How To Remove Background From Image in PowerPoint

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Making a presentation alone can be pretty laborious, and the last thing you need is to use complicated procedures to edit your images using Photoshop. Thankfully, PowerPoint provides many basic image manipulation options, such as the ability to rotate an image, reshape and crop images and remove background from an image. You can use the below-mentioned method to remove background from images within PowerPoint templates or Google Slides templates, and also learn how to match PowerPoint backgrounds to your selected image background color.

Background removal tool in PowerPoint to remove the background from any image

How to Remove Background from Picture in PowerPoint

In the first step, click the image from within your PowerPoint slide and go to the PictureFormat tab. From here, select the Remove Background option.

Locating Remove Background in PowerPoint

This option will highlight most of the background automatically. However, PowerPoint often gets the area selection wrong, at least to some extent; this is why you will require selecting the area you wish to keep or remove.

For the purpose of this article, we will use the Request for Proposal PowerPoint template, which contains a building image in the cover slide, and remove the background from the image in PowerPoint to retain the building image in the picture.

Remove the background slide in PowerPoint
Example of PowerPoint slide showing an image with a background before using the background removal tool.

For the sake of this example, we’ll use an image of a corporate building in New York that you can grab for free from Pixabay here.

Mark Areas to Keep

In the next step, click Mark Areas to Keep and click the portion you wish to keep. The highlighted area is the one that will be removed when you save changes made to the image, whereas the visible area is the one which will be retained. The plus signs show the areas you have picked to retain.

Remove background marking the area to keep and to remove
Example showing a slide with a picture and the area of an image to be removed.

Mark Areas to Remove

There will probably be unwanted areas that will not be auto-detected by PowerPoint. To remove them, click mark areas to Remove and click on the areas to remove them. This will add a minus sign and shade those areas so that you can identify what part of the picture is set to be removed.

Remove background in PowerPoint keep area is marked in purple

Select ‘Keep Changes’ to Retain the Desired Area

Once you are satisfied with the changes, click Keep Changes to remove the background from your image. And if you’re wondering how you to remove the background of an inserted image, the process is the same.

Remove the background from a building image or picture in PowerPoint
Example of an image inserted in a PowerPoint slide after removing the background.

Pick a Style to Change Image Background

You can optionally change the image’s background color and frame style by going to the Picture Styles menu via Picture Format. From here, you can pick a frame to stylize the image.

Adding a frame to an image in PowerPoint

You can use a variety of picture styles to match your needs, including 3D picture frames to make the image pop out.

Bevel Perspective Frame effect in image in PowerPoint

Change Image and Slide Background

To change and match the image and slide background, you can further edit the image via Format Picture.

Accessing Format Picture in PowerPoint

To change the background of the image, pick either a color via Solid Fill, or you can also use a gradient, picture, pattern, or slide background fill.

Use solid fill on image background PowerPoint

To match the slide background with the image background, right-click the slide and select Format Background.

Browsing Format Background in PowerPoint

Similar to how you changed the picture background, you can pick a color to fill the slide background.

Change slide background color in PowerPoint

The below image shows a blue background that was used to replace the green PowerPoint transparent background. Of course, you can also use a gradient, picture, pattern, slide background fill, or an image in transparent form. There is also always the option to experiment with dark colors such as a red slideshow background, purple PowerPoint background, or perhaps PowerPoint background black in color.

Completed picture and background color change in PowerPoint

Final Thoughts

Removing backgrounds from PowerPoint can be a tedious and time-consuming process. Following the steps outlined in this article, you can remove background from an image easily and efficiently and even make a transparent background in PowerPoint. Changing the image background color or adding a frame might be useful when the template background color might not go well with the transparent version of the image.

Don’t forget to check out our website for more helpful tips and tricks on graphic design.

Background, Image, PowerPoint Tips, Remove Background
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