A closer look at Office 2010’s picture editing improvements

Office 2010 itself is pure eye-candy – with animated opening splash screen and colored context sensitive menus, it just looks gorgeous. What impresses me more is that you can make your own eye-candy Office documents out of it with it’s improved picture editing capabilities.

If you select a picture inside an Office document like Word or PowerPoint, the Picture Tools tab will light up and the context sensitive picture format menu will appear.

Plenty of built-in picture effects are available. The main effects are shadow, reflection, glow, soft edges, bevel and 3D rotation. Each of the main effect has variations under them. Each variation has a thumbnail on it so it is easy to decide which to choose.

Below is a sample screenshot with an applied reflection effect:

A bunch of various picture style effects are also accessible under the “Picture Styles” panel. Clicking one of the styles will immediately update the style of the picture.

The picture layout options are also very handy if you want to convert an image to a SmartArt object.

Artistic effects are also available and I am very impressed by their output. Below is a sample of the same picture with a pencil sketch effect applied to it:

And here is another one with the paint brush in effect:

Overall, I am very pleased with the improved picture effects that come with Office 2010. Folks who can’t afford to buy and learn Photoshop or other picture manipulating software will appreciate these built-in picture effects. The good thing is that they are done inside the Office interface – there is no need to export and import pictures between multiple programs just to manipulate the images.