I am preparing a seminar course and will be showing a lot of figures: photos, screen captures of journal figures, etc. Some amount of equations but probably less (by slide count) than the images.
I see advantages for using Powerpoint/Impress for slides heavy in images/figures: you can often copy figures in OSX Preview and paste into Powerpoint/Impress without having to explicitly screen capture, and download figures as Powerpoint slides from online journals. With Beamer, you additionally have to convert jpegs to pngs for pdflatex) and bring in an external tool (e.g., Adobe Photoshop) for annotation.
However, I'm more comfortable with Beamer because I don't have to rely on my unreliable hand-eye coordination to place and align figures, and you know which figures on the hard drive are included in the presentation because of the explicit \includegraphics command (as opposed to importing figures from the menu bar in Powerpoint/Presentation).
Have you deliberated such a decision and what has been your experience? Can you also comment on
- how well Beamer handles images(pngs) in comparison to Powerpoint/Impress
(is it inefficient)? Since the page size of Beamer pages are much smaller, does that generally make raster images less readable? - when annotating, I often "place" the image in
Adobe Photoshop, draw over it, and save as pdf. Is it better to save
back to a png and let Beamer do the conversion?
Update: Thanks for bringing to my attention that jpegs are accepted by pdflatex. So this is one less hassle, unless the picture is in gif format, but I would say those cases arise less often. A lot of the arguments "for" Beamer is the pdf format, but I often print my Powerpoint/Impress slides to pdf anyway so that's a moot point for me. I understand the tikz package is a very powerful tool that permits annotation, but for this part I think a WYSIWYG tool might be more convenient as as each figure/image is unique and a little more complicated than slide layouts. Positioning text, boxes, and arrows often have to be handled on a case-by-case basis whereas you can get a sense of general positioning for slide layouts after a few times, and the latter is therefore more amenable to solving with macros.
Edit: I had thought the LibreOffice presentation software was called "Presentation" but it is "Impress". Sorry for the confusion.
Best Answer
I use beamer for all my teaching. The only time I might resort to Powerpoint is if I am hard pressed for time since it is easier to make corrections last minute. The fact that this happens less and less is probably because with time I grow more comfortable with Beamer. From a different angle, beamer forces you to think things through in advance.
For my graphics I use
.jpg,.pdfand.pngmixed in my presentations. Png is great for line graphics which it compresses very well. Since it is non-destructive, it does not compress photographs well so I use jpeg compression for such illustrations. Since I also work a lot with postscript output from for example Matlab, I convert the eps-output to pdf. All in all I find working with these graphics formats very easy. As you implicitly state working with LaTeX prevents cut and paste but I note that you use Photoshop in which case it is easy to cut from other documents and save as.pngor.jpg. With Adobe Illustrator I am also able to extract postscript graphics out from (unlocked) pdfs which is very useful for teaching.I am sure there are many other ways to get around moving graphics between applications but these work for me.