Photo Desaturation effect in PowerPoint

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Learn to create a photo desaturation effect. Animate a colored photo into Black and White or vice versa to add interest to your business presentations.

Here is the Photo desaturation effect in PowerPoint:

You can also turn a black and white photo into a colored photo using the same technique.

It is an interesting way to showcase your images in PowerPoint. Let us learn the technique in a step by step way.

Step 1: Set up the photos

PowerPoint animation effects are not always intuitive. For example, when you have a picture on your slide and you have an animation effect called ‘Desaturate’, you expect the picture to turn into black and white when you apply the animation. Right?

Here is the reality: ‘Desaturate’ animation doesn’t work on your photos. The effect works only on auto shapes and text. If you thought you can work around the problem by filling an auto shape with a photo, you will still be disappointed. That is why you need to follow the steps in this article.

Place the photo you want to desaturate on the slide. Make a copy of the photo and go to Format -> Color -> Saturation 0% to get a black and white version of the picture. Align the two photos so they are placed one on top of the other. Let the colored photo be on the top.

Photo Effect with Greyscale Copy

Related: PowerPoint Image Effect: Focused highlight

Step 2: Apply animation

Click on the colored photo and go to custom animation pane. Choose the exit animation called ‘Fade’. Let the speed be ‘Slow’.

When you go to slide show and ‘click’ on the slide, the following happens: The colored photo slowly vanishes to reveal the black and white photo underneath.

The other way to achieve the effect is to place the black and white photo on top and apply entrance animation effect called ‘Fade’.

You can choose to convert your black and white photo into color or vice versa by changing the order of your photos.

Achieving partial desaturation:

Once you learn the base technique of creating the effect in PowerPoint, you can learn advanced effects like partial desaturation of your photos. Here is the effect you can achieve by following the technique we are about to show you:

partial desaturation photo effect in PowerPoint
Step 1: Mark the shape

Draw an auto shape on the colored photo. In our example, we drew an oval shape on the pictclipboardtep 2: Trim your photo

Use the ‘crop’ tool to trim the edges of the photo to touch the edges. Click on the cropped image and apply ‘Cut’. This puts the image in the clip board.

Step 3: Fill the shape with the photo

Right click on the shape and go to fill -> picture or texture fill -> clipboard. You will get the following result:

Fill Circular Shape with photo Step 4: Arrange the shapes

Place the trimmed oval on top of the colored photo. You can reduce the transparency of the fill to help you place the photo in its right place. Place the black and white photo at the bottom.

Arrange the Photos for Effect Step 5: Apply custom animation

The last step is to apply exit animation called ‘Fade’ to the colored photo. You will get the partial desaturation effect in PowerPoint.

You may like creative ideas to Do More With WMF clipart

Smarter option for business presenters:

You may not always have the time to experiment with various animation options to create your business slides. That is why we came up with our 750+ Advanced Animated Templates for PowerPoint.

The templates pack has graphics, models and concepts to help you visualize your business ideas in an interesting way. The templates pack is an essential investment for those involved in making eLearning presentations, training presentations and marketing presentations uploaded on the web.

Here is an example showing a creative animated effect for photos and text

Here is another template from the Animations pack showing photo reveal with animation:

Source:  Graphics section of Advanced Animation templates

All the above examples are taken from our ‘750+ Advanced Animation Templates Pack for PowerPoint’.

Just choose the template that matches your thought and replace sample text with your own text. Your business slides get ready in no time. Why waste time animating your business slides from scratch, when you have such high quality solutions available off the shelf? Please browse through our animated templates collection here.

If you found this article useful, please leave us a comment below. You can find more articles on this site on Advanced PowerPoint use.

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