How to crop photos into shapes in PowerPoint®

March 23, 2020

Written by

Team Duarte

Welcome to the Presentation Hacks: Using photos in PowerPoint video series! In these lessons, a Duarte designer shares some of the fundamental tools of using photos in PowerPoint.

In this video, we’ll show you how to crop photos in PowerPoint into shapes — like a circle! You can introduce more negative space to your slide by cropping photos into shapes.

A great example of a time when you might need to crop photos in PowerPoint into shapes would be when you have a quote accompanied by a headshot on a slide.

You might also crop photos in PowerPoint into shapes if the photo is:

Too big
High contrast
Distracting

Mastering photo cropping

To start to crop photos in shapes in PowerPoint, click on the Format tab. Instead of clicking on “Crop,” click “Crop to Shape.” Any PowerPoint shape is available to you (circle, square, star, etc.)

Pro tip: Hold down CTRL + SHIFT to scale your photo down from the center.

Click the video to learn more …

Duarte video: What are the best practices for cropping photos into shapes in PowerPoint for presentation design?

Here are some of the things you’ll learn in this video:

How to crop photos into shapes
How to scale your photo evenly
Why you might crop a photo into a shape
Introduce negative space into a slide

Explore all of the videos in this series:

Illustrated by Rico Larroque

Slide design

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