Creating posters and flyers

Lesson -IV

Editing pictures inside Office

Office 2007 has tools to edit photos and pictures in the document.

Office 2007 introduced the ribbon which is not always the most popular thing in the world but for picture editing made features a lot easier to see and use.

LIVE PREVIEW

The big improvement is live preview, as you hover over possible changes in an image, those changes are temporarily shown in the document. You can see the effect of that image editing feature has in the document itself. No more switching back and forth to test settings.

CROP

removing select edges of the images to show only part of the original.

Despite being a commonly used feature, it’s somewhat hidden on the right side of the ribbon in the ‘Size’ section which is reduced to a single button in narrower views.

CROP

You can change the image to a specific height/width or click on the arrow icon on bottom right to see the picture size dialog that’s been around for many versions of Office by selecting an image will activate ‘handles’ at points around the image. The corner handles can be dragged to resize the image, larger or smaller keeping the image size in its original proportions. The handles on the sides will adjust the height or width but aren’t commonly used because they change the height/width ratio of the image and make it look distorted.

Clicking on ‘Crop’ activates the crop handles around the image.

WRAP TEXT

Positioning an image among text is relatively simple these days

The default is ‘inline’

TEXT WRAP

But the chances are you’ll want to position the image on the left or right then wrap the text around the image. The Position gallery options in Word 2007/2010 let you position the image at the various places relative to the page. These options will also turn text wrapping on.

Edit Wrap points

‘Edit Wrap points’ can be used to control the boundary between image and text. It’s most commonly used after rotating an image. The black points can be dragged around to change how the text flows. These days Office is much better at selecting acceptable wrap points even for partially rotated images so this feature isn’t needed a lot. In this example we’re showing deliberately extreme wrap points to demonstrate the effect more clearly.

ROTATE

If the photo was taken with the camera at an angle you might need to rotate the image. That’s easily done from the small rotate button on the bottom right of the Arrange ribbon section.

Or click on the image then the round green handle lets you rotate the image.

COMPRESS IMAGE Images in a document can make up a large

proportion of the document file size. For that reason Microsoft has a ‘Compress Image’ option to reduce the resolution of an image to a level needed for printing or screen display.

The problem with ‘Compress Image’ is that you lose the ability to effectively edit an image. If you want to increase the size of a compressed image you might start to get ‘pixilation’ from a compressed image.

Unless you need to, we suggest not compressing images in Office documents. Better to leave them in their original resolution in case you need it.

Position A handy way to place any graphic at a

specific spot on the page is to use the Position command button, found in the Drawing Tools Format tab's Arrange group. Clicking that button displays options for placing an image to the left, right, center, top, or bottom, or a combination of these.

Before using the Position command button, zoom out so that the page fills the screen. Then you can see how choosing different options affects the layout.

Unlinking an image from the surrounding text

select the image, select Text Wrapping→More Layout Options.

The Advanced Layout dialog box appears.Choose the Picture Position tab, and in the Horizontal

area, choose Absolute Position. Choose Page from the To the Right Of drop-down list. Page is the second option in the list. In the Vertical area, choose Absolute Position. Select Page from the Below drop-down list and then

click OK. The picture is now unlinked from the text, and you

can move it around freely.

Adding Images inside of AutoShapes

Save an image in one of your folders, preferably an images folder.

Select the AutoShape after you have created it as shown above.

Click on the drop down menu of the paint bucket and choose Fill Effects

When the Fill Effects window pops up, select the Picture tab.

Click on the Select Picture tab. Locate the image in your folder and select it. Once the image has been selected, click on the OK

button and the image will be in the AutoShape.