Polly got rather bored this week with having to stay at home all the time and managed to escape for an expedition to the Himalayas and get herself snapped on the south approach to the peak of Annapurna at something over 7,200m. She was rather pleased that she had managed without oxygen bottles.
While Grandpa was rather pleased that he had managed to find out how to snip things out of one photograph so that he could paste them onto another one.
The first attempt involved starting with the Snip & Sketch tool to snip the picture of Polly standing on a cork include at reference 2. This was then pasted into Powerpoint. Then the background was blotted out with a succession of polygons fitted around her, leaving her against a plain white background. But then what?
The second attempt involved becoming convinced that the key was being able to make a hole in a picture in Powerpoint, a hole through which you could see what was going on underneath. In desperation he asked Bing and he, Bing that is, turned up a helpful video from Microsoft on YouTube telling you exactly how to do it. With exactly how involving fetching a command called 'combine shapes' from the library. This could be used to subtract one bit of image on a Powerpoint slide from another, resulting in a former shaped hole - typically something boring like a circle or a triangle, in the latter. You could indeed see what was going on underneath. Unfortunately, by this time Grandpa had lost track of how this was supposed to help.
The third and successful attempt hinged on having the idea of asking Bing about removing the background from images in Powerpoint. He came up with another helpful video on YouTube telling you exactly how to do it. With exactly how involving using a command called 'remove background', which you seem to get at by typing just that into the search box at the very top of the Powerpoint window.
This is an image processing gadget which has a first stab at removing the background from what it thinks is the subject of the image, in this case Polly. You then have one mouse-based tool for telling the gadget to take more bits out and another tool to put bits back in. You don't have to be exact about this, just as well as Grandpa does not have a very steady mouse hand, as the gadget has a pretty fair stab at guessing what exactly it is that you want to do. And you can carry on fiddling for as long as you like.
What you are left with is an electronic version of a transfer. A picture of Polly pasted onto a rectangle of something transparent, a rectangle which can be selected, copied and pasted in the usual way.
With the results snapped above. Not yet perfect, but with a little practise he should be able to do better.
PS 1: I have been impressed at how much easier it is to follow the instructions about all this dished out visually on YouTube than it is to follow the instructions in a manual, at least at this elementary level.
PS 2: the relevant bit of gmaps seems to be blotted out by reflections from the snow, cloud or something, so perhaps perusal of reference 3 will enable me to work out from exactly where this snap was taken. Alternatively, perusal of the source of the snap, reference 4. Just the think for a slack Friday afternoon after a liquid lunch - except that that sort of thing is long in the past.
Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/06/series-2-episode-xi.html.
Reference 3: Annapurna: Conquest of the first 8,000m peak - Maurice Hertzog - 1952.
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thank you for the informative post, will definitely come back for more.
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