Word 2010 has a great feature called Background Removal, which can automatically remove parts
of the picture that you don't want.
This can give your pictures a cleaner appearance, and if it's a document you're going to be
printing, it can also save ink.
To get started, click on the picture, and then go to the Format tab.
Then, select the Remove Background command.
And don't worry if it doesn't look good yet because we're going to adjust it.
The first thing you should do is drag these selection handles so that the foreground areas
of the picture are all inside the box.
Once you do that, Word will automatically readjust the image.
Right now, the background areas are marked with kind of a magenta or purple color, but
when we're done, those areas will be removed completely.
With some pictures, Word needs a little bit of help deciding which areas to remove and
which areas to keep.
In this picture, there are a couple of problems.
The woman's hand and the girl's fingers are marked as background, so we need to tell Word
to keep those areas in the picture.
Click Mark Areas to Keep and then click and drag to create a line somewhere in the middle
of this area, and Word will readjust the picture.
But now it's including part of the background as well, so we need to mark this area to remove.
That looks better.
Go through the image and add markings wherever they're needed, and if you make a mistake,
just click Delete Mark and then click on the mark and it will disappear.
It looks like our foreground subjects are good, and the entire background is magenta,
so the last step is just to click Keep Changes.
And that's it! Since the background has been cut out, anything that's behind this picture
will now show through, so if you want, you can give it a new background by putting a
shape or picture behind it.
And at any time, if you see something that you've missed, you can always edit the picture
again by clicking on it and going back to the background removal tool.
