PowerPoint Blog
Labels: interviews, photos
Nate Anderson is Senior Product Manager at balesio AG, a leading provider of file optimization and compression solutions. He is a software industry veteran and was part of the core development team of the company’s new FILEminimizer Pictures software.
In this discussion, Nate discusses the new FILEminimizer Pictures 2.0 product.
Geetesh: Tell us more about FILEminimizer Pictures 2.0, and how everyday computer users can benefit from the program.
Nate: FILEminimizer Pictures is one of the small utilities that makes your everyday computer life a lot easier. The software is able to compress your images, photos and pictures by up to 98 percent making them a lot smaller and ideal for the Internet. Whether you want to send some pictures to your friends or upload your latest photos on facebook, there have always been problems. You can send only one or two pictures via email because email size limitation and if you want to upload your photos to facebook, it takes hours until they are uploaded and processed. FILEminimizer Pictures is great because it saves you a lot of time and frustration. You can batch optimize your photos and images and share them easier via Email and Internet. While there are some freeware tools out there which resize your images and decrease image quality and size, what makes our tool stand out and special is our lossless compression which is greatly appreciated by our users.
Geetesh: What is lossless compression, and why is it an important feature in FILEminimizer Pictures 2.0?
Nate: FILEminimizer Pictures features a unique image optimization technique which works on the single image and optimizes this image based on the image characteristics. We achieve file size reductions of over 80 percent without resizing the image or affecting the quality. Lossless compression means that you have still the same beautiful image after the optimization, in the same size, with the same quality. It is just a lot smaller! I cannot tell you more technical secrets about our lossless compression technique but I want to encourage at this point all users to try it out for their own.
Categories: interviews, photos
Imagine this scenario: you try uploading your vacation pictures to a social network site, or send it via e-mail to share it with your family and friends. And then you end up with an error message complaining about the file sizes and dimensions being too huge. Well, it's not your fault but that's what you get with 12 megapixel digital cameras! Fortunately, there is FILEminimizer Pictures 2.0.
Read the review here...
Categories: graphics, photos
Labels: photos, powerpoint 
Engaging or boring? What effect do your presentation slides have on your audiences? Can images help? That's the topic of this webinar organized by ReadyImages. Julie Terberg of Terberg Design hosts this online seminar that will help increase the effectiveness of your visual communications. Julie will provide guidance on the proper selection and use of images, and she’ll offer real-world design tips for using PowerPoint.
Attendees will gain next-level design skills and the opportunity to receive 100 complimentary images from ReadyImages.
You can sign up here...
Categories: powerpoint, photos
Labels: photos, powerpoint
If you use many images in your PowerPoint slides, you will find this webinar interesting. Copyright Clearance Center is hosting a webinar on copyright and the licensing of images next Wednesday, the 29th of April, 2009. The webinar will include a demo of ReadyImages.
You can sign up here...
Categories: powerpoint, photos
Labels: animation, photos, powerpoint, presentation_samples, tutorials
Learn how to animate a series of headshots -- very useful for an opening slide sequence. You can also use the same technique for product shots or vacation pictures -- just substitute the headshots!
Learn more now...
Categories: animation, photos, powerpoint, presentation_samples, tutorials
Labels: clip_media, photos, powerpoint 
Pictures make presentations work. But the most interesting and compelling images aren’t generally found in free clipart galleries. So you comb the Internet, looking for just the right image to convey your message. Click-cut-paste. You’ve got it!
While you may have “it”, that “it” is more than likely the copyright-protected work of a photographer or designer. Even for department presentations, sales presentations, training materials, and other internal business purposes, using images without the proper permission and rights is a serious issue, and may constitute a breach of the creator’s copyright.
Guest author John Billington has lots of info to share with you on this interesting topic -- read the article here...
Categories: clip_media, photos, powerpoint
Labels: interviews, photos, powerpoint 
A refugee from 18 years in corporate management and marketing, Rikk Flohr (pictured to the right) turned his attention inward to his 20-year love affair with Photography. He founded his design firm Fleeting Glimpse Images in January 2006 and divides his days between various print and screen design projects, presentation consulting and, of course, photography. He lives in Apple Valley, Minnesota.
Geetesh: Tell us more about yourself, your work, and how you got started with photography.
Rikk: My first serious camera arrived in the form of a wedding present. I still remember it-Minolta XGM. I still have it. It still works. Within months, I was burning through a dozen rolls of film a month and spending my free time packing my burgeoning gear around they Wyoming countryside. I ran the gamut, shooting weddings, graduations, fine art, landscape and anything I could think of. It gave me a good grounding in the basics. Soon I graduated to Medium Format and things got really expensive.
At the same time, my career with a diesel engine distribution company took off and I found myself having little time for photography any longer. My degree was in Computer Science back in the day in which personal computers were a dream and mainframes the reality. But, as the PC revolution hit the corporate world, I found I could leverage myself into the graphics end, eventually taking over marketing, print and web development and presentations for my company. I still remember my first presentation program, Applause II from Ashton Tate. I did a lot of amazing things with that on that lowly 286.
In 2005, I dusted off my photography passion and invested in the new-fangled digital gear. Eight months later I relapsed and spent all my spare time in the field shooting. My company received a letter of resignation and I founded my design firm to leverage my hard-won marketing and design skills and pursue my twin passions of writing and photography. My firm now works in capture, high-end digital stills or high definition video; design, for prepress, web or other media; and present, building presentations and coordinating events. Photography is where I like to be and when I am not shooting, I am conniving ways to teach photographic skills or teach image editing. Recently, I had the good fortune of serving as Artist In Residence for the National Park Service spending 35 days in the field perfecting my craft.
Geetesh: How can PowerPoint users benefit from using their cameras.
Rikk: PowerPoint users have a unique opportunity to leverage digital photography. Presentations, visually at least, consist of essentially three elements: Words, Illustrations (Including Charts) and Photographic Images.
For content creators, the immediacy and ease of digital capture is a great benefit. An image of a person for the next slide deck is just a digital photograph away. Whether that person needing photographed is in the office next to you or across the country, today's digital imaging, coupled with email, puts that image into your next slide in the next ten minutes. That was something film could never deliver. The low resolution nature of presentations means that any camera is capable of creating acceptable content for PowerPoint. With a little imagination, modest amount of technique and some basic understanding of image editing software, you can create a photo of your company's latest product and have it into a slide before the film could be taken to the developer. No longer are slide jockeys limited to the canned clipart or the antiquated photos gathering electronic dust in lost folders on the corporate servers-fresh content is always just a click away. Why use a cheesy clipart image of two hands shaking when you can take a picture of your company president shaking hands with a real live customer? Why settle for predesigned slide backgrounds when you can set your point-n-shoot on close-up (the little flower on most digital cameras) and find a real, contextually accurate image to use?
I feel one of the greatest ways a slide wrangler can enhance their capitol at a company is to embrace digital photography and image editing as a way to enhance and distinquish their company's presentations. Pictures are worth a thousand words-none of them bulleted.
Categories: interviews, photos, powerpoint
Labels: photos, powerpointlive
This page shows some pictures of the just concluded PowerPoint Live event at New Orleans.
Look here...
Categories: photos, powerpointlive
Labels: photos, powerpoint
Although it's easy to add reflection effects in PowerPoint 2007, there is a less obvious way of recreating a similar reflection effect in earlier versions of PowerPoint as well. This tutorial will provide the steps to recreate a reflection effect using Microsoft PowerPoint 2002 or 2003.
Sandra Johnson shows you how...
Categories: photos, powerpoint
Labels: online_presentations, photos, powerpoint
Scrapblog is a site where you can create scrapbook-like, online content that can be adapted to look like online presentations. As of now, the site is free -- and you can use visual content and videos from sites like Flickr, Webshots, YouTube, etc.
Take a look at Scrapblog here...
On Webware, Rafe Needleman adds that Scrapblog is an excellent online application. It's based on Adobe's Flex and uses a lot of the fancy user interface options available on that platform. Read more here...
Categories: online_presentations, powerpoint, photos
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