Use Paste Special for Chroma Key Effect in PowerPoint

In Hollywood, when they make movies that require special effects they’ll use the infamous blue screen (although many times it’s a green screen).  What they do is shoot the scene and then later replace the colored screen with a different image or video.

They choose a color screen that can easily be selected and replaced.  Today, you’ll learn to do something similar in PowerPoint. 

Let’s say you have a PowerPoint shape and you want to put a hole in it.  In the example below, we’re going to create a piece of paper that looks like a 3-ring binder page.  What we want to do is have the holes in the page be transparent.

• Create the piece of paper in PowerPoint using the rectangle tool.
• Then add three circles.
• Fill the circles with a lime green (or any other color).
• Get rid of the outline color.
• Select the object and cut it from the screen (or CTRL+X).  This places it on the clipboard.
• Select Paste Special and paste it as a .PNG file.  By pasting as a PNG file, you’ll maintain the image quality and retain any transparency.

• Select the Set Transparent Color feature and click on the green color.  That will make the green color transparent and you should end up with a see through hole.

That’s basically it.  The transparent tool in PowerPoint 2007 and lower can only work on one color, that’s why you want the fill to be solid and to be a color that is no where else in the image.  PowerPoint 2010 has a more sophisticated transparent tool feature.

Once you master this technique you’ll find all sorts of uses for it, like getting rid of backgrounds.  Here’s a tutorial that shows it in action.

PowerPoint Tutorial

Click here to view the PowerPoint tutorial.

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