Experimenting with Black and white photography and Artistic effects offered by Microsoft Word

While regular photography is run of the mill, a lot can be done with black and white photographs. What you need is a decent enough camera, I generally use a Canon DSLR, although other point or shoot cameras  and mobile phone cameras will work well enough.

Step 1: After taking the photograph, load it into your computer or laptop. Right click on the photograph, go into the properties then click on details and then enter all the information pertaining to the owner of the copyright, name of the author, title, rating, tags …etc.

Step 2: Copy paste the photograph on to a photo editing software. I like using the Microsoft Office Picture Manager software that comes bundled with your Microsoft Office software. I find the Microsoft Office Picture Manager nifty enough. Once you have pasted your photograph in the photo-editing software, you can crop the photograph; tweak the contrast, brightness, and the shadows. After you have tweaked these parameters, you can then compress the photograph as per requirements. I compressed the photographs for documents.

Step 3: For the next step, open a blank Microsoft Office document and then paste your photograph on to it.

Step 4:Double click on the photograph and then select the Correction icon. Sharpen and brighten the photograph accordingly.

Step 5: After you are done with correcting the snap for contrast and brightness, save you snap and then  double click on the snap till you open the MS Word Picture tool, select the Colour option, reduce the colour saturation and colour tone so that you get a black and white or a grey  photograph.

Step 6: Now select Artistic effects and then choose the effect you desire. For the snap shared below I chose Plastic Wrap!

I have pasted below a few snaps that I took and then converted to black and white and used filters to convert them to the desired effect.

Example 01

This is what I got after adding the filters and going through steps 3 to 7:

For the completed picture I used the paint brush effect in the Artistic Effects option in Microsoft Word.

Example 2

For the above picture, I proceeded to steps 3 to 7 since the picture pasted above has already undergone steps 1-2. The finished image is pasted below:

For the above picture I used the chalk dust option.

Example 3:

The picture above has already gone through steps 1-2 like the other snaps. For the finished snap I took the snaps through steps 3-7 and the finished product is pasted below:

For the above effect I used the Chalk Dust effect or filter in the Artistic Effects option in Microsoft Word!