Placing your own Cutouts in Keynote

By Brian A. Peat
5/5/04

So you just got that new theme you've been dying to use and you realize that there really aren't any photo cutouts that work for your type of presentation in it. Never fear, grab that copy of Photoshop and get to work! I'll be posting a tutorial for Photoshop Elements and one for Fireworks also, so if you don't have Photoshop, you're not out of luck.

Related Links

Creating Shadowed Cutouts with Photoshop
See our tutorial on creating your own shadowed cutouts in Photoshop.

Saving your own Theme
See our Tutorial on saving your own Theme file.

Placing a cutout in Keynote
Okay, you've got a finished PNG file, now you just need to put it into the theme so it can be used.

Choose your theme
For this next step I'll open a blank version of the theme I want to add this layout to:

In this example I have chosen the theme that my cutout matches

Dupe a Master Slide
Once you chose the Theme you want, slide down the bar that covers the master slides, so you can get at them:

Next, pick a master slide that ALREADY HAS a photo cutout on it to use as a starting point for your new slide layout and then COPY it:

Then Choose paste from the Edit menu and rename the slide to whatever you want:

Remove the old Cutout
Now, click on the Master you just renamed and then click on the background, in an area where there are NO text boxes. This SHOULD select the photo cutout that's already on the slide. Choose Unlock from the Arrange menu and then delete the unlocked photo cutout:

This will leave you with a blank slide that may have text, but has no photo cutout on it.

Drop in the new Cutout
The next step is to drag the cutout you made earlier onto this slide:

I just dragged this file from the Finder onto my Master Slide

Once you've got the cutout on your slide, you need to make sure it lines up so it covers the entire slide. The easiest way to do this is with the Measurements Inspector:

Send it to the back
At this point, you should see something like this, with the cutout covering some of your text:

Click on the cutout to select it and choose Send to Back from the Arrange menu:

The last step is to lock the cutout so that you don't accidently move it if you need to edit other objects on the Master Slide:

Finishing up
At this point you can use this Master Slide just like any other Master in your presentation. If you're interested in saving out this custom presentation file as a Theme, see our tutorial on saving a custom theme.