You can adjust a picture's relative lightness (brightness), the difference between its darkest and lightest areas (contrast), and the transparency (transparency: The quality that defines how much light passes through an object's pixels. If an object is 100 percent transparent, light passes through it completely and renders the object invisible; in other words, you can see through the object.) of one of its colors. After you edit the picture, you can undo any changes that you made or keep the changes but also save the original version of the picture.
What do you want to do?
Change the brightness of a picture
- Click the picture that you want to change the brightness for.
- Under Picture Tools, on the Format tab, in the Adjust group, click Brightness.
- Click the brightness percentage that you want.
To fine tune the amount of brightness, click Picture Corrections Options, and then move the Brightness slider, or enter a number in the box next to the slider.
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Change the contrast of a picture
- Click the picture that you want to change the contrast for.
- Under Picture Tools, on the Format tab, in the Adjust group, click Contrast.
- Click the contrast percentage that you want.
To fine tune the amount of contrast, click Picture Corrections Options, and then move the Contrast slider, or enter a number in the box next to the slider.
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Change the transparency of one color in a picture
You can make part of a picture transparent to better show any text that is layered on top of it , to layer pictures on top of each other, or to remove or hide part of a picture for emphasis.
Transparent areas in pictures are the same color as the paper on which they are printed. In an electronic display, such as a Web page, transparent areas are the same color as the background.
You cannot make more than one color in a picture transparent. And because an area of what appears to be a single color (for example, blue sky) might actually be made up of a range of subtle color variations, the color that you select might appear in only a small area. Therefore, it might be difficult to see the transparent effect.
- Click the picture that you want to create transparent areas in.
- Under Picture Tools, on the Format tab, in the Adjust group, click Recolor.
- Click Set Transparent Color, and then click the color in the picture or image that you want to make transparent.
Notes
- The Set Transparent Color option is available for bitmap (bitmap: A picture made from a series of small dots, much like a piece of graph paper with certain squares filled in to form shapes and lines. When stored as files, bitmaps usually have the extension .bmp.) pictures that are not already transparent, and some clip art (clip art: A single piece of ready-made art, often appearing as a bitmap or a combination of drawn shapes.).
- You cannot create a transparent area in animated GIF (animated GIF: A file that contains a series of Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) images that are displayed in rapid sequence by some Web browsers to produce an animated effect.) pictures. You can, however, make transparency changes in an animated-GIF editing program, and then re-insert the file into your 2007 Microsoft Office system document.
- You can make more than one color transparent in a picture in another image editing program, save the picture in a format that preserves transparency information (such as a Portable Network Graphics (.png) (PNG: A graphic file format that is supported by some Web browsers. Short for Portable Network Graphics, PNG supports variable transparency of images and control of image brightness on different computers. PNG files are compressed bitmaps..) file), and then insert the file into your 2007 Office release document.
- You can't make an entire image transparent or partially transparent by using the Set Transparent Color option. To make an entire image transparent or partially transparent, insert a shape such as a rectangle into your 2007 Microsoft Office system document, give the shape a picture fill using the image that you want, and then change the picture fill's Transparency setting. For more information, see Add or delete a shape fill or shape effect
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Undo or reset changes to a picture
You can undo or reset any changes that you made to a picture's contrast, color, brightness, borders, cropping, effects, or size.
- Select the picture that you want to reset to its original state.
- Under Picture Tools, on the Format tab, in the Adjust group, click Reset Picture.
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Save the original version of an edited picture
When you modify a Graphics Interchange Format (.gif) (GIF: A graphics file format (.gif extension in Windows) used to display indexed-color graphics on the World Wide Web. It supports up to 256 colors and uses lossless compression, meaning that no image data is lost when the file is compressed.), JPEG File Interchange Format (.jpg) (JPEG: A graphics file format (.jpg extension in Microsoft Windows) supported by many Web browsers that was developed for compressing and storing photographic images. It's best used for graphics with many colors, such as scanned photos.), or Portable Network Graphics (.png) (PNG: A graphic file format that is supported by some Web browsers. Short for Portable Network Graphics, PNG supports variable transparency of images and control of image brightness on different computers. PNG files are compressed bitmaps..) image, you can save the original version of the edited picture.
- Right-click the edited picture, and then click Save as Picture on the shortcut menu.
- Click the arrow on the Save button, and then click Save Original Picture.
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