Ways To Make an Item Stand Out On a Keynote Slide

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's look at some ways you can have an item in a photo standout on a Keynote slide. 

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Here's a typical situation you may run into when building a Keynote presentation. You've got a slide like this with a photo with several items or people on it and you want to make one thing standout so you can discuss it on the slide. So there are a few simple ways to do this that are pretty amateurish. You can, for instance, create a circle here. You can set the color to nothing. The border to a line. Give it a color and then just use that to highlight somebody. But that's pretty basic and it doesn't look very good. So let's make something a little bit better.

One thing you can do is have a shape that has a hole in it and actually have that person come through the hole and then use the rest of the shape to kind of mask out the other things in the image. So let's do that by first creating the hole. I'm going to use a circle here but you can use any shape that you want. Let's say we'll expand that like this and it's really hard to see if it's centered over the person or object so we're going to go to Style and then change the Opacity to something less than 100%. So like 50%. Now we can see through it and get it nice and centered and the right size and all of that. Now we're going to create a second shape and this one is going to be a rectangle because it's going to cover the whole slide. So the image is actually larger than the slide here but the shape doesn't need to be. It just needs to cover all of this. So let's go and Arrange and Send Backward. That way this circle shows through. In fact we can change the color of the circle so we can see it. Now we have the main shape and I'm going to Shift Click to select both that and the hole shape. Now I'm going to go to Format, Shapes and Lines, and then Subtract Shapes. That's going to cut a hole there and now you can see that person through the hole. So let's go and set the shape here to be semi-transparent. We can leave it here as black and semi-transparent to make everything around it darker. I could change it to white and semi-transparent and that makes the person there pop with more color so that you see them a little more clearly than everything else back there. 

You could use all sorts of things. You can set a specific color for instance and tint everything in the background. Anything you want to do you can basically just style the shape and set the opacity to what you want to get the affect that you want. 

Now let's look at another affect and then I'm going to come back to this one later and show you how you can animate it. So here we're starting off again just with this one photo here on the slide. What we're going to do this time is just have one shape that actually contains the item or person that we want to highlight. That way we can do other things with the rest of the photo. So let's create a shape. I'll just use a circle shape again and I'll do the same thing as before setting the opacity down. It doesn't matter to what. I'm just going to set it down to something where I can see through it so that I can highlight an item and get it centered and everything over. So now that I've got that what I want to do is create a second copy of this photo. So I just have one now. I'm going to select it and go to Edit, Duplicate Selection, Command D will do that. So now I've got two. Let's Arrange, Send it Back. Now basically we've got two copies of the photo, you could see like that, and we have the shape over it. I'm going to select the photo that's on top, Shift Click to select the shape, and now I'm going to go to Format, Image, and Mask With Selection. What that does is it puts the image inside the shape without moving the image at all. So I'll click Done here and now what I've got is I have this main photo here and I've got this shape that perfectly masks out the rest of the photo. 

So what I could do is I could select the main photo here, go to Format, Image, and make adjustments here. Like, for instance, I could adjust the Saturation all the way down to make it black and white. So only this one person here is in color. I could adjust the Exposure. Make it brighter or darker. I could also insert another shape. So let's go and add a box and make that cover the entire slide. Let's send it back behind this mask shape here. Now what I'm going to do with this is I'm going to change it to white and I'm going to set it to be semi-transparent. So now we've got layers here. We have the photo, we have this 50% white on top of the photo, and then on top of that we've got this. So now I've got three layers here and I successfully kind of faded it out and changed this to black and white and then this one person now is in color so they stand out. 

Both of these make for a pretty good transition, by the way. So let me go and duplicate this slide here. I'll go to Slide 2 and I'll get rid of all this extra stuff and change the saturation back. So now we've got the photo as normal and then the photo like this. So with the slide selected if I go to Animate and add a transition like say Dissolve now it will change like that. So you can see how it really highlights that person. Now on this slide, of course, you can add text here. That person's name and their position or whatever it is you want to say about them. Then on the next slide you could repeat the whole process and have another person highlighted. 

So I want to show you one way to animate this type of thing. Since this is a separate element here we can add animation for this. What I want to do is go to Animate Action and add an affect here and there are several things that you can do. For instance you can do Jiggle and you could see it draws attention. Pop is what I kind of like. It fits here so let's add that. Then if we change the Build Order here we can, instead of having it start on click we can have it start after the transition. So now we transition from one slide to the other. There's a POP there. But you could change that to anyone of these other affects if you think it would work better for you or even have a build-in affect. For instance Blur could be an interesting one or Iris.

Now I want to go back to the first method that we used which was to have a shape with a hole cut in it. You could do something really interesting with this that you really can't do with the other method. I want to start over again though to get this done because we're going to do it a little differently. So here's the slide again just with the photo on it, nothing else, like we started with. I'm going to add that initial shape that's going to be a hole and I'm going to do the same trick here where I set it to be semi-transparent so I could see and change the size of the shape and the centering of it and all of that. Once I get it where I want this time I'm going to zoom all the way out, even further than this. I'm going to do Control Shift and then the comma to go all the way out. When I create the other shape, instead of it just covering the slide I'm going to have it cover a ton of area. It's going to be huge. Going to send it backwards and that other shape is there. Let's change it so we can see the color. So we have this large shape and this shape and I'm going to punch a hole in it by going to Format, Shapes and Lines, Subtract Shapes. Now I've got this hole right here. I can select it and let's change the Styling so that it's semi-transparent and let's actually make it white, so it kind of fades everything like that. Now since this is so big it makes it so we can move it without hitting the edges. So let's zoom back in here. Let's say we have a slide like this and we want to transition to showing somebody else. We could select the slide here and Duplicate it with the slide selected so I've got two slides. Now notice if I move this, because the edges are so far away I could go to any of these people that I want. So I can move it over here like that. One slide like this and one slide like that. Then the cool thing is now I can do a transition. Now a simple transition would be to have it just dissolve, right. So it goes from one to the other. But instead of that let's change it to Magic Move. Magic Move will actually move the shape, thus the hole, to somebody else. So you could see how it slides from one person to the next. I could create a duplicate of this and I can have it slide over again. Now let's do Magic Move here. So now you could jump from person to person and each slide could also have information about that person on it as well. 

So there are a bunch of different ways to have any kind of object or anything in a photo standout in a slide in Keynote. This is a great way if you just have a single photo and you need to actually use that across many slides to actually have something going on rather than just an arrow pointing at something and some text. 

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.