Transparent areas of graphics turn black

Problem

PowerPoint turns transparent areas of images black.

Solution

A visitor to the PowerPoint newsgroup reported a solution to this problem. He'd created PNG graphics in Photoshop 6/Mac and found that if he turned color management OFF and chose the option to "Discard embedded profiles" when saving files, the problem disappeared.

PowerPoint newsgroup regular Adam Crowley tells us that you can remove a colour profile from a specific image in Photoshop by choosing Image, Mode, Assign profile, Don't colour manage this document (or Edit, Assign profile in Photoshop CS/2). This should also solve the problem.

Adam adds:

• This only affects PowerPoint XP onward (I can't test 2003 but assume it is the same) and Photoshop 6 onward (I think). This, of course, doesn't mean it's not a problem if you are using PowerPoint 2000. Several times have I inserted PNGs happily in PowerPoint 2000 only to find their pesky backgrounds turned to black when the file is opened in XP.
• Bearing this in mind you may need to extract a blackened PNG from a PowerPoint file in XP or 2003, which you can do by right clicking and Save picture (being sure to use the down arrow on the save button to select 'Save original'). Then you can open the PNG in Photoshop and remove its profile.

If you have PPT pre-2002 and a presentation with problem images but not the original image files, this doesn't help much. Try using the transparency wand on PowerPoint's Picture toolbar to turn the black pixels transparent.

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