Barry Beckham

Igor This may be premature as I expect what I am about to suggest will be overtaken when the music controls appear on the time line. However, in the PTE work I have done so far, I found I was looking for a reset button in the music editing windows to take the sound file back to default after I had fiddled with it. B

Alien Skin - Snap Art is one of my favourites

Sorry DG I am not sure trying all the different convertors is the best way forward. For a start where do we get all these convertors to try, then how much time do we commit to them. You have to use a chosen piece of software for quite a while before you really have all the evidence to judge it. In my experience we have neither the time, inclination or the analytical mind to do that. Best way forward? Look at images you really admire created by someone else, ask them what they use and try that. Often, especially in the digital world, enthusiasts spend so much time trying out different software that they rarely get time left to make a decent slide show. On a personal note, I like to use Adobe Camera Raw. It is convenient, very powerful and I also love the ability to open images up as smart objects. Smart objects are rather like live text. You can be working on an opened Raw file in Photoshop, decide you want to make a change to the raw settings, double click the layer thumbnail and Camera Raw reopens your image and you can make another change. Bearing in mind of course that you would be working on Raw computer data, so your not making a change to a change. This is great when you have a landscape where the foreground needs a different Raw tweak than the Sky. Photoshop CS 4 added gradients to camera raw so you can apply a sort of graduated filter over any image you produce at any angle. Apply it as a neutral density, or add some colour to your sky. It is superb for landscapes as you can add the intensity to skies to give your images more appeal and impact. CS4 also introduced the Raw adjustment brush so you can lift the tones in a small area such as a face, or dark shadow without affecting all the other settings.

Peter With the greatest respect to DG you cannot get it right in the camera most of the time for a very simple reason. Our camera (no matter how much we paid for it or how much photographgic knowledge we have) cannot capture what we see with our eyes. What you see is not what you get and image manipulation however we come at it, bridges the gap between what we saw with our eyes and what our sensor/film was able to capture. What is, best, Raw or Jpeg? The answer is Raw, every day of the week and twice on Sundays. Using Raw and a little practice your image quality will improve dramatically because we can better balance the tones and contrasts in any image shot in Raw. What do we use to convert the files, well some swear by Lightroom, but I think that rather depends on how fussy you are with your images (ie individual manipulation of the images) and to some degree what your particular work flow is generally like. I was sent a copy of Lightroom when it first came out and I worked hard at it, but I just could not fit it into my own way or working and after some time I came to my senses and removed it from my PC. I found myself struggling to find a use for it, over an above what I was already doing with Photoshop (or Elements) I work every image through Raw individually so for me, Lightroom just didn't suit the way I work. I doubt it is better or worse than Photoshop just different in the workflow. You will hear all sorts of views about what Raw convertor is best, but in my view pick one and stay with it. Once you find your way around you will then get the best from that convertor. Better that, than those who flit from one bit of software to another and NEVER get the best from any of them. Unless someone has extensively tried the many Raw convertors around, how can they really state what is best, but I am told quite often that this is better than that. I have used Adobe Camera Raw for ages because I have always used Photoshop and I love it. In CS4 the power it gives us just blows Jpegs out of the water. Learn to use a Raw convertor effectively and it will elevate the quality of your images to a new level. If your like me, you could be struggling to make a bit of software like Lightroom fit in when it clearly doesn't.

Stop stop stop stop Relax everyone, I do use SRGB and I failed to get my original point accross. Relax guys

Andre You can make colour space as important to your workflow as you like, my point here has been largely missed I think or members are keeping their heads down. A bit of controversy often gets the forum buzzing. . I was trying to say what I meant without offending anyone and that is difficult sometimes. Colour space is the least of the problems that AV enthusiasts have.

Because I consider myself a pretty average person and I certainly don't know all the answers. I am never comfortable with the "Expert" title. It assumes you do have all the answers and ........ ........gulp some experts don't seem to know an awful lot about the software and techniques they are labelled expert in. There are also a large number of ways to do some things, none are right or wrong, just a preferred course. Perhaps you should have asked another question such as who makes the decision on who merits these acolades such as "Expert" ? I am sure it's not the moderators, so I guess it is derived from the number of posts a person makes. If that is right, then what do you think? Does writing a lot makes a person an expert? From a technical standpoint I don't consider myself very strong in that area, be it PTE, Photoshop or any other software. Having said that I don't think that you don't need to be a technical wizard to use modern software, that's what the software developers do for us. I think I can hold my own from a practical use standpoint, but "Expert" just doesn't feel right to me. There are far too many experts if you ask me and over the years (not referring to anyone on this forum) I have leaned that most couldn't find their way out of a paper bag.

Err, let me think............No

Colin All my images are in Adobe RGB, so thats where I must be going wrong

Forgive me for saying this and it is a general statement, but why get bogged down with things like colour space. I say this with all due respect, but there are a 101 other areas that need our collective attention in AV before we get bogged down with this. Colour space has never been the tiniest thought in my head while making a slide show, has it prevented me from doing that. Not a jot Here are two of those 101 that are missed over and over again. Image quality and matching images to music and niether of those will be helped with all the theory in the world about colour space.

I am not a user of Lightroom myself, but I assume it will do much of this for you, but don't disregard manual sizing of images. It does allow you to take strategic parts of images and that can be an advantage sometimes

Claudia You need to avoid using 5mb files in a slide show. We don't need high resolution for slide show images, but we do need to retain quality. If your making your slide shows to fit your monitor for example, lets assume that monitor runs at a 16:10 format using a resolution of 1920*1200 pixels. You make your images all that size and this is how you do that. Open the PSD images into Photoshop or Elements and select the crop tool. In the options at the top of the screen enter the resolution you want. In this example 1920px for the width and 1200px for the height. (don't forget the PX) Click and drag the crop shape to determine what part of the image you want to show, hit the enter key or the tick to complete that. You may want to add a little extra sharpness in your images after cropping. Now save your image as a Jpeg file and use level 6. Level 6 is the default setting and is a great balance between size and quality. You will hear lots of nonsense talked about this compression setting with people suggesting you will lose quality. Ignore them and judge for yourself. You will find it is just right abd I have been doing that for years. Why can we get away with images in our slide show that would be considered low resolution for any print we would want to make? Because slide show images will not be enlarged and we view them in a similer way as we do web images, as they are presented. In addition they are only on screen for a few seconds. If and when you want to add animation to an image, lets say add a delicate pan, then you can create a larger image for the one image you want to pan. Try 2300px for the width and 1200px for the height. We don't need to add extra height if our intention is to pan. If we wish to zoom, then we will need extra pixels on the width and the height. I did write something about this on my web site, that might be of help http://www.beckhamdigital.co.uk/audiovisual/images/image%20%20size.htm

Nice to see your fixing the size of the slides to make sure your images don't lose quality on a higher resolution monitor. I seem to recall you becoming quite upset when I first suggested this. Nice when a plan comes together isn't it

Peter That may not make much difference if the issue is one where virus software is blocking the final email. With downloadable products that final email must be an automatic response to to completetion of the transaction. If not, then those selling products on line would have to sit at their computers 24 hours a day to respond to sales. Virus software being the cause has some merit. Our problem, like PTE's are intermittant. So, why does the on line shop software work perfectly for most people and only a few experience a problem. Some of the problems will be end user error, spam filters and the like. In our case the final email that contains confirmation of sale, the download link and perhaps in PTE's case the product key gets stopped somehow and we suspect virus protection programs.

Alena I am having very similer difficulties with sales of products from my own web site, where my customers fail to get their final email and confirmation. The real problem is that it is intermitant. This final email is what sends the customer the download link and I guess on your case the product key. We have been to all experts and they are now telling us that it is being caused by virus programs that block this final email. Is this something you experience too BB

In my exerience people tend to want the easy options first and that little technique has met all my needs

Eric I didn't say click sound, I said look up at the top right as you scroll through the thumbnails and you will see in seconds which has a sound file attached Try it again with out touching the sound at the top right

Roger I have had the need to do what you originally asked and never found it a problem at all. Open up PTE with the show in question and go to the slide list, where you can see all the thumbnails. Highlight the first thumbnail, then look up at the top right of the screen where is says add sound. Hit the right arrow on your keyboard and you can whip through your images in seconds and any that contain a sound file will show up plainly at the top right.

Peter Thanks very much, that is it BB

I read something from Igor a while ago about what was being worked on for the new version due to start beta testing soon, can someone remind me where that post is, I can't seem to find it Thanks

If 'User1' has produced a slide-show for his walking club, or 'User2' has produced a slide-show for submission to a AV Camera Club Competition, then clearly they will except different feedback. It is not an excuse, but merely a way of informing others of the potential audience. I dunno about that, but then why submit the same slide show to the premier PTE forum. I don't change my approach whether I am making a slide show for the local walking club or something for myself. If this forum intends to offer genuine and sincere feedback, then I must repeat, that the knowing who the potential audience is, is essential. Otherwise, such feedback will be generic. No, I am not sure I agree. What makes a slide show good , bad or indifferent does not change depending on who the author "aimed it at". However, I fully agree that members of this forum will only give detailed feedback, if they have received such in the past. So perhaps, we need to add "All feedback welcome", or AFW to the description? And then encourage members to offer feedback when AFW is asked for? I must again go back to the purpose of the forum, is it just look and see? Or do members want to learn from the feedback of other PTE AV users? I don't know about that either, you will have to ask the members, but my gut reaction from what I have seen and learned over 35 years in Camera clubs is that some will welcome constructive criticism, all will say they welcome it, but some will only ever welcome positive comment. They are not generally interested in how their show has been received by others. What they want is acceptance and when that doesn't come the hissy fits will start. I applaude your intentions, but you cannot please all of the people all of the time and I don't think you can take an "Art" - AV is an art. Then try to judge it like a motor race, formula 1, formula Ford and all of the other levels they have. The slide show is either good or it's not and there will be varying views on that. We all have what I call a visual IQ, some are not as high as others so what appears to be a great piece of work to one person can seen as far less so to another. I don't profess to have all the answers, but hiding behind the fact that " well this slide show was only made for the local pigeon fanciers" is not something I feel comfortable with. Perhaps it’s that issue we seem to see a lot of these days, that instead of applauding excellence we try to dumb things down in case we offend someone.

Some time ago I used virus software that scans the computer daily, weekly etc. While the scan is in progress the computer is always affected in some way and it does become a pain in the but. Then the virus software I was using picked up slide shows made with early versions of PTE as containing a virus. At that stage I switched to Avast, which can be obtained free like AVG. Avast only scans your PC once, when you first install the software (it does take a while) and then it protects your computer from threats coming in. Here is a question, what is the point of virus software scanning the PC daily or weekly? If the virus protection has already allowed a virus in under it's radar, a scan is hardly likely to find it tomorrow and even if it did, it's too late because the damage is then done. Its just a thought that I prefer a scan when I install Avast and then I just allow it to watch what comes in from there. I just think it is safer and less hassle than regular scans. As far as I am aware, I have never had any issues with a virus, but I have had lots of false warnings.

Does anyone ever wonder if the the risk of a virus is hyped up far greater than it ever really is. It seems that the programs designed to help us cause more problems than the viruses they are supposed to protect us from. I have to say that it is daft to leave loads of valuable files on your PC, back them up to external drives and DVD's The cost and time in doing so is minimal All the virus programs have identified early PTE shows as containing a virus at some stage. Norton, AVG, Avast and others.

Too many cooks spoil the broth me thinks.......................

Keith Try this. Open your project options to the Main Tab and click customise windows Then click the box that says show startup Window Click OK to both of those panels and run a preview of your slideshow You should see the attached window. Once you have tested it and see if it runs all OK, you can then fully customise that window. Is that what your looking for?