Contour Shadow in PowerPoint Shapes and Images

In PowerPoint you can use some nice shadow effects on images and shapes, but there is also a chance that you use contour shadows so the shadow can follow exactly the border of an image without counting the background. This can be really helpful for example to give a nice effect to the end slide.

For shapes, it is easy. You just need to pick the right shadow and that’s all. But the tricky part is for images and pictures. If you want to add a contour shadow in PowerPoint pictures then you’d need to remove the background from the shadow. Here is an example. If we have a picture with a white background and want to remove it, we can do it by using the background removal tool in PowerPoint.

Let start adding an image. In this case we have added a nice business people image with a green background and business woman and man with elegant business postures.

Then we can use the crop tool to reduce the original image dimensions.

Once you are done cropping the image, you can remove the background. We already have seen how to remove the background from a PowerPoint image. See background remove background in PowerPoint.

Finally, choose the right shadow to be used as a contour shadow. In this case we tried to simulate a simple drop shadow effect in PowerPoint using a rectangular shape which will work pretty well for the contour shadow.