How to combine images and make them look like they belong together

I recently gave a presentation to the local Chamber of Commerce called, “How to Ace Presentations.” (I didn’t choose the title.)

One of the topics I included was a discussion of a simple persuasion method:

1. Start with the problem
2. Then present your solution
3. Finally, show proof

Here are the 3 slides I used.

It’s hard to find a series of images that work together, in this case the broken egg and the whole egg. Actually, that wasn’t hard; I found them both in Microsoft Office’s Image Gallery. But how could I indicate the concept of the solution? In this case, the bottle of glue represented the solution. I certainly wasn’t going to find a bottle of glue and an egg together.

Here’s a close-up of the middle slide.

So I took a photo of a bottle of glue that I had in the house. Then I did the following:

1. I removed the background of the egg and the glue bottle, using PowerPoint 2010’s Remove Background feature.
2. I rotated the bottle of glue so it pointed to the egg.
3. I gave both the same shadow treatment, in this case one of the Perspective shadows, as you see here.

This gave the two images a similar treatment, so that they looked as if they belonged together. My audience liked this slide! What do you think?