Fixing Image Size

[CHCM]

I am looking for an alternative to MySlideShow Gold, that I've been using since I was in nappies.  It would be really good if I could get to like PTE, but my experience in trying to persuade the Demo version to do what I need has, so far, not been good.

I have been comparing output from PTE and MySlideShow (MSS) and the resulting show in PTE has images that are less sharp than MSS.  I need the output file to not exceed 1280 x 1024 and so I set those numbers in Project Options>Main>Aspect Ratio.  The problem is that any slide that is not either 1280 wide or 1024 high is resampled to whichever of those values is appropriate.  The slides are coming from a number of members of our photographic club and we try to make them look consistent  This means that if a member puts in images with thicker white borders than we prefer, we trim them off and end up with, for example, an image that's 1276 wide.  PTE then appears to resize by just these few pixels to 1280 and it knocks the edge off the sharpness.  (It's doing something we're constantly telling members not do to.)

MSS allows me to tell it NOT to resize and I note that older versions of PTE appeared to have that feature.  However, I can't find any setting that does that in version 10.

This really is a deal-breaker if I can't sort it out.  I'm not prepared to spend good money on replacing a seven-year-old package with something that produces inferior output.  Why not stay with MSS?  Well, my fear is that it's been unsupported - and so not updated - all this time and we all know that Microsoft is rather good at suddenly rendering old applications useless through Windows updates.

Any ideas?

[davegee]

In Objects and Animation (Animation Tab) select the Object (Photograph) and right click on the X in ZOOM X. Choose ORIGINAL SIZE.

You can do this for each photograph individually or create a Style which you can apply to single or multiple slides.

DG

P.S. What is the resolution of your projector?

[CHCM]

Thanks for your swift and informative reply.

Wow, that's rather obscure, but I've found it and even made a Style to fix all of the slides.  I had seen that dialog before, and assumed that Zoom = 100% meant "leave it as it ism please", but clearly it means 100% of the output size and not of the input size; hey-ho.

However, it has shown that my problem isn't only here but mainly in displaying the executable.  In Project Options>Screen, I select "Fullscreen", assuming/hoping that it will follow my Custom setting of 1280 x 1024 in Project Options>Main>Aspect ratio.  Unfortunately, when I display the executable on my 1050-pixel deep (by 1680 wide) monitor, it's zoomed to fit that.  So "Fullscreen" means exactly what it says, with the emphasis on "screen"; I suppose I can't fault it for that.  However, resampling 1024 to 1050 on-the-fly is bad news for sharpness.  Also, the pictures end up wider than 1280, of course.

So what this means is that I need to find another setting that says "please don't muck about with the output; leave it at 1280 x 1024 regardless of the actual screen size".  I can't find anything like that in Project Options or anywhere else.  I have noticed that it does the same for the other Screen>Mode options too, so they don't help.

That brings me to an answer to your question about our projector.  It is capable of 1400 x 1050, but right back in 2007, when we first started doing PDIs (Projected Digital Images), we decided to go for 1280 x 1024 in all of our competitions and AVs.  The rationale behind that is that as the aspect ratio becomes "wider", so portrait-format pictures get an increasingly bad deal, so we were trying to get as close as we could to a square projector.  I wrote a bit of a bit of a diatribe on the topic back then.  If you're interested, it's at https://silebyps.org.uk/odds_ends.htm#1400.

We're still using the same projector, so if we were to project our newly-created PTE shows, they'd be upscaled to 1050 high and therefore be softer than the originals.  They'd also be smaller on the projection screen into the bargain, because the only way we can make the fixed-width screen "wider" is to make it "shallower", of course.

[jt49]

We had the fixed size feature up to version 9. Version 10 hasn't got it any longer.

What about asking your members to deliver their images at 2560x2024 (or 2000x1600)? And in PTE's Project Options choose 5:4.

[CHCM]

Thanks for the suggestion.  I have just tried it and the results are the same; the output is still scaled to my screen's 1050.

To make that work, we'd have to request submission at the projector's native resolution of 1400 x 1050 (or a multiple thereof) with padding in black and set the Project to an explicit 1400 x 1050.  That appears to work, although there is a slight reduction in clarity that I can't explain, but much less than with the on-the-fly upscaling earlier.  (It seems that setting the Project to 5:4 chooses pixel dimensions that aren't related to the input dimensions, but specifying the dimensions gives us control over it and therefore over the up/down-scaling that is required for "Fullscreen".)

The problem is that members wouldn't bother going back to the originals, they'd as Photoshop to resample 1280 x 1024 up to 1400 x 1050, thus degrading the image.  Not only that, but we *ban* padding for competitions so that we can more easily extract images for printing on certificates and presentation on the Web site.

Then, they'll be asking why we can't have 1400 x 1050 as our standard submission dimensions for competitions as well as AVs - and what about black padding?  Then we'll get back into discussions about screen area usage and the effect on portrait-format pictures.  I'd rather not, to be honest.

It's looking increasingly like we won't be able to use PTE, which is a shame.  I quite like the features it offers, but if we can't make it work without significant disruption, then it's not a runner.  To be fair, it's my mission in life to drag the best I can out of any software that I use.  I have two degrees in Computer Science and 50+ years "in the trade", so have a pretty good idea of what I should be able to achieve and suffer extreme frustration when I can't.

Thanks for all your help, davegee and jt49.  I shall continue to monitor this post in case some genius out there has a solution.

 

[davegee]

Your projector is 4x3 so if you set 4x3 in Project Options and set "Original Size" for images then there will be no upscaling.I

DG

P.S. 

[CHCM]

Yes, the projector is 4x3, but the "show" is 5x4, so I think I should be using the latter, but see below, where I cast doubt on using the presets.

I tried your suggestion and the results were a bit strange.  The resulting pictures were **smaller** than expected, whereas in the past they'd been bigger.  When choosing "Original Size" on an image that, as noted in the original post, had ended up as 1276 wide, the zoom factor was 88.519%.  It should have been 99.6875% - 1276 divided by 1280.  I think that's because when selecting any of the common (preset) aspect ratios in Project Options, there's no definition (that we can see) of the number of pixels.  From the above, it looks like it defaults to something around 1440, yes 1440, not 1400.  (Being a multiple of 72, commonly used in printing - it's "pt", the point size, I could quite believe that.  Further, 1440 appears in a number of "standard" resolutions.  I am only speculating, though)  The reciprocal of that 88% number times 1276 comes to 1441 and a bit.  That's why I've been using absolute width and height numbers instead of the presets.

My testing involves running the show .exe, pausing on a particular slide, then double-clicking the original image file to open it over the top in Faststone.  When running the .exe from MySlideShow Gold, there is absolutely no change in the screen content between the two; they're exactly the same size and both as sharp as each other.

By padding out the originals to 1400 x 1050 and setting the PTE Project output size to these dimensions, I can reproduce the MSS results.  I don't need to select "Original Size", because they're all already the correct size for the output - at least the height for my monitor.  "Wonderful", I hear you say.  However, it's not practical for the (political) reasons already stated.  Further, if we were to follow the PAGB (Photographic Alliance of Great Britain) recommendations and buy a 1600 x 1200 projector, we'd have to remake any shows that we wish to use again, otherwise they'd be stretched on-the-fly from 1050 high to 1200; we'd be back to square one.  So we'd have to keep all of the originals of all the shows ready to re-pad them to 1600 x 1200 and re-run them through PTE.

As I said in my second post, I need a "don't muck about with the output size" setting, which jt49 says no longer exists.  Maybe I should try to get hold of a license for Version 8.