MikeL117

Sorry for the multiple entries. I got click happy while waiting for the message to post. Can one of the moderators please delete them for me. Thanks

Hi I think I have stumbled across a small but frustrating bug. If the file list is 'accidentally' pointed at the system folder WinSxS in windows 10, PtE becomes un responsive. Any action, including selecting a different folder, takes on the order of a minute or so. CPU usage at this time is about 13%. The only way, that I have found, to get out of this state is to patiently select a different folder. The other system folders do not seem to affect PtE. Re-starting, re-booting, re-installing does not help as PtE remembers the folder. This probably will not affect most users as the system folders are usually hidden. Thanks Mike

An update. The above should say "The other options do seem to work". If the text template is manually inserted it does grab the correct field. The format is <%MainImg.IPTC.Credits%> for IPTC Credit, etc. Mike

Hi Has anyone had any problems with EXIF and IPTC text templates not working? I am using 9.0.16 and when I try to select any of these options no template is inserted. The options do seem to work. Thanks Mike

OK on Win 10 64bit (build14342) using Chrome and also Edge Mike

Thank you so much Jean-Claude With 15 minutes of finding this simple PTE tool I saved myself a good hour of editing an animation. That included downloading, installing and learning how to use it. This will change the frustration of creating a complex animation back into a joy again. I look forward to PtE 8 inspired in part by your skill. Mike

I'm still working at 4x3 but 16x9 and even 256x135(2k) will be dominant sooner rather than later. As long as it can be set in preferences the default is an arbitrary value to show how up to date the software is. As for fit or cover slide, almost every slide is cover for me then I can choose the crop in PTE. So cover slide added as a selectable option in either preferences or options would save me hours. Thanks

Hi Igor I'm uploading a sample AVCHD for you to play with. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17582773/00010.MTS Thanks Mike

Hi Igor A couple of issues with beta 10: These are with 1080i footage from Panasonic SD9 AVCHD. No thumbnail of video in file view, OK in slide view Division by zero error hitting space to show full screen sound playing after video image gone (slide moved on or dragging O&A timeline to shorten displayed time) sound stops OK when footage trimmed using trim controls in O&A. Sorry if these have been mentioned before. I didn't manage to read all 12 pages of bug reports. Mike

Hi Pasting the text into a Photoshop text box would give you a better and, probably, quicker result as it would text wrap and have no background to deal with. OR Place (not import or a normal open) the PDF into Photoshop or open as a smart object you do not need to remove the background as this should be transparent. Then either give the layer a Photoshop shadow or other effect or save as transparent PNG and add the drop shadow effect in PTE Hope this makes sense Mike

Thanks Igor It is useful to know. I was aware that the method Canon uses to reduce the resolution to video res was crude but hadn't realised they had hacked it all down to 720p. It looks like it may be worth shooting in 720p at 50/60 frames rather than 1080p 25. Mike

Hi Igor Here is a 7D video file, not the most exciting in the world but it is steady. 00:1:37 recorded at 1920*1080 25p. Hope it uploads OK and you find it useful. Think the upload did not work, here is a link via Dropbox may take an hour to finish uploading. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17582773/MVI_2144.MOV Here is a smaller file 15 seconds long http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17582773/MVI_2127.MOV I have noticed that a piece of HDV footage had more detail than my 1080p 7D footage! Mike

Well done Sheila You can do the next Awards show at OPS I knew you would beat it into submission once you got your teeth into it but this abundance of patience, where do you keep it locked away? Thanks for sharing and keeping it simple enough for me to understand. Thanks also to Lin, Peter and all the others, too numerous to mention, on the forum for all the help with getting to grips with this amazing piece of software Igor and his team have produced. BTW did Igor manage to publish the API for PTE. The O&A with 3D would really benefit from some way to generate the numbers to plug in. I look forward to seeing your next 'play'. MikeL

I think that few of us would want the extra overhead for showing an AV (I often exceed the limits of PTE already). There are some uses of PTE that would benefit from support for other profiles and not have a problem with longer load times. In photographic club competitions (although there is now some excellent software available for running most club competitions) and on-the-fly appraisals (PTE is much more slick and as quick (two key strokes) at presenting work than most other solutions). These applications need to work with images supplied from many sources and not all the authors have mastered the art of converting and correcting their images manually. @Igor As the code is already done perhaps you would consider including it in the next version with a simple tick box to enable it (default off). That would be really nice Mike

@mbskels This is a discussion on the topic of incorporating colour management into PTE version 5: http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index....ic=4438&hl= I have, in the past, seen a few other similar posts, not always easy to track down in such a large forum. I do not remember any discussion that pointed to a change in this situation and my experience with PTE indicate to me that the situation is still the same. If I have missed the relevant post I would appreciate if someone would point me at the switch to enable this as my version does not take any not of any attached profiles. I have attached quick and dirty PTE exe to illustrate Mike

@potwnc It has been a while since I played with video colour and have so far managed to stay far enough away from the multitude of HD formats but I think you will find that unless you are working with cinema size and quality, video is also optimised for sRGB. I am ready to be proven wrong, particularly on the more recent formats but when I did work in video I always converted any still formats to sRGB before incorporating within the video. Also since most internet streamed video and TVs are set to approximate sRGB then that adds credence to my thoughts. Video tends to be more forgiving of a lot of things with the very high compression particularly of the colour information but you do need to be more aware of final sharpening if it is going to be used in interlace mode (as most standard DVDs and all older TVs are). You may even have to apply some final blur for some images with a lot of fine detail to prevent flicker. I suppose I could have simply said yes @davegee Yes, for 99% or more of images it will make no perceptible difference to the end result whatever the order is - unless you try and compare your final with your original at the pixel level. Mike

@mbskels It has been stated many times (and by Igor himself) that PTE is NOT colour aware/managed. PTE does not alter the colour information in any way so if you have set up (and even calibrated) your system as sRGB, as most resemble 'out-of-the-box', then you sRGB profiled files will be seen exactly (well as near as...) as they were After they were converted to sRGB in Photoshop or your preferred program. If you are lucky enough to have a system calibrated to AdobeRGB then you should use AdobeRGB calibrated files and they will look the same (unfortunately only on your system, they will look different on most other systems). The above ignores the ATI bug of throwing away the System calibration Before you run your PTE show. @davegee You don't NEED to convert to sRGB for your images to work but you do NEED to convert to sRGB for the colours to be as close as possible to you original, wanted colours. As you have noticed most colours in the AdobeRGB colour space are also in a similar place in the sRGB colour space so for many images you do can 'get away with' not converting. Photoshop has tools for 'soft proofing' to see the effect of converting and not converting so you can see what the final result is likely to be. If you are working in ProPhotoRGB I would suggest you ALWAYS NEED to convert as the colours (and luminosity) can be VERY different most of the time. It would be nice if it was colour managed but for the main use of PTE it is not needed, in fact as you may know, being colour managed opens a whole new 'can-of-worms' including what rendering intent do you used. There is enough, often misinformed or over critical, debate regarding PTE's rather good resizing ability. Colour conversion is something that really should be done by a person rather automatically, most images will convert without any unfortunate colour shifts depending on you choosing the most appropriate rendering method (usually a choice between Relative Colormetric and Perceptual) but some, particularly if they have been edited in a wide gamut profile such as ProPhotoRGB, will need some attention after converting to get some colours closer to what you intended. As for Photoshop and 'Save for Web', version CS2 and before do not convert from the original colour space before saving as JPEG so your images WILL be wrong (however they look) if you have not converted before trying to save. From version CS3 Save for Web does convert to sRGB so the colours will 'correct' but may not be quite what you want. Colour management is a mine-field as colour is perceived and interpreted by the brain and each different brain will interpret this information in slightly different ways and the relationship between colours even more so (try taking the colour test at x-rite). As anyone who has been involved in club competitions will be fully aware colour combinations that are perfectly acceptable to one person are totally hideous to another. I seem to have got a little carried away - again- to get back to the original post. As others have already said you do NEED to convert to sRGB before you save to get the colours as you would prefer. As you are using ProPhotoRGB I will assume (I cant read your original post from here) 16 bit (there is little point in using 8bit and wide gamut) so the process I would recommend is: 1. Duplicate and flatten your image (duplicating prevents you accidentally saving a flattened version over your original file, flatten as converting profiles can and does affect how the layers interact) 2. Convert to sRGB using Relative Colorimetric intent (if you are not happy with the conversion try Perceptual intent - the other intents are unlikely to improve on your conversion for a photograph. If you are still unhappy then you will need to bring the affected colours closer to what is available in the small sRGB space. There are many methods of doing this some completely counter intuative and far too involved to go into here- I have gone on much too long as it is - 3. Convert to 8bit (with dither) 4. Resize to your final size (you may prefer to resize before converting to 8bit, I see little difference YMMV) 5. Apply your final sharpening (by whatever method you choose - If you resize using Bicubic Sharper you may not need any extra, in fact it may be too sharp - Both resizing and reducing to 8bit remove some of the edge data and soften the image so may need to correct for that) 6. Save as JPEG (again using your preferred method, I use Save for Web as it gives me a direct preview of the final result quicker than Save and lets me choose the optimum compression for the image and use) If anyone has waded to the end here, well done. As always these are my ideas and methods but with many years of experience and often learning the hard way Mike

Hi Peter Simple answer: either projector or PTE (or both) can resize in this case. PTE will resize to fit the display resolution, the projector will take the display resolution and resize to fit the native projector resolution (assuming you select something like fit to screen option in projector) the projector will then re-sample to allow for any electronic keystone you have selected. In my experience PTE does a better job of resizing then most common projectors. This would suggest that you set the display resolution to the native resolution of the projector and let PTE take care of all (except keystone correction, which you really do want to minimise) resizing. Also in 'real world' situations for 99% of all images I have seen projected even the author would not notice a difference in a resized projected image to his memory of the image on a computer screen without extreme scrutiny, as long as the resizing is not excessive (2:1 or less) and done as well as PTE does. Other issues are much more problematic such as intensity (particularly in the mid tones) and colour balance/profiling. Mike

Hi All Just a quick thought. If you are running full screen with a dual monitor set-up you may want to access the other screen to,say, enter a comment or something while reviewing the AV. If this option is set the the show will pause if not set it will continue (with a little glitch). Not a scenario that will apply to most people but may confuse the few that do use it. Mike

Hi All Just a few comments from my point of view. First for anyone thinking of using Bridge to display competition images DON'T. Bridge is a browser and is not optimised to display the slideshow well. It seems to filter the high frequency components from every image it shows regardless of whether it needs to resize or not. So all images will appears slightly soft at best and any with a lot of fine detail will be obviously damaged. Lightroom, on the other hand, does a superb job of displaying the images and seems to do a subjectively better job at resizing than Photoshop. PTE also does a superb job at display and resize. As it does not colour manage it can't mess-up the colour if there is a fault in the profiling but it does require all images to be saved as sRGB (not necessary to be embedded) for them to look correct. Although Adobe1998 will often look OK for most images, ProPhoto will look awful The problem with pre-rated images in Lightroom (and Bridge) and be overcome by selecting all images and setting the rating to zero (and flags to off) before starting the competition. I have not done objective tests at 1400 x 1050 but subjectively I can say that they are far superior to 1024x768 when using PTE versions 5.1 and 5.5 although I have not done a direct comparison between Version 5 and Version 4. A point on resampling that I know a lot of you will be unhappy about, but I urge you to actually try it under real conditions, if it is done well (as PTE and Lightroom do) it has NO significant effect on the judgement in a competition. It is FAR better to fit to screen (maintaining the aspect ratio) than to show a small image with actual pixels or a cropped part of a large image. People do make mistakes, not every entrant has a full understanding of sizes in pixels. In club level competition it is more important to give all the members a good show of the images and content and composition should be more important than absolute technical quality. I know if I were to send the wrong size to a national or international comp (there are so many different sizes specified) I would want my image to be shown the full size of the screen rather than postage stamp or a corner even though it will not be seen at its best quality – only I would know it could be better, it would be my own fault. Yes, we should minimise any “messing” with the image and make sure that the messing that is done causes the least damage to the image. Any one who is concerned that their image must be only shown at 1:1 with absolutely no resampling should make sure they supply exactly the native resolution of the projector filled to the edges with their preferred colour (and hope there is no digital keystone correction and the signal to the projector is fully digital and the graphics card hasn't been used to slightly rescale the image and the software hasn't regenerated the pixels to suit some internal format and the software is mapping the image you supplied at 1:1...) I would worry more about profiling and calibration which will really mess up your image if the organisers have got it wrong. Colin raises a good point about judging conditions. It should not matter in higher level competitions as all the judges should see the images by projection under the stated conditions at the same time. For club competitions where a digital entry may be sent to a judge for marking before the competition, the likelihood that this judge will have a correctly calibrated system with the same native resolution as the intended final projection system is very small. At our club we are seriously considering not sending digital images out to judges (even embedded within PTE) for this very reason. Mike Competition Secretary - Oldham Photographic Society

Hi Al Thanks for a really useful tool. Have you got plans to update it to run with PTE version 5.5? For some reason it loses the names of the slides when used with this version. It is not the end of the world for me if not as I can still open and save with version 5.1 before applying your Adjuster on it. Thanks Mike

Hi Igor Just found a possible little bug. When in lightbox display and a subset of the slides are selected the Random Order command (from the context menu) randomises All the images not just the selected ones. It also behaves the same in the main slide list window. In version 5.1 only the selected images are randomised. I tend to use this when making our club competition shows and it is a little tricky getting the various extra slides back into the correct order. Thanks Mike

Hi Geoff As Brian said there is no simple answer. The difference between LCD and DLP (and other technologies) is diminishing, each has its own benefits and problems. You need to decide what you will be projecting. Is it for good colour rendition in still images in a dark room or bright image in a less than perfect blackout or mostly for AV? Then you need to decide your budget. Personally I don't think there is a perfect product out there, regardless of budget. The Canon XEED series is considered, and I agree, to be one of the best for still projection (it uses three LCOS devices to give an expanded colour range and no problems with colour wheel generated noise and high resolution at 1400x1050) BUT the SX50 and SX60 (I don't know if others in the series are affected) are less than suitable for AV as they have problems displaying smoothly slow horizontal pans (I have seen the effect and it is quite noticeable). Also the price is very high. Several of the clubs that host International competitions seem to have decided on these. I have no experience on what is best suitable, in the present market, for AV. One very important factor, often overlooked, is setting-up the projector to give the best image. You should also budget for some sort of calibration device something like the Spyder or Colormunki and the time and skill to use it. Also make sure that someone in the club takes responsibility for maintaining the projector and learning to set it up correctly especially for competitions and visiting speakers. If your Optima is still giving you good service, I would suggest you make the most of that as these are still well respected models until such time as you need to replace it or a more suitable model becomes available. Mike

Hi Igor Glad to see your work progressing so well. I have been playing with Beta 6 and like the timeline integration very much. I had a couple of problems: In Objects & Animation I accidentally deleted the decimal point when editing the zoom value making it immediately try to enlarge in one direction by several thousand percent which it found, understandably, difficult and slow while trying to enter the correct value I had an Access violation error; "Access violation at address 004D63B3 in module 'apr.exe' Write of address 0E4B19A0" This or similar errors appeared several times as I tried to continue. Upon exiting and re-opening everything seemed OK. On a different occasion (after the computer had been shut down) while adjusting values in Objects & Animation I had a crash with the following error; " Unhandled Exception @ TPteProject Disposing (D:\D_Common\WnLib\Win32\wpTypes.pas, line 536 Runtime error 204 at 00402B50" The file I was editing and had regularly saved was no longer on the computer (I had an earlier backup)!!! PTE had no problem when re-started. A couple of point on usability, if I may. I would like to second Stonemason's request for a "select slides to right" in the timeline. Also would deary love to be able to select several keyframes and move along the timeline at once while in Objects & Animation. It would make reusing objects much much easier. Perhaps even copy and paste the keyframes from one object to another. I did have a few problems with performance when running one show spawned from another. I very much like the "Play new background music file" for an individual slide although I could not persuade it to stop repeating when it had spawned a new show. Thanks Mike

Yes please Igor. That would be another great step forward. Mike