OfficeArt Effects Series #3: Duotone Picture Recolor
Yesterday I installed the latest internal build of Office 2007 and magically many of OfficeArt's effects looked better than ever. The reason: we recently checked in all of the effect settings that will be in the final product. One of the effects that got a tremendous upgrade in this latest build is Picture Recoloring. There is a big improvement over what's in Beta2.
Psst: This post is just about picture recolor but that 3D frame effect is also one of our new "settings" for the Picture Quick Style gallery. We'll be talking about that in an upcoming post. You'll be able to create that entire graphic above with your own pictures in a few clicks. Now, don't get distracted by the pretty picture above, back to the recolor effect...
The Recolor Effect
There are many types of Picture Recoloring and we've had a few of those in previous releases so it helps to clarify exactly what effect we are talking about. It's duotone recoloring. In Office 2007 this is a digital effect, but is based on a method of printing photos when using a limited number of ink colors. The effect is valuable as a way to give pictures a retro look, a very cool variation on black and white. OfficeArt's recolor options are based on Office Theme colors so your recolored pictures will always match the overall look of your document.
The effect itself essentially provides the ability to use two different colors for the dark ranges and light ranges of a picture. In a black and white photo those colors are, surprise, black and white. Duotone lets you pick two different colors.
You'll find the UI in the Picture Tools contextual tabs. On the far left of the ribbon there's an "Adjust" chunk with the Recolor gallery button. The gallery looks like this:
You'll also noticed a More Variations option at the bottom which lets you pick any RGB color you wish for the effect.
Dark Variations
The dark recoloring variations use shades of white for the light colors and shades of a theme accent color for the dark colors. Here's what the dark variations look like using the Office default theme colors.
Light Variations
The light recoloring variations use shades of black for the dark colors and shades of a theme accent color for the light colors. Here's what the light variations look like using the Office default theme colors.
"Color Modes"
The Color Modes section at the top of the gallery gives you access to grayscale, sepia and "pure" black and white effects. There's also a "washout" effect which is useful for using pictures as a watermark. Of these, sepia is new kid on the block, made possible through the use of the duotone effect. The other effects are available in Office 2003 on the Picture Toolbar.
Ghosts of Recoloring Features Past
Just for completeness here are some of the other types of picture recoloring we've had in previous releases:
- Color Substitution: the ability to get a list of the colors in a bitmap or metafile and substitute one color for another. This effect goes back to PowerPoint 3.0 (possibly earlier) nearly 15 years ago! It's purpose was to recolor clipart and bitmaps -- in the days when bitmaps were often just 2 to 16 colors. A few releases back we eliminated the ability to do this on bitmaps and only retained the ability to work with metafiles. As of Office 2007 both capabilities are no longer in the product.
- Monotone Picture Recolor: This effect simply takes a picture, reduces it to grayscale, then uses shades of a single color instead of shades of gray. A lot of the subtle contrasts in a photo are lost in the process. It's like a poor man's duotone effect. Only Publisher ever had a dialog UI for this. However, PowerPoint used the effect on some of our design templates backgrounds so they would respond to color scheme changes. Duotone recoloring fully replaces this old effect.
Recolor It!
That's the new recolor effect. It's a far more modern and professional recoloring effect than Office has ever had. Let us know what you think and look for our upcoming posts in the OfficeArt Effects Series.
Howard Cooperstein
