone Picture Recolor

re: OfficeArt Effects Series #3: Duotone Picture Recolor

Howard Cooperstein — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 17:15:33 GMT

Thanks for the feedback everyone. Actually, the ability to change the background color in a bitmap was lost several releases ago. The dialog that did that function simply didn't scale well as a user experience when you got way above 16 -- it maxed out at (I think) around 64 colors so it didn't really work on most most bitmaps -- it just grabbed a random 64 out of the 256 GIF colors or 16M. The dialog still works on metafiles in 2003, but for this release it there was a significant cost to making it work with the new graphics platform that, quite simply, didn't make the cut. HOWEVER, if your gif background is black or white you can recolor it using the new recolor feature. And, if your GIF background is solid we sill have the ability to set a transparent color to make it a "cut out". The idea for advanced selection tools such as by color, shape are great ideas. While we didn't go that direction, we did invest substantially in an easier selection UI for complex drawings and slides. The "Selection Pane" gives you a list of your objects. YOu can rename them or multiple select them and then do whatever you want change colors/effects, move it, delete it, etc. Brent: great story about people assumming your presentation was produced on a Mac. People clearly identify superb graphics and slide design with Mac/Keynote. I think PowerPoint 2007 will change that identification. :-)

re: OfficeArt Effects Series #3: Duotone Picture Recolor

Jools — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 16:24:36 GMT

I miss colour subsitution too - with the lovely new colour schemes, it seems like there's even more reason now to want to make clip-art look like it was made to measure. I had to do it manually the other day (by converting the WMF to drawing objects) - eventually I gave up and ended up redrawing the whole thing myself. It cost me nearly half a day for four little pictures :o(

re: OfficeArt Effects Series #3: Duotone Picture Recolor

Bryan — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 21:42:30 GMT

I'm not sure I understand the rationale behind adding sophisticated recoloring options while removing the simple ones. So now, if I want to change a photo to sepia tone I can do it in PowerPoint, but if I want to change the background color of a GIF logo I need to go to Photoshop? Doesn't this sound backward? In the corporate presos I do, color replacement has been invaluable and the removal of bitmap support was a real inconvenience. Don't underestimate the productivity hit of having to launch a separate program to perform minor changes...removing that bitmap support was a big pain point, and I hoped it would come back. To Mark's point, converting a WMF to OfficeArt only works on the most simplistic of objects. Some advanced selection tools would make this easier and would benefit many slide creation tasks (tools such as "select all objects by color/shape/style," for example, would make recoloring complex OfficeArt objects possible while also facilitating rapid editing of multi-object pages), but I haven't seen such tools mentioned. In short, given the sophisticated graphics engine work you folks have done, it seems that implementing simple graphic editing tasks would be easy. I'm just surprised that so much focus is on gourmet and not bread-and-butter. There are still a lot of legacy 16- and 256-color graphics out there. I guess working with them will continue to suck.

re: OfficeArt Effects Series #3: Duotone Picture Recolor

Richard — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 15:42:37 GMT

Am I imagining things, or are your descriptions for dark and light variations the wrong way round?

re: OfficeArt Effects Series #3: Duotone Picture Recolor

Brent — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 15:55:21 GMT

So I gave a presentation yesterday (PowerPoint 2007) which made use of some of the fine new effects and things, and afterwards a guy on another team comes up to me with a big smile on his face and says, "Looks like the work of a Mac right there!" He walked away sadly after I corrected him.

re: OfficeArt Effects Series #3: Duotone Picture Recolor

Mark Jaremko — Sun, 09 Jul 2006 01:03:23 GMT

We hear you on this one. We know lots of people liked this kind of recoloring for clipart metafiles. As you probably already know you can right click on any metafile clipart and choose "Edit Picture" to convert it to OfficeArt drawing objects. They will be in a group which you can select into and change colors. It lets you accomplish the same thing, albeit more tediously for complicated metafiles. Something not mentioned in my post is that you can use our new recolor feature to substitute a color for black in simple black and white bitmaps. You can use our new feature to recolor that as well since it will substitute a color for all the black parts of that picture.

re: OfficeArt Effects Series #3: Duotone Picture Recolor

Echo Swinford — Sat, 08 Jul 2006 17:13:26 GMT

Nice, nice, nice stuff, Howard. Your team has really worked on these recolor options, and it definitely shows. I know I'm not the only one who will miss the color substitution for metafiles, though. Since so much of the clipart coming out of Office Online is WMF, this feature was dead useful! And sooooo easy to use. Recoloring clipart in Photoshop is a hassle compared to PPT. I'll miss it terribly.

re: OfficeArt Effects Series #3: Duotone Picture Recolor

Mark Jaremko — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 18:01:35 GMT

You are not alone! :-) We've gotten other requests for the XML. I'm working on getting the details; I'll either add them to this post or create a new post covering several of the effects when I've got it together. Thanks,

Howard

re: OfficeArt Effects Series #3: Duotone Picture Recolor

Chris Nokleberg — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 23:36:55 GMT

I'm probably alone, but I would find it extremely helpful if in these entries you could add a footnote referencing the relevant elements/attributes in the OOX specs. Anyway, thanks for the info, keep it coming.