Word 2010 Artistic Effects
As if the new screen capture tool wasn’t enough for the budding graphic designers out there, the Microsoft team have created a new tool for Word 2010 that applies a number of snazzy artistic effects to your pictures.
Let’s try it out. Insert a picture into your Word 2010 document by clicking Insert > Illustrations > Picture. Navigate to where your picture is on your hard drive and select it. After the image has been inserted and whilst the image is selected, the Picture Tools contextual tab is displayed and you should be able to see the new Artistic Effects button over on the left.
Artistic Effects
Clicking the Artistic Effects button reveals a gallery of thumbnails representing the different effects available to us.
Thumbnail Gallery Of Artistic Effects
Of course, hovering over each thumbnail provides a live preview for you to check before applying a particular artistic effect. Hovering over a thumbnail also displays the name of the effect as a tooltip. The effects are quite impressive considering that Word 2010 isn’t supposed to be an image editor. Here are a few samples of different effects:
Pencil Grayscale
Pencil Sketch
Glass
Light Screen
Cement
Blur
These are some pretty inspiring effects! To remove an artistic effect, select the image, click Artistic Effects and then click the first thumbnail image in the gallery. The image is then restored to its original appearance.
Artistic Effect Options
The beauty of Artistic Effects is that you can apply them quickly and you don’t have to perform complicated steps to get stunning results. If you have time to experiment, though, you might like to exert more control over the effects by using the Artistic Effect Options. Select the image and in the Picture Tools tab click Artistic Effects > Artistic Effects Options. The Format Picture panel is displayed where you can tweak all the different settings until you reach the effect you want.
Artistic Effects Options