Slide alignment

[harbrimar]

I am working on a sequence which involves the history of a church destroyed in WW2. I have a photo which I recently took and also a photo taken just after the war. Unfortunately because I did not have the old photo in my possession at the time I captured the latest image they do not exactly line up (slightly different view point).

I would like to show a ‘now and then’ effect. Slide 1 being ‘now’ and slide 2 being ‘then’. Quite simple so far, but when using a dissolve transition at the ‘in between’ stage I have two church towers which does not look particularly good. I have tried playing around with ‘Objects & Animation’ and superimposed ‘then’ on top of ‘now’ and set keyframes to adjust opacity which works as far as the tower is concerned but as the slides are offset the rest looks quite dreadful! Apart from taking another image which is not possible (in another country), does anyone have any suggestions to minimise the effect caused by offset slides or any other solutions? I have added a couple of screen shots to illustrate the problem.

[jkb]

Have you tried doing a soft edged wipe instead of a dissolve?

In Customise slide/Transition choose something like a Page effect & set the own thickness of smoothing line to a high number.

Give it a long transition time.

With a slow transition & a high smoothing line the mis alignment will be less noticeable.

You may need to play around with the numbers to find what works best.

Jill

[Guest Yachtsman1]

I am working on a sequence which involves the history of a church destroyed in WW2. I have a photo which I recently took and also a photo taken just after the war. Unfortunately because I did not have the old photo in my possession at the time I captured the latest image they do not exactly line up (slightly different view point).

I would like to show a ‘now and then’ effect. Slide 1 being ‘now’ and slide 2 being ‘then’. Quite simple so far, but when using a dissolve transition at the ‘in between’ stage I have two church towers which does not look particularly good. I have tried playing around with ‘Objects & Animation’ and superimposed ‘then’ on top of ‘now’ and set keyframes to adjust opacity which works as far as the tower is concerned but as the slides are offset the rest looks quite dreadful! Apart from taking another image which is not possible (in another country), does anyone have any suggestions to minimise the effect caused by offset slides or any other solutions? I have added a couple of screen shots to illustrate the problem.

You could try the push effect so that half the original & half the new are on the screen together for a few millisecond depending what you set the transition time to. One other thought, cut out the trasition entirely "quick no transition".

Yachtsman1

[Barry Beckham]

Jill

If your a user of Photoshop or Elements there is something you can try. Drag one image over the other to form a two layer stack. Open the layers palette and at the top right is an opacity slider. Reduce the opacity of the upper layer so you can see through to the layer beneath.

Now use your Transform tools to adjust the top image so it sits much better in register with the one below. The sucess of this will depend on the size of the images you start with because you will need to crop the images again before using them in your slide show. It depends on their size to start with really.

When complete, bring the top layer back to 100% opacity and save each layer separately as a Jpeg.

[stonemason]

Jill

There is yet another way in Photoshop using the Difference blend mode to align images. For a step by step tutorial see here

http://www.sean-paul.com/photoshop/photoshop-difference-blending-mode-trick/

Geoff

[Lin Evans]

Is there some reason you can't do all this in PTE? Just put both images as two objects in one slide. Set the opacity of each to about 50%, size and position them and just jot down the pan and zoom values for each. Use those values for independent slides and you will have effectively done what is needed without having to use Photoshop or other software???

Best regards,

Lin

[davegee]

What Lin said.

You don't even need to jot down numbers. just copy and paste the slide and delete one in each slide.

DG

[harbrimar]

I have been away for a few days and very pleased with the response! I will start with what appears to be the easiest option first (last two posts) and work through the suggestions. many thanks to you all and I will let you know of the outcome.

Regards

Brian

[richard tucker]

Although it is a lot easier in several versions of Photoshop or elements - manually in older versions or automatic using Align in newer ones you could probably do for free in GIMP see http://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-tool-align.html. I have aligned about twenty images in PS and occasional the odd 2 in PTE objects and animation and that is not too difficult as Lin has already explained.