Getting slide to dim or grey to highlight certain area on screen

You could draw a Freeform shape around the area you want to 'dim' or use the Frame shape and adjust the shape's cutout. The adjust the shape's transparency.

Okay I will try this out. Thank you.

Drawing the freeform shape is very challenging and the frame shape is not very precise. Anyone else have any ideas?

Thank you,

Elise

One of the ways I have done this was to place the main image in color on the screen. Then fade in the same image that I used PowerPoint’s Recolor-light variation feature to save a new faded image.

 I then cropped the original image to the shape I want it to be, created a shape where I used the cropped image as the fill for the shape. When I talk about the highlighted section, the filled in shape image fades in.  An example of this attached. Sorry, when I copied the images from the actual course to a blank template they did not align exact, but it should help you see what I am trying to describe.

Hope it helps

Cheryl your example is amazing. Thank you! I will attempt it!

Thanks!

PowerPoint Labs has a free download that does this and a bunch of other effects. Easy to create, then copy and paste to SL.

Thank you - good to know - I will have to check it out.

PowerPoint Labs has exactly what I needed to create a spotlight.  Thanks for the suggestion! 

So glad to see that this will be able to assist you as well Melanie. Thanks for popping in to share.

I was hoping to achieve a similar effect. After a number of searches I found this option.  Exactly what I was hoping to achieve.

https://youtu.be/be2T95BMVjc

This is a really clever option. One word of caution: filling shapes with the slide background can crash SL under certain circumstances. It always crashes if the background is a gradient and the slide has animation, so I've never tried it with a picture.

If you want to highlight a simple rectangle, apply a zoom area to a slide. While you are editing, the non-zoomed portion of the slide is grayed out. Place the zoom area where you want the highlight, and grab a screen shot. It's not extremely flexible, but is really fast and easy.

Awesome! What a great idea!  Thank you for the recommendation!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQrNhhXsU0E

I stumbled upon this thread trying to resolve an issue I was having where my visited state and normal state were the same. This link walks you through how to edit the visited state to whatever you want it to be color-wise without needing to add a colored transparent shape over your original image.

These work-around are good but when working with an infographic or odd shapes - they're not great - plus requires several extra steps.  6 years later does Storyline not plan on adding this as a standard feature - Camtasia and Captivate have always had this.

Hello Cassandra and welcome to E-Learning Heroes :)

This is not on our current roadmap, but I can see that over the years it's been a fairly common request. I'm gathering similar conversations to link them to a report that I will share with my team.

Thanks for bringing this back up and letting us know that you'd be interested in using this.