Barry Beckham

Dom Was your last post meant for me "Barry" not Bruce If so, that doesn't make any difference, In any setting when you remove a flag from the time line you also remove it from the slide list too. So far I cannot find a way to program a slide show on the fly, I must be thinck cos I can't find what I am looking for. Barry

This is all looking rather good, but there is just one feature that I use quite a lot and I cannot find it. How do I clear the timeline of time points without it clearing the slide list of images at the same time? I can't seem to find a way to go back to a slide show and re program the sequence by clearing the timeline first The command "Delete all Transition Points" has gone

Patrick Not elitist, I just feel that if you embark on AV, which is all about image presentation, you MUST get the fundementals right.

Patrick If you really feel that attaining a higher standard is unattainable for you, then I can't see a great deal of point in putting forward any work at all for comment. What would be the point as the whole purpose is to learn from what other say isn't it? I don't think I do over estimate the camera and lens level of amateurs, I do visit many clubs and come into contact with thousands of enthusiasts just like us. So I do have a reasonably good knowledge to make such a statement. You don't have to spend a £1000 on a lens. I worked for years and competed sucessfully with budget second hand cameras and lenses. Olympus and Tamron lenses was my choice. Absolutely sure ! Not sure what you mean here, if it is that you agree, it seems to contradict your previous comments. You seem to be saying here that it is the photographer and not the equipment that is the main cause of good images. If you meant this to be a question as in "Am I Absolutely sure !" Then I would say yes, some people can get interesting images with a disposable camera. I wish to be respectful Patrick and it is easy to get the wrong idea in text, but you do seem to have some issue with image quality and the wish to improve and gain higher standards. I hope it is not because it is me that has said it. By the way, I thought young Pauls slide show was a very good one, I found the photo quality to be perfectly OK for the style of presentation and he captured a mood perfectly. The show didn't need words as the music and images told the story. Short and to the point as well. I think we all accept that there is a world of difference between a presentation of images on this subject and a pictorial one.

Patrick Sorry mate, but I always have a little difficulty grasping the point you are making. Thats down to me not you as I can't speak French, at least you can speak and write English. I think the point you are making is that these people have some advantage over others because of their equipment and status. If so, I think you under-estimate the equipment used by many amateurs these days. Its much the same as you see listed in your thread. My own and most of my friends have a similar amount of equipment. If you visited many camera clubs as I do there lots of people who have this level of equipment also. I accept that if you don't have a decent telephoto lens you cannot get some shots, but don't write off the quality you see in those images to the equipment this couple have. They would get great quality images no matter what they used, because their method of going about their photography and attention to detail is what makes the difference. I used to pride myself in winning a club competition with a £35 second hand Fujica camera. There were others in the club who had a mass of top Nikon kit that would cost you thousands, but it was no advantage to them as the had no vision or technical ability. There is no special accreditation to land on Bass Rock, you have to go there and book a place, that's all. + professional Photographer What does that mean Patrick?? It means that someone earns some money or a living from their photography. It doesn't mean they are particulary good at it.. I know wedding photographers who are exellent, but also others who have little creative merit of technical ability, but they still earn a living and therefore are classed as professional. If I have understood your comments correctly, you seem to be writing off the image quality you see as unattainable. I disagree and think we should all be striving for that level. Sure, we won't all suceed like all school footballers don't end up at top football clubs, but lets set our sights to a great standard and try to achieve it. That old saying still holds true, its not the camera, but the person behind it who creates the image.

Michel I think we have to separate the sharpness issue for images in a slide show/AV from those higher resolution images that we wish to print. We can apply a different thought process to both. For print purposes I sharpen my images at the very start of the manipulation in Adobe Camera Raw, that's if they need it of course. Not all images do and some need more than others. It depends a lot on your technique, lighting, contrast and even the subject matter. Not all images need to be sharpened and every image I produce, is high resolution at the start. When we move onto using that same image in our slide show we resize the image and users of Photoshop or Elements will often do this via the image size palette where we would tick the Resample Image box in the image size window. There are other ways to do this as well and one of my favourites is the crop tool. Example I have an image on screen in Photoshop that is 49MB and the dimensions are 5120*3407 pixels. I use the preset values in the options of the crop tool to select an image the same size as my monitors resolution. Lets assume that is 1024*768 Once that crop has been made and the physical size of the image has been reduced we have gone from 49Mb at 5120*3407 pixels to 2.25Mb at 1024*768 pixels. We have taken an image made up of 17.5 million pixels and reduced it to 786,432. If my maths are right we have thrown away 16 million pixels. It doesn't really matter what the numbers are, because any resize from a modern camera will discard loads of pixels. Now, discarding those pixels is the right thing to do in these circumstances and despite the loss of those pixels the image will still display perfectly at 1024*768 even when we put that same image up on a screen 10 foot accross via a Digital Projector. It wouldn't print very well, but that is not the object of the excersize. However, despite the fact that I sharpened my image at the start of the original high resolution manipuation, it needs to be re-sharpened now that we have discarded those pixels. I have come to rely on a particular setting in Photoshop or Elements to do this. In 99 out of a 100 cases, you will find that if you are using unsharp mask, you can apply 200% on the amount slider and 0.3 on the Radius slider, 0 on the Threshold. That setting will give you a marked increase in sharpness, but without over doing things. Try this on one of your high resolution images and with the unsharp mask window open, look at the image with these settings applied and untick, then re-tick the preview box. You will easily see that this setting works fine for images of 1024*768 or even 1280*1024. Over sharpening an image should be avoided, but consider this. If we need to push sharpness to much higher levels, we will get away with it far more readily with slide show images then those for print purposes. (As long as don't go too high of course) The reason is simply because on screen, a slightly over sharpened images tends to look a bit better than when we see it on paper, but the most important reason is that it will only be on screen a few seconds. Everything in moderation of course, but if you need to squeeze more sharpmness into an image for a slide show then try it. The issue that has to be balanced is when we throw animation into the equasion because of the Moire effect. The moire effect can be increased or even directly created by over sharpening an image.

Ifa Those have been my views since way back when I used to do this with twin projectors, but there are times when images are used that clearly are not really good enough. Your right that this then drags the whole show down. Often we also hear the excuse that, well I wanted to show the images like that doesn't really cut it with me. Generally speaking AV is let down by poor image quality more often than any sound or presentation issues. That is the area where most attention is needed, forget the all the fancy stuff and get that right first. If your going to show photographs to photographers, then at least edit the images and drop out those that don't belong. I would rather see 6 of your good images, rather than 36 that contain only 6 good images. The issue is not just image quality, but vision too. The variety of a slide show has to be considered at the time you are taking the pictures. When you are in front of the PC, it's too late. How often do we see good static slide shows showing movement through the frame (not animation) A good differentail focus shot, sharp in the foreground and soft in the background and then the other way round, it looks great on screen, but it has to be taken like that. How often do we see any third image examples and it's much easier now than in the slide tape days. How often do we see the resized images sharpened before being placed into the show. They need it badly after removing millions of pixels. These are the issues that need general attention.

The lanquage does make it a bit tricky to understand sometimes, but you can speak and write English, I can't speak or write French. I am afraid it is the Englisg disease, we expect the whole world to conform to us. So keep up the good work

I think tuned is the word, I would like to see what proportion of the image was used here. Impressive though when you see it in the slide show

Dadou I think I understand where you were coming from now. I agree that you can create a slide show with less than perfect images and create something very worthwhile. Creating a sequence can capture a mood or emotion and sometimes that mood/emotion is strong enough to overcome some less than perfect images. However, that sort of show is not the norm and generally speaking these types of slides shows are rare. 99 times out of 100, the image quality is vital to the slide shows success, especially when presenting those slide shows to other keen and skilled photographers on forums like this. As far as I am aware this discussion is not about an isolated slide show like the one you suggested I comment on. If you ever judge a photographic competition at a camera club, you cannot judge the pictures against some perfection you may have seen in an international salon. You have to judge what is presented to you, based on the general standard of entries for that particular competition and/or club. Well, isn't that exactly what we do here? We look at each others sequences and it doesn't take too long before we get a pretty good idea on the typical quality and presentation we will see. Our comments, if they are honest are then based on that standard. I don't agree with those here who feel lightening shadows gives an unatural look. As long as it is not overdone and it is measured, it does improve the image. Well, it does through my eyes and making those adjustments takes nothing away from the images/show and in fact adds interest. Why, because we are all keen photographers whose interest is to see good images. If you put forward images that someone feels are not that good, what does that person say. The only thing you can say is constructive ideas on how to make the adjustments, but it is only a personal opinion. Those opinions can be accepted or rejected, no offence should be taken. Having said that there is always a danger that the written words we see on forums can be misinterpreted. Sometimes deliberately, but more often than not completely unintentionally. When you add the differences of language I am surprised it doesn't happen more often. There needs to be a fair degree of tolerance allowed to anyone on forums as we can all rattle off an email one minute and later when we read it again see that it could be interpreted in a far different way than we intended. Live and let live and don't look for offense when none was intended.

With the debate about image quality raging........... If you want to see quality images, then look no further than the article below http://www.beckhamdigital.co.uk/articles/B...ck/bassrock.htm

Dadou I am not sure what you expect me to say about a slide show like that. Almost any comment at all will upset someone, somewhere on this site. So, in the interests of diplomacy I decline to make my views public. You may want to run the wnsoft patch on this slide show though. I hit the escape key on the very last slide as I thought it was designed to stay on screen. (not being able to read the text). It froze Windows Vista. Igor's patch will fix it. Can I ask you why you particulalry asked for my comments on that slide show?

Tom Appologies, but I have only just seen your post, must have missed it earlier and was draw to it by something someone else said in response. What's all this about "A little photoshop would work wonders", what ever happened to getting it right in the camera. In my younger days I worked mainly with transparencies and doing my own E6 processing, with this film stock you only get two chances. In camera and contrast in the processing, after that forget it. Exposure and composition had to be right at the taking stage. But they were not right at the taking stage Tom, every exposure was a compromise unless you were extremely lucky with the conditions. Slide film never recorded what our eyes saw, it exposed for the highlights and shadows blocked up, we just got used to seeing that on a projected image. Those who worked on negative stock always made changes back then, which we now call image manipulation. It was needed then to balance the tones and colour from a negative and it's needed now from our digital negative. The only reason it wasn't done with slide film was because it couldn't be done. Photoshop is a great TOOL for us photographers but that's all it is; a tool, it won't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Well, at one time I would have agreed with the above statement, but not any more. Quite often we can make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. I saw a portfolio of images recently from a photographer who obviously had great vision and technical ability and there was a header statement from this photographer that I felt was bang on. It said something like this. If I didn't have the skills necessary to realise my images in Photoshop, I would consider myself an incomplete photographer. Whether an individual wishes to carry out some of the more indepth manipulations is perhaps a debateable point, but anyone who owns a digital camera will need some image editing software and the skills to use it. This is simply because your camera doesn't record what was there. It can't cope with the contrast of many scenes that we shoot. I say this of course to a forum of amateur photographers, who are not likely to be satified with what their camera produces for them. Of course you still need to get all the technicalities right at the taking stage, regardless of what manipulation you decide on. No sense in having to move a mountain in Photoshop to reach a point we should have reached as we pressed the shutter. I don't know whether the attached link to an article will be of interest http://www.beckhamdigital.co.uk/articles/C...ng/cheating.htm

We should have our visa for Australia in July and so I might just look you up on that beer mate around Nov/Dec. What part of Australia are you, we will be settling in Brisbane. By the way it wasn't your post that was hilarious, it was a combination of them all. Its great fun to see peoples likes and dislikes and if you even need that saying "you can't please all of the people all of the time" demonstrated, all we have to to do is visit a photographic forum.

Good images alone do not make up a good show No, but what a great place to start ? On the other hand, the bad images should not constitute a significant part of a show Bad images should not constitute ANY part of a show, if you know they are bad, dump them and find something more suitable. The whole point of AV is a visual presentation medium, please tell me what is more important than the images we present ? On very, very, very rare occasions, the mood of a show can be so strong that the images and the quality is not the vital point. However, in my experience that is very rare and in 99% of cases the images are vital. Anyone who thinks you can slip some uninteresting and maybe poorly exposed images into a slide show and get a good show is barking up the wrong tree.

Hillarious stuff, I havn't laughed so much in ages. keep it up

Jim A very nice sequence to watch, very relaxing, particulalry if you know the area as it takes me back there. In fact I might pay a visit in a couple of weeks when we are up in Durham. I liked the presentaion and it made me think of the postcards we see in the stores around Cumbria with 3-4 pictures on them. The gentle changes worked well for me. I like this form of presentation, because it adds something different to our shows, but seems to retain the charm that some other presentation methods do not. The shapes fitted my 1280*1024 screen pretty well too, which makes me feel it was made for this resolution. When the 4 oblongs appeared two thirds the way through, they were slightly bigger than the preceeding images and I wonder if that was intentional. Perhaps you have forgotton to check the box in the Objects and Animation screen. Mode > Original and my screen is displaying those few images slightly larger than the rest? Music is well suited and the pace worked well too. Loved to see 42085 again, I have taken a few photos of that Locomotive in my time. I think there are 2-3 shots that need to come out of your show. I emphasise that this is a personal opinion, (don't wan't to upset anyone else) One is close to the start and is not as sharp as the others, its of a running stream and I didn't think the musem shot of the minor worked that well. Its only an opinion of course, but I didn't think it fitted in with the rest of the images very well. I think you will spot the few images that need replacing yourself as it happens to all of us who put these sequences together. What we think is a great idea on Monday, doesn't look so good a few days later and I am always tweaking bits here and there. I felt the saturation of one or two images may have been a little high, but perhaps it was enhanced a little between two different monitors. Again, its only a personal view. I tend to saturate parts of an image to lift appeal and leave other parts alone. A really nice slide show from a great part of the world, your sure got around.

Xaver/Patrick I take back all I said, because it must be me that is out of step here. Having looked at Xaver's modified image I feel the modified one is the best of the two and would accept that over the original every day of the week and twice on Sundays. I felt the shadows had been lifted just right, not overdone and with the verticals dealt too. Great improvement.

Patrick Well, what can I say? Your reply has either been lost in translation and I am misunderstanding your reply or I must have wronged you in a past life If you don't agree with what people say, ignore their comments, that's what I do. Enough said I think.

John I really enjoyed this sequence and the landscapes where well chosen, with strong appeal. I also like the presentation, but perhaps the green border was just a little too green. I would prefer it to be slightly more subdued. Having said that the images where so strong that they still kept my attention. Sometimes when a frame is too colourful it can overpower the images, but the image strength and interest prevented that. When the sequence first started I thought the choice of music of the Skye Boat Song was a little obvious, but I should have reserved judgement a little longer. It was used just long enough to set the scene and then the second piece was a perfect choice for these landscapes. I found your pans far too fast for my liking. They interupted the smooth flow of images you had carefully planned. Everything is smooth and gentle and then the pans appear and they seem rushed. That is the trouble with panned images in a landscape show, to fit with the pace you have set by the music and transitions they need to be a lot slower, but that means the image needs to be on screen longer. If the picture is strong and yours were, that shouldn't be a problem. I also believe that any animation should not start and stop while the image is on screen. (apart from picture in picture and text) I think you get a much better flow if the animation starts and ends at the beginning and the end of the fade. That way the image is always moving from when you first see it until the next one replaces it. It also illiminates that jolt as the animation starts or stops. Just been to Scotland for a week myself and while I got a few miles onto Skye, I never captured any images like these. Great set of images. By the way, there was one image that came up small in the second half. I don't think you meant that to happen, you probably dropped the wrong image in. I do it all the time.

You sound upset by my comments and I am sorry if I have caused offense. I thought I offered some constructive comment offering solutions too, but perhaps this is why people prefer not to comment on slide shows posted. There seems little point in making comment at all if it all has to be positive.

I am sorry, but I dont fully understand Barry, no problem and also very few manipulation to do : just select the exe file and hit the Suppr key... that's all !

Patrick Sorry Patrick, but I found the images far too dark to be enjoyable and they are so easy to fix (if you have Photoshop) using Image > Adjustments > Shadow and Highlights. I did a screen grab of your first image and it came up fine in seconds. I also didn't find the first piece of music very appropriate to the show. It was too futuristic and the images didn’t keep pace with it. It felt to me that the images should have been moving along at a faster pace given that music and with a faster transition. The second part was much better, the misty appearance captured some mood and the music then worked in harmony with it. Too be honest it was like two separate slide shows. However, the quality of the second batch of images could also do with some manipulation. They need to be adjusted with levels, while retaining the misty charm. Again, this is not difficult to do and it would lift the appeal of your sequence considerably. As it is, it has limited appeal

Lin It's a good job that slide shopped when it did. That Wolf was about to step into my study. Phew !

Lin Thanks for the explanation