You don't need to learn Photoshop or CorelDraw to achieve this cool 'Highlight Picture Effect'. To remove the background noise and focus on the portion that is the crux of the slide. It improves the aesthetics of the slide, definitely, but more importantly, you need this effect for one major reason: There are many times when you need to highlight a particular area of the slide and fade out everything else in the background. Please see the steps given at the end of this article to create this effect in PowerPoint 2010.
Users of PowerPoint 2010 have to customize their PowerPoint Ribbon to use this hack. UPDATE: The highlight picture effect explained in this article was created in PowerPoint 2013.
