think(box)

Thanks Mike, Alan, Ken - I'll study all of those devices and compare options. If you're scanning at 2700dpi this means your image is (approx) 3600x2400 after scan for approx 34x23mm to stay inside rounded corners, right? This is helpful in that it is about 8.6 megapixels, and that you find this good for image rework purposes (no pixelation loss). A 5 megapixel image would be about 2000dpi and 2700x1800 pixels, or very close to same. A minor issue - do you scan to stay inside rounded corners, generally? And do you have lots of trouble with irregularly cut or inconsistently positioned slide windows? I suspected what you found would be true, Alan, that color balance and other parameters will sometimes be off when you use paid services that don't have people doing individual scan visual checks. Some original images need help right from the initial scan settings. And Ken - just got your reply. I'll check out the Canon as well. 4,000dpi and auto-fixup features - sounds good indeed. And that nice, little device has been around and in use for two years according to the web page. User feedback should be available and the price is not at first-issue levels. Thanks!

Charles, I previously wrote about timing variation, quoted here. I've added a machine speed example to the previous text, in brackets: The bottom line for P2E shows through V4.01 is:Synchronized show Music playback is timed precisely to show. If you attempt to display photos at a rate faster than machine can handle, then skipping occurs. You have to create shows for the viewing audience's slowest computer. This entails limiting image resolution to 800x600 (best) or 1024x768 (next best), and keeping display time per picture and fade interval (if used) not excessively demanding, or fast. Unsynchronized show Timing is approximate, since actual clock time is not used for 100% of the timing constructs that dictate show timing. The software is simply not designed for exact wall-clock timing in unsynchronized show mode.

Greetings to all, May I ask for your opinions and help on 35mm slide conversion options? Alan Lyons mentioned in another post "I still use slide film and a Minolta Dual Scan2 as a twain source." Although I have switched to digital, there are a lot of slides around needing rapid and very high quality conversion. I am considering doing the conversion myself, as opposed to using a paid conversion service. I would like to find a device for sale that accurately projects 35mm slides and holds a digital still picture camera for slide image capture, preferably with the camera in macro image mode and closely spaced behind a projected image. Pointing my camera at a standard, large projection screen results in undesirable quality loss. I want to use a DSC because it can capture a photo to perfection in 1 or 2 seconds, while a good scanner make take 15-20 seconds. I should be able to capture high quality pictures most rapidly with a high megapixel DSC. Thanks in advance for your help on this

You're welcome - and thank you both! Required execution order is something I found at significant time cost. I had to redo a lot of batch work. Results were widely variable when I ran the pictures through DCE first and then Neat Image, because Neat Image wasn't getting a uniform starting point in terms of image noise, as in directly from the camera (or scanner in Alan's case). The non-uniformity was caused by DCE using JPEG EXIF data interpretation to vary how it processes an image. This is a good thing in itself. To forum members - EXIF is EXchangeable Image File info such as shutter speed, F-number, equivalent film speed, flash used, noise reduction used, etc., that all digital cameras store in the picture file when you take a picture. EXIF data is used to do a better job in both printing and post-processing, and is handy to photographers in reviewing their work. I was using both Neat Image and DCE in sequence only because my older camera puts a lot more noise in pictures than newer cameras do. But even newer digital cameras can have significant noise at "high film speeds", which is really high CCD image pickup electronic amplification (low light photos). For sure scratches and other strong defects will always need special manual attention before automatic tool batch application. I have scanned a lot of stuff over the years and can take a picture that has been torn into shreds and put it together to look better than the original. Clearly reconstruction is first in sequence. In light of using automatic tool post-processing, I wonder if sharp edge clone-fixing will provide best results, or whether perhaps soft edge is better, in regards to how the tools handle image noise. Soft-edge cloning can blend and reduce local image noise, while sharp-edge cloning leaves noise intact. There may be detection of noise at cloned region boundaries as content, not noise. Some further learning is needed here. I have a question related to your slide scanning Alan, about 35mm slide conversion to JPEG that I'll ask in a new topic.

Greetings Bruno (Grecco). Except that the tree branch movement wouldn't be so gradual, you could use a 0.5 second fade and zero play time per slide (use 1 millisecond or you will have failures) and make a slower, yet possibly smoother cloud sequence movie. Have you tried this? If so how does it work? I suspect from my own testing that the picture has to be very small, even smaller than the present 640x480 in order to minimize the still time between each shot ending and next one starting. "Still time" takes away from the illusion of motion. Your present show at 640x480 screen area setting has fast, full-screen action and is quite interesting to watch. You can even see the sunlight edge moving up the building. I would estimate that you photographed those shots in mid-afternoon. Thanks for the nice show

Hi Dave - Guido flagged the right point for your shows from the other topic thread - you are using synchronized music. And yes you have to make a choice as the software stands right now: Synchronized music with no navigation, or unsynchronized music with navigation. If you want a fade on last slide then synchronized play is the only way to be positive it happens. There is an alternative that isn't very accurate - use unsynchronized music that happens to end during last picture, with navigation bar enabled. If the viewer does not pause the show it can end approximately with the music. Per-slide timing is not (yet) by "real-time" in P2E shows, so the time per slide varies with machine read-in and decompression speed metrics that will differ between computers. This approach is likely to miss the desired timing. Another approach for an unsynchronized show with navigation bar is to use the "Customize" feature on last slide, "start new music" feature in music tab. This can start a special, end-show music track that is timed to end with both that slide and the show itself. You can build a special fading into that slide's music. The music that was playing from previous slides will end abruptly once last slide starts, but there aren't any clicks or pops in sound this way. And the show ending has your fading music. Igor has requests to allow full pausing, music and all in the future. A pause of sound and music would be not preferable to me in that sound suddenly stops. Yet if I have to answer the phone I would like to have full pause anyway.... And then if you paused all and navigated, the music would have to start playing at a totally different place in a synchronized show. This would be complex and may surprise a viewer adversely.

Hi Dave - When you made each of the other shows did you add the navigation bar in exactly the same way as in the show that calls other shows? Each show really is an independent entity as you've described your productions, hence each show needs the navigation bar enabled.

Guido - THANKS! (Alan - what did you find?) I purchased Neat Image and DCE AutoEnhance after studying them and they are great! For the benefit of other forum members who did not know about these tools: These are somewhat complementary tools, not alternate choices. These tools have knobs and dials to turn. They try to make it very simple for the novice, but it really makes a difference if you take the effort to understand what you are doing.... After hours of experimentation I have determined that a good sequence of operation is: 1. Use Neat Image to reduce image noise unique to each and every camera by sample from picture. And for a low-res original do a 50% sharpen. Neat image does the noise removal to perfection and is best done prior to DCE AutoEnhance, even though that tool can do noise reduction. And Neat Image Pro does full BATCH OPERATION ON ALL CONTENTS OF FOLDER. 2. Next use DCE AutoEnhance (DCE is from "Digital Camera photoEnhance") to do a large number of image processings each with strength control, including: * Auto-Balance & Mid-tones Balance * Sky Blue "cast remover" (reflections of blue sky that turn objects bluish can be undone) * Color Enhancement (works great - mostly a saturation modifier) * Filter simulation (e.g. #1A UV skylight filter; about 100 others) * Sharpening, including unsharp mask * Hot pixel removal for long exposures in camera without built-in noise reduction * Noise reduction for general and portrait modes * Resizing * Text insertion in photo * BATCH OPERATION ON ALL CONTENTS OF FOLDER P2E shows will benefit greatly by the quality enhancements from these tools. Both have free trials and DCE has permanently "free" low-feature version. If you process a lot of images you will want pro versions. If you can't afford both, then get only DCE AutoEnhance. Photoshop only scratches the surface of what these tools can do.

Works for me - nice clouds motion picture! (5.75MB download)

Welcome to the forum Dave! Been there, done that. Thinking outside the box, try this: If you can do without precise synchronization, never exit the first show. Put all of your shows in one. Call other shows by a "Jump to slide number" and have custom music start with that slide. Just concatenate your shows into one big show and use buttons in "Home" screen (get this by "Home" keyboard key) to jump to starting picture number of other shows. You can't do fancy timing this way, but you can get the original music to stop and later restart as jumps happen by customizing each slide that is a "Jump" target and selecting "play new music" in the customize slide music tab. If other following slides are not customized for music the previous music continues. Make the last slide in each included "show" have a 1000 second display time (fake pause) by customizing it. Have text in slide say "Press Home Key" or alternately have it say "Click to return to show selection screen" (define a 1600x1200 transparent, textless "Button" in that screen's object editor view with button action "Go to slide number" and 1 for home screen slide number so that a click anywhere in screen takes viewer to slide 1, the home screen). It would be nice if last screen in each included all-in-one "show" could be programmed to take an action like go to slide 1 *just* by being played. Many forum members have made this request to Igor, but it is not yet in the software, FYI. Cheers!

Igor, I think the files can be mixed up though if you store as DOS filenames. DOS filename translation suffix e.g. "~5" can come out differently if the file set is changed (add, remove, rename) and system restarted, or if it is viewed from another partition that isn't identical or even on simply another drive letter. This gave me a lot of trouble a while back on my Autorun CD in that the "~5" translation of long filename on CD would come out differently on a different computer.

Hey Dave - One other often suggested technique is to put all music into a single MP3 so that additional tracks are not loaded after show start. Cheers,

Ken - Thanks for the tip on Mark Plonsky's impressive photo work! Before and after pictures by Michel: I took avant and did Adobe processing in an attempt to match apres. I can get close, but not an exact match. My guess is that you are showing us original quality differences, not how nicely you can clean up a bad picture. Is this what you intended? And Graham - nice pic's!

Hi Bob (LumenLux) - I'll post a separate reply about the tutorial topic idea, but as for the lens: The Sony DSC-F717 has a Carl Zeiss, Vario-Sonnar F2-2.4/9.7-48.5mm lens. My father is a lens expert and has ground many of them. I'll ask him about the color accuracy features when he returns from a trip. I recall that there is some interesting detail about the element construction and lens surface coatings. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that some of the finer image quality improvements are due to the lens complex itself. Here is Sony's description of the lens: And then there is the photo pickup. They used a new generation in I believe both of the Sonys, 707 and 717. For the 717 here is Sony's description: This is probably just as important as the lens in image quality. You can tell what kind of image CCD was used by zooming in to the pixels on a picture that has very thin, dark lines like a fine tree branch near the leaf attachments. If you see a violet shadow or ghost image it is a Hole Accumulation Diode CCD pickup. Previous generation pickups produce other colors for ghost images. I agree with you fully on the image quality observation between simple, tiny lens cameras and large, complex, color-accurate lenses. I'll post more on this if my father can give me a modest description of why, or perhaps another forum member can give the technical details. Cheers!

We all have only the best wishes for everyone We all recognize that everyone has to start somewhere Peace

Thanks Ron. My "How to stop P2E skipping" post *here* was right on the mark! I used the forum's "View new posts" feature and was pointed to this topic by Connie. The "View new posts" feature is not an AI application that notices a nearly identical posting in two places by the same person and tells you. The topic creator could have edited the redundant thread starting point and said that this question was duplicated elsewhere and is being responded to *there*, or someone else could have helped and added a reply to point people there, where there are so many entries that we need a table of contents. But in that brief moment when anyone realized there was redundancy, no one made the helpful entry. Such is luck. Bottom line is "stuff happens", as I'm sure you know. Where things are loosely organized in a stream of consciousness documentation structure, there will be redundancy, misplaced information and general inefficiency ... and ruffled feathers. Forum members have been asking for "categories" for quite some time to help on this. We could all benefit from that forum administrative help. I'm sure that some anchor "How-to" and "In case of problems with..." notes would be well-received by everyone just starting. Sorry if it wasn't intended, but your post rubbed me the wrong way when I was innocently a victim of that just described. You could have said, "Oops, I see that Connie added the same post question in two places a few days ago, and there is a mile-long reply thread with Connie's redundant post in the middle of the other one! Here's a link to the other thread...." I'll do anyone else the favor - here is the missing link and title of the other thread "UGH!! Slide show skips": http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums//index...ct=ST&f=2&t=642 By the way Ron - for this Thursday, May 22, happy 81st birthday!

Hello Connie - The two most common causes of skipping are oversized images and corrupt JPEG or music files. I thought your name was familiar (it turns out to be from the autorun post). Welcome to the forum! You've provided good info about the show, but not about your image files. An image file with unnecessarily high resolution can exceed machine speeds and cause show to skip. What pixel resolution are you using? If you want the most widespread compatibility, then 800x600 JPEG is a good choice. If you want better resolution then 1024x768 is preferable. But as you use any higher resolution than this you start to load down slower PCs enough to make them fade pictures poorly or skip the music. Having both music and pictures running requires more of the machine, so that is a consideration in the tradeoff. Photoshop or other batch processing makes easy work of resizing. PTE software is about as efficient as can be. It can support good resolution, very large show size and music all at once on a very modest PC. However when you push resolution to extreme levels like 2560x1920 as in my 5 Megapixel digital camera's pictures, the system resource demand is so high that you have to forego using fades and in some cases even music. And then consider that most display monitors can't effectively display an image with more than 1600x1200, not to mention people's eyeball acuity Please tell us more, and if this is not on the mark. And please accept my apologies if you have already explored the image size avenue. Cheers,

Michel - Thank you for the suggestions. I am a quality nut too, but dare I admit this? I am working on a show to post that was photographed with a 1.3 Megapixel camera in the year 2000. That was all I had at the time, while now I have what I consider to be a world's best semi-pro digital camera, the 5 Megapixel Sony DSC-F717 (lots of opinions gathered on that before purchase) . I will of course do the best I can to enhance and compress the images before I reduce them from my old camera's original 1280x960 size. Things like Photoshop Auto-Levels and Unsharp mask, and many of the all-in-one tools like Intellifix, etc. are helpful. And retouching, cropping, straightening, cloning etc. are always needed somewhere. My point is that the fledgling amateur, newbie pro, or just the every day photographer may produce some nice art, yet of imperfect quality. We have to start somewhere. I appreciate a creative, artful production even if the perfectionist in me is cringing at quality attributes. In the interest of helping members with skills development, I would like to see a forum category for this. But until then perhaps forum members could start a new topic (you could do this) and reply thread (one reply per contributing member) in which each member "Edits" the same post to enhance tips, but doesn't create new replies under THAT topic. That way the topic stays compact and concise while other topics explore content feedback in the new "Quality" topic. A post can only be edited by the member who entered it, and administrators of course. And for those reading edited posts, it may be necessary to hit the "Refresh" browser button if the web page doesn't autoupdate when visited (depends upon user's browser settings). Would you like to try this? We could all benefit in knowledge, efficiency or both. Cheers!

Michiele, may I suggest that you compare a black color background for your text to a less stark, pleasant yet relatively dark *color*. I have found that a blue-green shade 0-64-64 in RGB 24-bit color is very pleasant. If you aren't already familiar with how to generate this and don't have super image software, then just use Microsoft Paint. Go into Colors menu, click Edit colors and click the color box in next to bottom row, fourth color from left, then OK. It is a standard color selection in Paint. Next click the "spilling paint bucket" graphic and click in the blank white image from Paint startup. This turns the whole image your selected color. Finally do File menu, Save as, and select JPEG file as type to save, give it a name and click Save. You now have a tiny 9KB JPEG image file that can be used for a blank background in a lot of ways, with good general color compatibility for text colors and most images that you may place within the background. Of course you may have a different preferable color Enjoy PTE. You've made a good choice. It is the best in the world. Cheers,

Greetings Keepsake and all, I have noticed the same and characterize P2E behavior as follows: When you set a simple display interval and for this example have transition effects disabled, the way P2E works is it takes an unaccounted-for period of time to load and decompress a photo, and then it starts the clock for the next. Example timing: Modestly well sized, relatively high resolution JPEG file load and decompress time: 0.3 seconds Time value entered for display per slide: 1.0 second. Net interval realized during show playback: 1.3 seconds Then if you read the photo from CD-ROM the longer access time to just get the JPEG file from CD could result in a net interval of 2.0 seconds, even though you chose 1.0 second. PTE could be modified to keep track of the actual time-of-day elapsing, such that it could give you precisely the interval requested (Igor, please!) but it won't always work. For example if it takes longer to read in and decompress photos back-to-back than your chosen interval, then either the interval would have to be missed or some photos would have to be skipped. I prefer the former of those choices. Someone else may say show timing is paramount and insist on the latter (or both options). So for now take forum members' advice - either synchronize your show (works great!) or live with approximate timing (for now, at least). And Al's Adjustor can help you do sync with ease. By the way, even if you synchronize your show be sure to make your JPEG image size modest if you plan to show pictures at a fast rate like every 0.5 second. Modest JPEGs are sizes like 800x600 (forget about dpi unless you are scanning things or printing them). P2E can display VERY large images, but the larger it is the longer the image formation time. Beyond a certain point there are no display monitors good enough to show the resolution as well. For playback performance metrics you can check out a test I made, documented in another forum note. See my May 7, 1:49PM reply at the following link and check out other posts in this topic: http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums//index...ct=ST&f=2&t=639 Check out other topics as well. There is a wealth of help in this forum Cheers,

Thanks Guido! Here is update for each Windows, & Granot's "Search To File" shareware helps! You have tested another version of Windows I didn't have available to test, Win2000. If I understand correctly, it looks like the "timesetevent" search actually works in Win2000, but the "saved find" doesn't have the files listed in it. That's unique among Windows versions. Yet your method of selecting all at the step before saving, while files are still listed, even works on Win98. I get the same, "You can't create shortcuts here, but would you like to create them on desktop?" message. You don't need to on 95/98/98SE because the save doesn't stop showing files, but you can use this for any show(s) you want shortcuts on desktop. Here is the accumulated compatibility listing: Windows works correctly on "Find files" search all .exe files for "timesetevent": Win95, 98, 98SE, 2000 Incorrect search results found in (Windows goofs): ME, XP Saved "Find files" results works correctly in: Win95, 98, 98SE Guido's alternative for desktop shortcuts works in: Win95, 98, 98SE, 2000 NEW! While Win 95, 98, 98SE users are all set, here is a special alternative to get clickable show list in WinME, XP and 2000: I have tested and found that Granot's "Search To List" utility may help with clickable show names from the text file list that users of WinME, XP and 2000 can make in DOS or Command Prompt window. Granot's shareware "Search To List", unlike his freeware "All_files", can "Load" a text file folder/file list. Just change the file type from .TXT to .LST when you do the "redirection" save to shows.txt in my XP procedure. Do it like this: This shows changed file type in command: findstr /S /I /M "timesetevent" d:\*.exe > c:\shows.LST Then in Granot's "Search To List" shareware, do this: 1. Click "Load" 2. Navigate to drive C: and select shows.LST (from now on "Search To List" remembers this) 3. Find a show you want to open, click to select, or double-click to see all of a long name 4. Click button "Open selected file" to run the P2E show 5. If you like it and want to use it please support Granot with the shareware fee! May I ask that anyone who has made a .txt listing under WinME, XP or 2000 try this method? You can just rename your .TXT file to a .LST file and open in "Search To List" if you've already generated the file. I am especially interested in whether any editing is needed to the file listing to work in Granot's shareware. I think no editing is needed at all. Here is a link to download Granot's shareware and freeware: http://www.thailandphotoalbum.com/ Cheers,

Dana, Ray, Sometime in the past year I read about Bio-Luminescent technology displays. They will appear on the market in a short number of years, and are based upon learnings from life on planet Earth. Because it gives off light BioLum will be like Plasma in that all viewing angles work well. And it will be very bright. LCD/TFT displays let light through from behind the TFTs and hence have historically had poor viewing angle performance, relatively speaking. As with any technology that has been around for a while, it improved in recent generations. OK Dana, suppose you had the several thousand bucks ready to drop - which would you buy after your visit to Best Buy? Is the lost viewing angle that bad in LCD/TFT? Is the previously-mentioned graininess in Plasma that bad? Cheers,

Good one Stu! Just "ftp" in Start->Run window on my Win98SE machine indeed starts a DOS window and runs FTP as one would expect. But when I put "ftpfubar" or "ftpfubar.exe" in the Start->Run window Internet Explorer starts with "FTP Folder Error" saying that it can't access that named folder. This could be the cause of what Jim found, a CD Autorun starting dialup for IE just because the name begins with "ftp". Thanks! Cheers,

Stu - I was under the impression that folders like pte_tmp1073, pte_tmp2799 were created just to store the mp3 and other music files (a .cfg file too as I recall), so I tested a show without music. Indeed it created an *empty* folder pte_tmp6575 for as long as show ran. Normally these are cleaned up, but not after Windows lockups, etc. I have been using a "Cleanup.bat" file that activates with the "Exit" button in my separate, custom P2E "show" music player to delete contents and folder for ANY pte_younameit folders left around in the Windows temp folder. Igor recently told us he planned to stop using the Windows temp folder for expanded music and just play it from the P2E .exe file, so maybe the only use is for music. The need for a pte_tmpxxxx folder and associated cleanup efforts may well be going away soon. Thanks for the tip. I checked the case you mentioned and found that every time you do a preview PTE opens a new-numbered pte_tmp5720 (e.g.) folder. Every time you end a preview show that folder goes poof, gone. The folder appears to never be reused on subsequent show preview. Cheers,

Granot, I don't know why this post just now showed for the first time to me, even though it says you posted it three days ago! I think there was some kind of system lag. This new app sounds great and a potential speedup for the "media drudgery". It's fun to make shows, but not fun filling in the repetitive details for distribution media. I'll load it and kick the tires. Thanks! Cheers,