Overlapping Dissolve

[Photo99]

A question for the knowledge-base all you wonderful people are.

I have 3 images.

I wish to have image 1 on screen for 5sec - fade to image 2 in 2sec.

Image 2 is to only reach 75% brilliance in the 2sec fading in when image 3 is to start a fad in and then a normal fade out of image 2 to image 3 from that point.

Hope I have explained what I am trying to do.

Joanne.

[fh1805]

Joanne,

Add image2 and image3 to Slide1 as objects and then program the opacity changes and durations that you want as if it was animation.

regards,

Peter

[Photo99]

I was trying to do this in the slide list. Never used the O&A screen or functions but I guess it is time I started.

A whole new learning curve. I am sure i will have lots of questions when I start there but here I go.

Thanks Peter I am about to give your suggestion a try.

Joanne

[Lin Evans]

Hi Joanne,

On skinning cats....... There are several ways in which PTE can achieve what you wish, but I think the terms used in our description the transition might be, at first, a bit confusing.

The transition effect is called "fade-in/fade-out" but it is non intuitive requirement that in order to "fade out" there must be a subsequent slide in the slide list. I suspect this may be one reason the developers are adding the "blank slide" feature in the next release.

If you take a single slide in PTE at the default of four seconds and set the transition to "fade-in/fade-out" for a value of "2000" (two seconds) you will have a two second fade-in and an abrupt ending. In order to have a "fade-out" for this slide and to use only the slide list, you need to add a black file (jpg, etc.) as a second slide and set it also to fade-in/fade out. Another way to achieve this is to go to Objects and Animations and add a black slide on the Objects List and use the opacity feature and keyframes to fade-in the black slide at the appropriate time.

In addition to this, you can do the whole thing as Peter suggests by putting the second and third slide in as "objects" on the object's list and control the timings of the fades via keyframing as explained.

PicturesToExe is a very powerful tool, but with this low-level functionality comes a certain need for practice and the resultant experience which you will quickly obtain once you begin working with Objects, Layers and Keyframes. In addition to the above, it's also quite possible to manually "pull" and "push" the keyframes into times before and after those dedicated to the slides. This means you can start a second slide via keyframing while a previous slide is still displaying simply by pulling the second slide's start time (via the keyframe and mouse) into the time slot for the preceding slide. The myriad ways in which various effect can be created makes this a most versatile tool, but one which requires a little time to master.

This may, at first, sound confusing. However, if you take a couple slides and experiment with it, you can achieve some very unique effects this way.

Hopefully, in the near future I will have some time to create an AVI tutorial on this and add it to the existing twenty two or so which I have made available via the Tutorials and Articles Forum (PTE Made Easy - PTE For Smarties). You may want to avail yourself of these to help you get a jump start on learning to work with PTE.

Best regards,

Lin

[xahu34]

This thread discloses a minor disadvantage of PTE, compared to the highly priced products of the Austrian and German competitors. PTE lacks the possibility of mixing arbitrarily many images using independent light curves and a kind of additive blending (like the blending mode "screen" in Potoshop [in German "umgekehrt multiplizieren"] with a similar behavior as analog slide projection). PTE is restricted to alpha compositing (convex combinations of color values).

Regards,

Xaver

[Lin Evans]

Hi Xaver,

How and why is this a "major disadvantage?" Could you provide an example of an image which has been so mixed which is not possible with PTE and masking, or with PTE and an inexpensive Photoshop alternative such as PixBuilder Studio?

Lin

This thread discloses a minor disadvantage of PTE, compared to the highly priced products of the Austrian and German competitors. PTE lacks the possibility of mixing arbitrarily many images using independent light curves and a kind of additive blending (like the blending mode "screen" in Potoshop [in German "umgekehrt multiplizieren"] with a similar behavior as analog slide projection). PTE is restricted to alpha compositing (convex combinations of color values).

Regards,

Xaver

[xahu34]

... How and why is this a "major disadvantage?" ...

Hi Lin,

First of all, I said it is a minor (not a major) disadvantage!

Some people in this forum (including you) often show effects and point out that they can be realized within PTE, without external support. As long as you deal with still images (no animation) you just need a simple slideshow tool providing alpha-blending of single images, provided that you really want to do the hard jobs in Photoshop, Gimp or another image editor. So, external support should not be an argument!

I did some tests regarding blending modes. As long as you deal with normal (daylight) images, blending modes like "screen" do not show a significant advantage, maybe there isn't any. The situation changes if you combine low-key images with particular highlights. If you have an additive blending mode, you can mix several images at almost 100% lightness. This leads to better results than those given by alpha-blending, which naturally has the tendency to a leveling of lightness. In PTE, in order to have a nice blending of low-key images, you can improve the situation if you combine the images with blurred greyscale copies as masks, perhaps a possible, not a comfortable way.

Another aspect here is, that (for example) m.objects (playing the show while using preprocessed data and not the original images) provides some kind of additive blending which isn't that bad even in case of animations.

All in all, not a very important observation, just a minor (but an existing) one!

Best regards,

Xaver

[Lin Evans]

Hi Xaver,

Sorry, I misread your reply.

Yes, a minor disadvantage but one which with masking and an inexpensive third party software such as Gimp (free) or PixBuilder Studio (inexpensive) can be implemented in PTE without too much effort providing the user understands the procedures. The combination of selective masking plus opacity levels can generally create about any type of effect possible with more sophisticated blending algorithms although it takes more time to create appropriate masks.

Best regards,

Lin

[xahu34]

... Sorry, I misread your reply ...

... a kind of Freudian slip????

Kind regards,

Xaver

[Lin Evans]

Hi Xaver,

No, more like 67 year old eyes without glasses or coffee.

Best regards,

Lin

... a kind of Freudian slip????

Kind regards,

Xaver