While working on a workshop deck recently, I came to this slide. This isn’t bad — I’ve definitely seen MUCH worse. I wanted to give it a more powerful visual impact and didn’t have time to launch a quest for a new ‘perfect’ image. I like this image…it just doesn’t fill the slide. So what do you do when an image doesn’t fill your slide the way you need it to?
Fortunately, this scenario is the perfect candidate for a super cool trick I first remember seeing used by Nolan Haims (@NolanHaims) of Nolan Haims Creative. The best part is that it is so simple anyone can add it to their slide design bag of tricks.
Here are the before and after versions:
Now to show you how this works.
1. The first step is to duplicate your image and crop out the main content, leaving only a slice of the background.
2. Next, align your newly cropped background slice with the edge of your original photo.
3. Resize the background slice to fill the entire slide.
…and voila! Looks like it was meant to be widescreen all along.
What do you think? Do you already know this trick? Do you have any others you use instead of this one? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Mike Taylor 
Phenomenal idea!! Thanks for sharing! Only challenge could be for other images with “things” in the background on either side of the main object where stretching would make them look odd. Have come across this same issue many times. Thanks again!
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Thanks David. Isn’t it great!? I can’t take credit for it but it is crazy useful!
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Doesn’t the part of the image you cropped looked all pixelated when spread out?
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It could look pixelated if the original is not a hi-res image. Otherwise, it should be good. At least in my experience, I haven’t’ had any issue with pixelation.
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