When I was a PhD student I had to give some presentations. I think I tried once to use Powerpoint to give a presentation filled with mathematical equations before I decided that this was not going to work ;)

After some other packages, I finally found LaTeX-Beamer. For the majority of the presentations the default styles provided with LaTeX-Beamer were sufficient, but every now and then I wanted to have a bit more, do I dare to say it, powerpoint like theme :)

I wanted to have background image over which an white transparent layer would be put, on which the text would appear. I created a latex-beamer style for this and a sample output of this diepen style is given in the two pictures below:

The picture that is on the background can be changed into any picture you choose, although I found that in most cases the result is the best when the used image is not too bright.

To use the style, you must first download the source from my GitHub repository, and copy it into the texmf directory (or your local texmf directory) and make sure that you have run the texhash command under linux or the windows equivalent such that pdflatex is able to find the style files.

After you have done this, you can use it by placing the following command in the preamble of your beamer file:

\usetheme diepen

The following options are available:

• backgroundimagefile. The filename (without extension) of the image to use as background (e.g. \usetheme[backgroundimagefile=schiphol-tower]{diepen} to use schiphol-tower image as background)
• opacity. A float value denoting the opacity of the white overlay on all sheets except the title page \usetheme[opacity=0.78]{diepen} to have opacity of 78%).
• useblacktitletext. Is a boolean and if present the color of the text on the titlepage will be black instead of white \usetheme[useblacktitletext]{diepen}. This option sometimes is useful for background images that are rather light in color

If you have any questions about this diepen style, please let me know.