Ok.. so everything is free on this site. That’s kind of the whole idea but I wanted to be able to have a place to share resources that come my way or that I create. The first one is fairly simple. It is a background I made using a picture taken at College UM ARMY of an angel statue.

Right click the link and save as.

If you have resources you would like to share please email them to me. If I post them I will give you a link back to your site and a huge thanks. Thanks.

I remember 10 years ago going to a mid winter camp for our conference and the worship leader was leading music and the words were on transparencies being “projected” onto a sheet. A few years later I was at the same event where the white words were projected onto a black background. It seems today though that a slide isn’t a slide without countless number of background graphics. While I sometimes wonder if we may have gone overboard, putting a different picture with every slide, not staying with a theme etc, I do realize the value of a well chosen graphic to go behind the words that we are singing, or for a sermon, announcements and other uses.
There are several websites where you can go to find free graphics for you to use. Here are some of my favorites:

Stock Exchange- http://www.sxc.hu/ – This is a photo exchange where thousands of photos exist for your use. All the photos are huge, big enough to print, but can be easily compressed down for use on screens. Most of them are covered under the normal licenses which allows you to use the photo for free unless you are using it to make money by selling it in a design set or something like that. Some photos require you to notify the artist when you use the photo in public.

Creative MYK- http://www.creativemyk.com/ Creative MYK adds a different twist on the traditional photo site. It allows people to upload not only photos but also Adobe InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator Files. Most of them upload in layers so if you see something you like you can edit it for your uses. I actually have a gallery here with a few photos.

There are a ton of other sites out there. These are the ones I use the most.
Where do you find your graphics?

A few weeks ago I attended a UM ARMY camp for the college students. While there I took these pictures and we ended up using some as worship backgrounds. I thought I would share some with you.

Have you taken or found a cool picture and wondered how you can turn it into a powerpoint background, but you don’t have a program like adobe photoshop or macromedia flashworks. What if all you had was Powerpoint?

Well it just might be easier than you think. While you may not be able to do all the slick effects possible with some of the other photo programs you can still come up with a usable worship background from one of your photos. Here I have taken a picture that I took at our recent Palm Sunday service. Let’s turn it into a background slide you can use for Power Point or Media shout or even other publications.

First I opened up Microsoft powerpoint. Then I clicked insert > file > palm.jpg.

Second I selected the photo and then found my photo toolbar. I choose brighten and brought up the brightness of the photo. Depending on your photo you may also want to reduce the contrast of the picture or if you wanted to eventually use lighter text on top of the slide then reduce the brightness.

Third I added a text box, I chose the papyrus font and typed in the Text “Hosanna”. I changed the text size to 117pt, then I rotated the text and placed it on the left hand side.

Fourth I created a rounded corner rectangle auto shape from the auto shape menu. I wanted to use the auto shape as a place to eventually put text so I drew a fairly large square on the right hand side of the slide. I went to format auto shape, chose to fill it with white and then set the transparency to 45 percent.

I think that slide would do great as a title slide or for some small announcement but what about a slide to use for song lyrics. With just a few changes I found a way to make a slide for such a purpose.

First I selected the slide and clicked ctrl+d which duplicated the slide.

Second I selected the large rectangle auto shape and dragged it over to fill the entire slide.

Third I selected the “Hosanna” text, rotated it back to horizontal, shrunk the size to 60pt and placed it in the bottom right hand corner

Fourth I chose the text box, right clicked chose order>bring to front. This placed the text box in front of the text so you can see the text faintly behind the box.

This created a slide that I would use for a song background or maybe a scripture background.

Finally to save the slide as a photo choose file>save as> jpeg and named my file palmbkg. When the box comes up that says “do you want to export every slide” I chose every slide. This creates a folder on my computer with each slide saved as a jpg image in the folder.

As you can see this is an easy way to create background files. However you are somewhat limited to the photo effects you can use. If you do have adobe photoshop then please check out this easy to follow photoshop tutorial posted on life in student ministry. Adobe Photoshop has also just launched Adobe Photoshop Express, which is free and can be used to crop, change colors, add cool effects like blur, sharpen, and more.

]]> http://forkintheroadmusic.wordpress.com/2008/04/01/backgrounds/feed/ 0 forkintheroadmusic