By Tom Collins
We've had several people ask about how they can add captions to pictures for use on their blog, or (shameless plug) for contests like our WIN Your Way to BlogPaws 2011 Photo Caption Contest! Now, you DO NOT have to attach the caption to your photo to enter our contest. In fact, even if you do, you'll still have to type the "caption" (up to 50 words) into the required box on the entry form.
But if you want to start getting fancy with captions, here's a tutorial I posted in the BlogPaws Community, showing really easy method using a tool most people have access to: PowerPoint.
Find more videos like this on BlogPaws Community
Note: If you don't have PowerPoint, you may want to try the (free) OpenOffice.org Impress version; most of its tools work similarly to PowerPoint, though I haven't tried it for this purpose.
Some of you may know that I do most of my graphic work in Adobe Fireworks, but I do use my MS Office tools a fair amount for grabbing clipart or shapes. But I've also written before about using the drawing tools in PowerPoint to create a layered header image for your blog. I love that I can ungroup an MS drawing object, pull out pieces I want, regroup them, and save them as PNG "pictures" that can then be used for more elaborate designs in Fireworks.
That graphic in the caption contest is a really simple example. The callout on the picture of our own Pandora, a/k/a The Grumpy Old Lady, came from Publisher "shape" saved as a PNG.
If I hadn't been building the larger image in Fireworks already, I could have layered the callout over the image right in Publisher or PowerPoint, using the same steps as in the tutorial above. If you try that and it doesn't seem clear, well, that's an excuse for another tutorial! Let me know.
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