mhwarner

I look forward to trying this out! There are many times when I want to just do a quick edit (maybe add a border or shadow or other simple frame) to post to my website or do an adjustment requiring layers or maybe a quick "clone" and hate to sit and wait for Photoshop to load. Although I quit purchasing Paintshop Pro after version 8, I've lately begun thinking about loading an old copy of Paintshop Pro (maybe version 6), which was fairly quick to load with what I considered a much simpler interface just to do quick edits. Will this new product of yours support Photoshop (.8bf) plugins? Will there be any possibilities of automation (like Photoshop actions or keyboard macros)? Will printing allow the use of color management? Anyway, i will be interested in looking at it. A quick and small editor that supports curves, levels, layers, and free transform is certainly something that would be useful. Thanks for the heads up Igor, and let us know how we can help with beta testing!

I see that so many of you are using the timeline and taking great care with soundtrack and transition synching. Most of the time I just find or create music tracks of the approximately correct duration and synch the show to the length of the soundtrack (mainly for lack of time to play with individual slide synching). However, I would be really interested to see some examples of slideshows where you are using this technique (just to see what is possible and to give me some ideas). Does anybody have some publicly posted examples that they could point me to on Beechbrook or elsewhere? Thanks in advance. Mary

You can do it with P2E, but you would need to do all of the prep work yourself in something like Photoshop CS or Elements or any software which supports layers. Create a canvas the size you want to use for your slideshow with the color background you desire. Then paste each of the pictures you want to use onto separate layers on the canvas, resizing as appropriate. Once you have the arrangement you want, hide all of the layers but the first picture. Save that version to a .jpg. Unhide the next picture/layer, save it, etc. etc. Then load each one of these .jpgs into P2E and set the transitions as you wish. It's definitely not automatic, but it will provide the effect you want, and probably with a lot more control than something which does it automatically. Hope this helps.

I would also like to request the ability to use the IPTC caption information automatically (via a checkbox or something) as the comment on slides. I have found myself using at least this field to annotate my pictures. My current web page album (Arles Image Web Page Creator) can do this, and most image management programs, as well as Photoshop, have the ability to display it. It would certainly save time in adding comments, which I tend to not do because it can be a pain. And thanks, Igor, for such a wonderful product. It just gets better and better and you are so kind to keep listening to us.

The Plugin Commander program is very helpful for managing plug-ins: http://thepluginsite.com/products/picopro/index.htm There is a free "Light Version" you can download and try. Can't remember what the limitations are on the free version.

And last but not least (unless this has changed somewhere and I missed it), creating title slides in PS assures you that the fonts you select are in fact the fonts that show up in the presentation when the user sees it. If you use the object editor to put text on your slides, if you select a fancy font that exists on your machine but not on the prospective user's machine, then font substitution will occur at the time the show plays and it's hard to tell what font the computer will select.

Perhaps I didn't state my question correctly and so I am still a little confused. I do not want to customize the synchronization. I just wanted to have multple music files and allow P2E to automate the display of slides so that when the last of the 3 files has played, the slides have also finished displaying. So, if I have 1 .mp3 file that is 4 minutes long and 2 each that are 3 minutes long (10 minutes total) and 10 slides, I should be able to automatically synchronize and have each slide display 1 minute. I don't want to have to do anything manually. If, on the other hand, I add one music file that lasts 10 minutes and I have 10 slides and check the "Synchronize to music" box, each slide will automatically play for 1 minute and the slideshow and the music end at exactly the same time.

I created a slideshow and wanted to sync it to the music I had chosen. I added five .mp3 files to the project. I could never get it to work. I finally had to combine all five files into a single .mp3 file in a sound editor and the sync worked properly. So can someone please confirm that this is in fact the case -- to sync a slideshow to music, the music must be contained in only a single file. If that is not the case, could someone tell me what I might have failed to check (or uncheck) to cause it not to work. Thanks in advance. Mary

Ron In Win2K or XP, you can simply right click on any .jpg file in a Windows Explorer listing, then selecting "Open With" and choose the program you wish to use as the default for opening that type of file.

I wasn't sure where to post this bug report but since Igor seems to be following this thread it seemed as good as any place. I worked on a large (600 file) slideshow over the weekend using the latest beta. It was very stable and the "light table" was a joy to work with. I did however, notice some bugs in the main window when using the file list only. There are some problems with selecting files in the left list and dragging to the righthand slide list. Sometimes more than one slide gets inadvertently selected or you can't quite drag. You have to keep clicking around a bit in different windows, and then it does eventually work.

If the only item on the CD is the slideshow .EXE file, then there are not actually any individual pictures to download. You cannot prevent someone from capturing the slide on-screen (with the printscreen key if not disabled in your slideshow, or some screen capture utility) and printing it. But the screen resolution will only allow you to print a decent 4x6 or 5x7. In JoeJoe's case, since it is obviously not a commercial venture, if his grandson would send him the individual (probably .jpg) files on a CD, he could print better quality (and larger) pictures.

Actually, I don't think it's a lack of interest in creating video (or DVD or SVCD or whatever). I watch that forum regularly and am disappointed not to see any postings that list easy and foolproof ways to make DVDs from P2E. When I finish my current programming project, I would love to easily create some DVDs of my slideshows so that I can pop them into the player and watch on TV (instead of carrying my laptop down and hooking it in). It appears that only a few folks have been successful in making the transformations (at least using P2E), and there is no consensus on the right way to do it, or even the best software. As I recall, the package originally recommended for creating the DVDs by Igor is not even available any more. And everybody who has posted there seems to use different pieces of software with varying results. I am by no means complaining about P2E. It is a wonderful piece of software and gets better with every update. I have been using the latest beta and I think the new light table is fantastic. I am just trying to point out that maybe it is not a lack of interest in putting slideshows from P2E on DVD, but rather the perception that it is for the moment, quite difficult and one cannot be assured of getting consistent results. My guess is that the folks who want to do this, like Andrew, have found other pieces of software that are easier and more consistent to work with for that particular activity and out of respect to Igor and his hard work are not posting their comments in these forums.

Did not use a timeline. The show is set to automatically sync to the music. The only thing I did was change the filenames of the picture slides.

Problem solved: Apparently P2E didn't like the naming convention of the slides. I renamed them from ATitle1.jpg, ATitle2.jpg, ATitle3.jpg to A1Title.jpg, ATitle2.jpg, A3Title.jpg and they all transition perfectly. But it still seems like a bug.

Unless somebody can explain what I might be doing wrong, I think there is a bug and I am wondering if there is a workaround. Although I have been using the new beta, the problem has happened to me before in the last 2 or 3 release versions of P2E. I have created some title slides in Photoshop. It is actually one graphic with say 3 lines of text. I hide the bottom 2 lines, save the file as ATitle1.jpg. Then I display both the first and second lines of text and save as ATitle 2.jpg. Then the same with line 3, showing all three lines. My show is synchronized to the 3 or 4 mp3 files I have chosen. Without those first title slides, all is well. As soon as I add the title slides, the first one fades in fine, then it transititions to the 2nd. After that, the transitition to the second keeps repeating and repeating and the rest of the show never displays. If I remove those 3 slides again, all is well. The program seems to get confused with the similarity of the slides or something. If I insert different slides in between my title slides, it also works well. They just don't work in sequence. Has anybody else experienced this? Thanks in advance for any help.

I had some problems a while back (when I was trying to clean up my security act). Not sure if this is related, but you could try (if using IE) to go to Tools\Internet Options, then click on the "Privacy" tab. Then click on the "Edit" button. There you should see a list of web sites and whether they allow or block cookies. If picturestoexe.com is not in the list, you can add it and click to "Allow Cookies". This may not be your problem at all, but I hope it helps.

Thank you so much for sharing this! Gorgeous photos, beautiful music, mesmerizing slideshow. I thoroughly enjoyed watching it!

Greetings from Chino Valley, Arizona (north central part of the state, 90 miles north of Phoenix, 15 miles north of Prescott, 120 miles from the Grand Canyon). Prescott - Arizona's Christmas City Grand Canyon

Could you please take this a step further with instructions on exactly what to do in Ulead DVD MovieFactory2. When I open the program, how will I find the temporary .AVI file created by P2E? I know this is basic, but I have just downloaded the trial and am not sure how to proceed once I have completed the steps in P2E. Thanks in advance.

I'm waiting until you guys get all the bugs worked out and come up with the best procedures for burning SVCDs so I don't have to keep plugging my laptop into my TV to display slide shows. It seems like my wait will not be too long now. I greatly appreciate the research being done here to come up with the best method. In the meantime, I just want to say thanks to Igor and express my appreciation for his hard work and responsiveness to all of the requests made over the years for product features and most especially for the latest capability to create an output that will ultimately be readable in DVD players. P2E is already a winner and with this latest capability, it will become an absolute blockbuster. Thanks again, Igor, for listening. You are doing a super job!

Unfortunately, if you read the fine print, it appears that it is only free for limited personal use. It is not free for any purpose which would be likely to generate income -- like selling CDs with P2E presentations or selling them on a website or using the music on a website where you are selling anything else. But there is definitely some nice music on there and it would be useful for creating shows which you will be giving away to family and friends. Thanks for sharing the link.

Granot, How very clever you are! This is simple, yet elegant and a very quick way to polish up some images for the web or a quick slideshow without opening Photoshop. Thanks you so much for sharing this. My only comment would be that it would be really nice to be able to specify the filename and location where to save the framed picture. That would save hunting for it and moving to my web site.

I too am interested in obtaining a royalty-free CD of Medwyn's music if it will be available to us in the US. Please let us know how to go about obtaining it. And thanks for looking into this.

Thanks, Granot, for the speedy response. I will try the utility on my laptop which runs Windows XP. On my desktop, however, which runs Windows 2000, the fonts are installed in c:\WINNT\Fonts, so the hardcoded installation directory might not always work.

I have been using PTE and following this forum (mostly lurking) for several years and I have tried searching, but haven't come up with the answer. So, am I imaging this (is it wishful thinking) or do I recall that in a revision of PTE somewhere along the line the fonts used for comments actually get stored into the .EXE and are not required to be on a user's machine? Or do I still have to actually create little graphics in the font of my choice and place them on the individual slides as objects if I want to be assured that they will display in the font I have chosen. Thanks in advance for your answers.