Pictures pop with easy photo editing in Office 2010

This is post #9 in the Ten Days of Office series celebrating the one-year anniversary of the release of Office 2010 with tips and tricks for getting the most from your Office experience.

The cliché "a picture's worth 1,000 words" persists because a great picture gets to the point in a way that no amount of text can replicate. With Office 2010 you can use that to your advantage: You no longer have to jump back and forth between your document and your image editor, since so many tools are built right in. Office helps you easily turn good pictures into great pictures, and transform good documents and presentations into ones worth remembering. 

There are many things you can do with pictures in Office 2010: color correct them, apply artistic effects like pencil sketching, put borders on, rotate, add shadows, etc. But personally, I have a thing for photos that are mostly black and white but have some hint of color. It's my favorite trick to show off the new photo editing tools. Follow along with me and you too can use this tip to embellish your Word docs and PowerPoint slides.

I started with the photo below, and for this effect you will need two copies of the same image:

Once you insert your image, Picture Tools opens on the ribbon. In Picture Tools, select the Wrap Text command and click the In Front of the Text option. Then you can just copy and paste the image to drop a second image on top of the first.

Then I select the one in back and use the photo tools to format it black and white.

Under Picture Tools/Format, select the Color control and find the black and white example in the Color Saturation section.

Then use the Remove Background tool on the front, color the picture to pop out the part you really want to show off:

From the Picture Tools again, choose Remove Background and draw the box around just the part you want to keep. Then use the Add and Remove marking tools on the ribbon to drag lines through the areas where the Remove Background tool is guessing wrong.

Finally, slide the top picture back over the bottom one, to line things up:

And voila! There you have a composite image effect that you can typically only achieve with very expensive tools and lot of spare time on your hands.

This of course is only a fraction of the amazing things you can do with the built-in image editing tools in Word, Publisher, and PowerPoint 2010. Plus you can even trim, recolor, and format videos in PowerPoint 2010. You can find many more tips and tricks for working with images on the Word blog and the PowerPoint blog. Check out this post which also features Remove Background for getting your picture just right.

Thanks to Office 2010 and congrats on its one-year anniversary.

-- Chris Bryant