Fixing and coloring images in Microsoft Word 2016
Overview
Daniel Scott
Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor
instructorI discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.
Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.
Hi there, in this video we're going to look at correcting your images, making it look nicer, fixing the brightness and contrast, and we're also going to do something like this, where we kind of make it black and white, add our corporate color to it, and fade it out, so it's kind of nice big block image thing. All right, let's go and do that.
First of all we're going to look at maybe fixing the image up. This one is pretty good because it’s the stock library image, so if yours is, maybe if you've shot it yourself on your phone, or on your camera, and it's just not quite perfect, with the image selected, we're going to go to this one that says 'Format', and we'll go to this one that says 'Corrections'. The cool thing about it is, if you hover about it, you might have to-- depending how fast or slow your computer is, if you hover over it, can you see, my actual image over here adjusts. Watch this, if I hover above it. So you can just slowly work your way through. Mine's a pretty fast computer, and it's still pretty slower. And you just decide whether you want this brighter or darker, and there's this kind of nice picture that plays between contrast and brightness.
Now, 'Sharpen/Soften', you can soften it in the middle, it's like doing nothing to it, go this way, it gets a bit fuzzy, might be because of the background image. Nice and blurred out. And you can sharpen it up as well. Gets a little bit ultra sharp, this one here. Cool.
So this is the basic corrections. What I want to do is, I want to actually play around with the color. So, under 'Color', I would like-- the saturation here, you can bump it up. You can lower the saturation, just making it brighter, and you can put it right down to '0%'. That's what I want to do in terms of this black and white.
Other color tones, you can mess around, whether you make it-- Can you see, it says Kelvin there, or K? This just depends on, like, if you shot this inside, in our office, it's often going to be quite blue, so you want to bump up the Kelvin to something higher that looks more like daylight, and if it's sharp outside, and maybe too bright, you might want to lower it down a little bit. You can move it down. Mine's perfect, so I'm going to leave it as it is.
I like these ‘Recolor’ options as well, that's what I want to do. I want to do something like this, can you see, it's like a Dark Teal, but I want to use my actual corporate color, so if you want to have a specific color, obviously you can just wing it, and pick a color here, but what I want to do is go to the one that says 'More Variations', and you can see, there's my color there. We added this in the previous tutorial when we set it as the default. If you haven't done that tutorial, go to 'More Colors', and you can add your own corporate color there.
So I like this, but what I'd also like to do is to make it dark, because it's a bit bright, so I'm going to go back to 'Corrections', and there's an option in here, 'Brightness/Contrast', that's kind of what I'm looking for. Just style points, I guess. Click on that one. So it's the right corporate color, where it's in the right zone at least, and it's nice and dark now.
All right, that's basic corrections, and adding that color to the top of your image.