I’ve run into this recently, maybe you have as well. You’ve got your presentation done and you’re looking to fill a photo cutout area with an image to help refine your idea. You go to Google for a quick image search and you find a great one… only it’s FAR too small to use at it’s current size. You place it into Keynote and enlarge it so that it fits the area but, since it was a small image to begin with, enlarging it just makes the pixels larger, the entire image gets blocky, and it’s definitely not helping your presentation.

If it’s a REALLY small graphic, then there’s not really a lot that can be done with it, but if it’s in the 200 – 400 resolution range, there’s a trick you can use that will allow you to stretch it across an entire 1024×768 slide and still look presentable. Let’s start with the image here.

It’s 300×281 and you want to use it in a full height photo cutout. If you enlarge it to 768 high, it becomes badly pixilated. Might be good enough for SOME presentations, but not the look you were going for. So, select the image, bring up the “Adjust Image” tool and move the indicator for “Sharpness” all the way to the left. It’s still recognized as a tank by the human eye, but the distracting pixilation is gone! (I’ve also used this tip when I wanted to use an image of a brain for an image fill, but the biological detail was far too distracting)

Depending on the size and quality of the original image, you may not want to expand it quite that large, but, going through these steps and seeing the results gives you an idea of what is possible right within Keynote. Play with the “Sharpness” on various images to yield different results. Combine it with a change in opacity to use almost any graphic as a fullscreen background that doesn’t take away from the message.

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