Keynote has a great feature brought over from iPhoto called Adjust Images. Using it, you can do some minor color tweaking to an image or you can go as far as changing a graphic from one shade to another, add blur, and alter the exposure. However, Adjust Images only works on bit-mapped image formats. This would be pretty much anything you run across on a webpage or in clip art sets you may have (We’re talking .gif, .png, .tiff, .bmp among others).

Adjust Image does not work with .pdf’s or .pict’s. While the image as you see it may look like a bitmap, the way it’s stored in those formats doesn’t expose the data to Adjust Image required to make it’s alterations. Similarly, neither Keynote shapes nor editable text can be altered with Adjust Image either. For all of these non-Adjustable forms, you’ll have to convert them to an image. Fortunately, the free app Preview can do this and it’s quite easy. Just copy the object you want to make an image of, open Preview, do Command-N (to create a new document from the clipboard) then Save As… one of the bit-mapped formats above (.png is generally a good choice as it has a wide range of colors and Alpha masks like .tiff but it’s file size is smaller).

Once you’ve done this, you’ll be able to apply Adjust Image. One caveat. ALWAYS check the name of the file in the Metrics tab of the Inspector under File Info if you’re working with an image that you know should be able to be adjusted. If there’s no information there,

then the object you have selected is a Shape or a Text object and will need to be converted. If the information there ends in .pdf or .pict, then the copy/paste into Keynote may have converted the image to one of those and you’ll need to use Preview to change it back.

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