"Save as Picture" in Powerpoint

[Shara Williams]

I am having two problems using the "Save as Picture"
function for objects in Powerpoint. I have Office XP and
Windows XP.

When I "Save as Picture for an object on a slide, if I
pick certain file formats, the background is ends up
being black, when it should be white. One of the file
formats that I tried, where this happened was ".jpg". I
saw a reference to a similar problem in the Knowledge
Base article: 300875, only that describes a problem for
Macs, not PCs.

2) The ".png" file format seemed not to have this problem
of a black background, although the background did end up
looking bluish/pinkish/gray, instead of white. However,
when I save it, the straight lines that are displayed in
Powerpoint end up as jagged-pixelated lines in the EMF,
PNG, or JPG file I created. Can I get rid of this
problem? Programs I have available to fiddle with it
include: Powerpoint 2002, Word, Excel, Adobe Photoshop,
Illustrator, and Acrobat. The LateX-based word processor
I am using will accept about forty image file formats,
including all the common ones like GIF, JPG, PNG, EMF,
BMP.

Thanks in advance for your help!

 

[Troy @ TLC Creative]

Depends on your type of picture you are saving. It sounds like you are
saving out an image that has an alpha channel (transparency). In this case,
if you save as anything but a .png or .tif what was transparent will become
a default color (black sounds like the default on your computer). My
recommendation when saving an image from PPT is to always use the .png
format, as it is automatically 24 bit color, where a .jpg, .emf, .gif, etc.
will most likely be 16 bit color.

Although I cannot give exact advice on what is occurring with your exact
images.

--
Best Regards,
Troy Chollar
==============================
TLC Creative Services, inc.
www.tlccreative.com
==============================

 

[Guest]

From my experience today, the transparency guess seems to be a likely part of the problem for the black background. The thing is, that makes it seem like the "Save as Picture" function doesn't work properly for even the simplest case of a Powerpoint-drawn object. The .png option, for the moment, seems the least bad of several bad options. The files have a pale grey background in the destination file (please see the table, below)

It seems, if there is any object exportable as a picture by Powerpoint, this object should be, since I drew it in Powerpoint. It's just a simple cartoon. I did draw it on an older version of Powerpoint, back in 1999

Here are the results of my latest scientific experiment in "Save as Picture" for my Powerpoint-drawn cartoon

"save as" format size appearance of background of resulting image appearance appearanc
when viewed in Windows Explorer in Scientific* Word in Photosho
bmp 981 KB dark grey(!) (pixelated image) dark grey bkgd dark grey bkg
emf 124 KB white white bkgd not supporte
gif 4.07 KB white (*very* pixelated image) black bkgd transparent bkg
jpg 9.86 KB black(!) black bkgd black bkg
tif 48.2 KB white not parsed (?!) not parsed (?!!!
wmf 35.8 KB white (*very* pixelated image) white bkgd not supporte
png 22.0 KB white pale grey bkgd transparent bkg

(* Scientific Word is the LaTeX-based word processor from MacKichan Software. I am including this information about what the resulting image looks like inside it in case it is helpful to someone who understands this image stuff, not because I hope anyone will know details about Scientific Word, here.)

Back to the main point: I don't understand the results in this table

It seems that, at the bare minimum, things drawn in Microsoft's Powerpoint, saved in Microsoft's Powerpoint, and opened in the Microsoft Windows' file viewer should be viewable okay, but that's not the case. The ".bmp" and the ".jpg", with their strange backgrounds, do not have the proper appearance.

I also don't understand how a supposed "tiff" file would not be able to be opened by the seemingly-ever-so-flexible, generic, Photoshop, or by my other program. Does the "Save as Picture" with a ".tif" extension not really generate a ".tif" file?

How well does this "Save as Picture" function work, overall? Is it going to do what I need it to do, or should I give up on using Powerpoint in this case

Thanks again for your help

--Shar