In this little lesson, I'm going to show you how you can create a really cool title slide in PowerPoint using the blur effect because I'm hosting a PowerPoint night where I'm going to be boring all of my friends with a comprehensive presentation about my recent trip to Morocco. So let's create a title slide of awesomeness.
So I'm just starting from a blank template. So I've created a new presentation and I've changed my layout to just use the blank slide layout. The next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to add a picture to my title slide. Now, I already have a picture saved off. I downloaded this picture from Pexels. com, a great resource if you're looking for royalty free images.
So, let's jump up to Insert. We're going to go to Pictures and this device. Here it is just here. Let's click on Insert. Now, when you're inserting images into slides, I have covered this before. If the image is a vertical image, then you're going to find that you have white space either side. Now, the thing not to do here is to use the resize handles and start trying to drag it out and stretch it.
Because you're going to end up with an image that is completely distorted. A much better way to get this to fill the entire background is to utilise the crop and fill utility. So with the image selected, we're going to go to the Picture Format Ribbon. And in the Size group, we have a Crop button. Now we want to click the lower half of the Crop button because we're looking for this option just here, Fill.
Now when we click that, we're going to get these black handles around the outside of the image. And we can use these to effectively kind of sketch out the area where we want the image to fill. So I'm going to grab this black handle and I'm going to drag it all the way out to the edge of the slide. And I'm going to do the same on the other side, like so.
So now, I can go back to the lower half of my crop button, choose Fill, and it's going to fill that space with the image, but it's going to keep the aspect ratio. It effectively zooms in on the image as opposed to stretching it and distorting it. So, I'm pretty happy with that. We could jiggle this around a little bit.
We could move it up or down. I'm going to leave it just there and then we click the top half of the crop button to crop the edges away. Now this slide is going to be my title slide to my presentation about Morocco. So I want to have some text on this slide. Now, if I was just to add a text box in here and add my text, because that background image is kind of busy, we have lots going on, we have lots of different colors, if I add black text onto here, it's not going to show up very well.
And the same if I was to add a lighter color, because parts of this image are also lighter. So in order to make that text truly stand out and add a nice effect to our image, we're going to incorporate a blur effect on half of the title slide. Now, that may seem fairly simple on first look, but there is an added layer of complexity just here.
Now, what I'm going to do here is I'm going to go up to insert, and I'm going to grab my rectangle tool. And I'm going to drag this so that it covers half of this slide. And what we should find, and if you can see that, I actually have a guideline that's popped up that runs directly down the middle, so I know that this is exactly covering half.
So now what I want to do is remove the shape outline. So on the shape format ribbon, we're going to go to shape outline and we're going to choose no outline. Now I'm going to fill this with the same image that we have in the background. Now a quick way of doing this, if you already have the image on the slide, is to simply press CTRL C.
To copy it, click on the shape, right click, go to format shape, and then in shape options, we can choose picture or texture fill, and we can insert it from the clipboard. So we still have our shape selected. So we're going to go up to the picture format ribbon. We're going to go to artistic effects, and we're going to select this blur just here.
Now, if you want to change how much blur you're applying there, if we go back to here and select Artistic Effect Options, we can adjust the amount of blur that we're seeing. So, you might want more or you might want less. Now, I want mine so it's just a little bit blurred, like that. I'm then going to duplicate this shape, CTRL D, and I'm going to place it directly over the top, but this time I'm going to fill the shape with a dark color.
And then once again, from my fill options, I'm going to adjust the transparency. So that we let more of that blurred image underneath just poke through. So I kind of want an overall sort of dark shape, but I want a nice blurry image underneath. So now that I have this, I can add a text box over the top and that text is still really going to stand out.
So, I've added my two text boxes. If you're not sure how to add a text box, just go to the Insert tab, and you have Text Box over here, and I've just applied the Montserrat font. This is one of my favourite fonts. And just to give this a little finishing touch, I'm going to change this little subtitle to a different font colour.
But, I'm going to use the Eyedropper utility to pick a colour out of the image. So let's click on Eyedropper. I'm going to hover over my image. Let's pick something quite bright. Let's go for this bright yellow. So there we go. That title stands out so much better than if we just had that text on that background image.
The final thing I'm going to do here is add some animation. So I'm going to group together the text boxes and the shapes and pictures that we have underneath. Now to do this, I'm going to utilise the Selection pane. Because this allows me to see the different objects on the slide. And I would highly recommend that you rename these so that they're not generic like mine are just here.
But I want to group together TextBox6, TextBox5, Rectangle4, and Rectangle3. So I'm going to select them by holding down CTRL, and then on Picture Format we can click on Group, and Group again. So now this is all one object, I'm going to go to the animations tab and I'm going to choose the fly in animation.
Now notice currently it flies in from the bottom, we can change that in effect options. I want this to fly in from the left. So now when we play our presentation, it looks like that. And then when we click, we have our title flying into the left with that really nice blur effect.
