Why is my product so blurry after flattening in PowerPoint or Flat Pack?

If you use PowerPoint or Flat Pack to flatten your products, you might see some slides come out really blurry. Here are the three steps you can do, to address it:

Step 1: Make sure your Windows Registry is set to 300dpi

When you (or Flat Pack) tell PowerPoint to turn this slide into an image, PowerPoint then goes into the Windows Registry to find out what quality and what dpi it should export the image as.
Microsoft has a step-by-step article that takes you through the process of how to change the export resolution of a PowerPoint slide

Step 2: Change the Flat Pack image preferences

If you go to Flat Pack -> Preferences -> Image Settings, you will see that you can change the Image Quality setting. The options are “Low, Medium, High, Maximum”. The default value is High, as it strikes the balance between great quality without pushing the file size too much. If you want the highest possible quality and don’t mind a large file size, then you can go to Maximum. Behind the scenes this means, Flat Pack instructs PowerPoint to export your slide as an image that is 5 times its normal size, and then uses that as the background for the new slide. This results in a much higher quality image, but will also push up the file size.

Step 3: Consider not flattening some text

The reason why we flatten most of our TPT products, is because most clip artists require you to do so according to their Terms of Use. When you flatten everything though some quality is lost no matter what method you use. You might notice that especially around text with red backgrounds for example.
A good option here, is to click on “Do not flatten” for those pieces of text. (NB: You will still want to have all the clipart flattened). When you click on “Create PDF” in Flat Pack afterwards, this means the text is not flattened into an image, but all the clipart around it is. Any blurriness around the text will not be there anymore, because the text does not form part of the image.
The other advantage of taking this step, is that you will have a more accessible product. That is, those using screen readers because of a disability, will be able to use your product too.

Summary

When you sell your products on TPT, you need them to be flattened, but you also don’t want them to lose quality. Taking the three steps above ensures that you get the highest quality products out of the flattening process.