Adobe Captivate: Round-Trip Your Background Image Edits

by Kevin Siegel

While Captivate is absolutely a great program for recording software demonstrations, simulations and creating soft skills eLearning, nobody is going to confuse Captivate's drawing capabilities with best-in-class tools like Adobe Illustrator or Adobe Photoshop.

But what if there's a problem with one of your slide backgrounds and you need an image editor to fix it? In the image below, I'd like to remove the box and text just to the right of the yellow folder. While I could create a mask using a white highlight box, what if the background problem was too complicated to simply cover with a box (or other object)?

Some of you might be thinking that recording additional slides would be in order (and this time ensure the box and the text aren't there). While I'm not keen on recording additional slides, that's a solution that might work. However, who knows what kind of other problems recording additional slides would introduce. No thanks!

It may or may not surprise you to learn that you can edit any Captivate slide background in a graphics program like Microsoft Paint. Here's how:

1. Right-click the background you need to edit and choose Copy Background.
2. Switch to Paint and Paste the background into a new Paint window.
3. Use the Eraser tool to "fix" the graphic.
   
   
4. Once you are done edting/enhancing the background image, press [ctrl] [a] on your keyboard to select the entire image.
5. Press [ctrl] [c] to copy the image to the clipboard.
6. Return to the Captivate slide and (this is the big one) choose Edit > Paste as Background.
   
   Bam!!! Your background problems are a thing of the past.

If haven't tried the steps I've just outlined, I encourage you to give them a try... they truly work and will save you countless hours re-recording.

Of course, I have one more trick up my sleeve. The problem with the steps above is that there are just too many steps. None of the steps are difficult, but miss any one of them and your background simply won't get fixed. Read on for a nifty approach that will make even quicker work out of fixing your background images in an external image-editing program.

1. Using Captivate, right-click the slide background you want to edit and choose Find Background in Library.
2. Right-click the found (and selected) background image in the Library and choose Edit with mspaint (you could also elect to use a different program like Photoshop or Fireworks by choosing Edit with... and opening your favorite image editing tool).
   
   
   
   Note: If mspaint isn't in the menu by default, and it probably won't be, choose Edit with... and manually open the Paint application. The default location for the paint application (mspaint.exe) is C:\Windows\System32.
   
   The image will quickly open in Paint. All you'd need to do now is edit the image, save your work and exit Paint.
   
   And double-BAM!!! The edited image would replace your Captivate slide background. No copying. No pasting. No manually switching between applications! Nothing. Now that's cool!

If you're a visual learner, check out the video I created of this process on IconLogic's YouTube channel.

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Looking to learn Captivate quickly? IconLogic offers multiple live, online Adobe Captivate 6 classes each month including Introduction to Adobe Captivate and Advanced Adobe Captivate.