Photoshop with Microsoft PowerPoint

PowerPoint, Microsoft’s presentation program, is fine for creating quick and easy on-screen and slide presentations. However, it’s a real lame duck when it comes to creating any kind of graphics that are engaging and even remotely original and creative. That’s why I repeatedly turn to Photoshop to create all my background slides and to refine any other images I plan to incorporate into my presentation. You can easily create great backgrounds by employing filters, layer masks, varying opacity settings, creative brushstrokes, patterns, and so on.

Follow these steps to create a slide in Photoshop to use in PowerPoint:
1. In Photoshop, create an image that is 10 inches in width and 7.5 inches in height at 96 ppi (72 ppi on the Mac).
If that size doesn’t seem to work, you can experiment with other sizes.
2. Use an RGB color mode.
3. Save your Photoshop image in a file format that PowerPoint accepts.
PowerPoint accepts EPS, TIFF, JPEG, GIF, PICT, PNG, or BMP. I personally stick with an LZW (lossy)-compressed TIFF.
4. In PowerPoint, choose Insert➪Picture➪From File.
Or you can apply the Photoshop image on your master slide if you want to use it throughout your presentation. In that case, choose View-->Master-->Slide Master and insert the picture. You can also get Photoshop images into PowerPoint by using the Clipboard method. Select the image in Photoshop and choose Edit-->Copy. Go into PowerPoint and choose Edit-->Paste. However, if you want to print the presentation on a PostScript printer (for handouts, for example), don’t use the Clipboard method. Instead, import your images as TIFFs or EPSs.