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A few things we have learned along the way that may be of value to others:
1. IrfanView is an excellent freeware viewer program.
We use it for naming and sorting pictures.
2. Microsoft Photo Editor comes with MS Office 2000
(but not later versions) and includes a handy Autobalance feature.
Sometimes the "auto" is not to our taste, but often it is the quickest and easiest way to improve a picture's quality.
We don't know of any similar
feature that is as quick or good in Paint Shop Pro or Adobe Photoshop.
3. The pictures in the Pictorial Library are 1600x1200 resolution
or larger. That means they are too large for the typical screen or
classroom projector (that doesn't mean they won't fit, it means that the program or the projector will not display all of
the pixels). When building a PowerPoint for the classroom projector, we resize the pictures to 1024x768 resolution. This
reduces the file size (as sometimes our PowerPoints can be 40MB, even with this size reduction). And at 1024x768,
we are
still getting the full quality of an XGA projector.
4. When resizing pictures, it is essential to apply an "unsharp mask" after resizing. Resizing tends to blur pictures
quite a bit and using "unsharp mask" brings the sharpness back.
5. If you are interested in building a PowerPoint file quickly with a series of photos in a certain directory, use the
PhotoAlbum
add-in available for PowerPoint 2000 from Microsoft's web site. The PhotoAlbum feature is included in PowerPoint
2002 and 2003 (with the loss of one feature). This add-in has
significant limitations, but for some purposes it can be a time-saver.
6. When adding pictures to a PowerPoint file, do not drag and drop or copy and paste from another source. If you do,
PowerPoint interprets the picture as a tif file and the file size is greatly increased. Instead, add pictures by using the "Insert/Picture/From File" command on the
PowerPoint menu.
Have a tip to share? We'd appreciate your input. Send an
email to
us.
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