MS Office tools like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel have their own specific uses, and few would disagree that each of them is really good for its purpose. However, leaving aside the usual uses, they are actually capable of doing so much more provided we can exercise our creative minds.
One of such capabilities is image editing options like cropping to any shape and applying effects. Today we are about to explore another image editing feature of Microsoft Office products. We will learn how to remove the background from an image. Well, this is not something that is available directly in image editing tools (except for advanced tools like Photoshop). So this method sometimes comes in handy.
Note: We used MS Word for the tutorial. But Excel and PowerPoint also support the same.
Steps to remove photo background
Open a Word document and insert a sample image into it. You can drag and drop the image or navigate to Insert -> Picture and then browse for your images.
We will use this image.
Step 1: Select the image and then navigate to Image Tools -> Format. Hit Remove background option set below Adjust part. Refer to the screenshot below.
When you do that, you will see that MS Word automatically detects (pink area) the background to be removed. And, while not perfect, it doesn’t do a shoddy job at all.
Step 2: The above result is not what you expected. You need both the bottle and Word removed the parts. So you need to do a little more. Drag the lines to increase or decrease the coverage. Here, we need to increase the area.
Step 3: Even with that, you can still leave some unwanted areas (like shadows) or some erased areas that you need (on the edges).
To your rescue, you can use Remove background tools like Mark areas to keep And Mark the area to remove. As the name indicates, they can be used to further mark areas to be removed or to mark areas to keep from what has been individually selected.
To do that, select the required option and drag horizontal lines across the area you want to remove or keep. This is definitely not as easy as it seems. It needs practice.
This is what we took from our sample. The minus sign (-) indicates areas selected for removal and the plus sign (+) indicates areas marked for retention.
Step 4: When satisfied, click on Keep the change. You will be taken out of edit mode to preview your results. At any point in time, you can press the . button Exit to switch to preview mode.
Not bad at all, right? If you don’t like it, you can always go back and Discard all changes or undo the bookmark using Remove bookmarks.
Cool Tip: Learn how to easily insert images from the web into Office documents.
Conclusion
The best part is that the background is not white.. it’s transparent. That means you can easily place it on top of another image. Overall, this is a neat function that you can use when you need to remove certain elements in the background of a snapshot and don’t want to mess around with an image editing tool.
Image credit: Jenny Downing, Kiewic
Categories: How to
Source: thpttranhungdao.edu.vn/en/
