Lin Evans

Hi Alan, It's apparently "fixed" now - sorry for the earlier snafu, probably my fault for not completely understanding the proper procedure for completing the process. Best regards, Lin

Hi Ken, It does get you feet moving doesn't it? LOL. Good to hear it's finally working! Bummer about the rain - but it beats a couple feet of snow any day... HA! Best regards, Lin

Hi Robert, Thanks! My son-in-law is a career Marine Master Sgt, and has about four more years before retirement. Hopefully after four combat deployments he won't have to do another. The right side of the two sided book is him leaving on his last combat deployment to Afghanistan and the left side is my daughter (with the red hair) greeting him on his return. As a life member of the Military Order of The Purple Heart myself, I hate it every time he is deployed because I know the statistics and probabilities. He's been extremely lucky so hoping he's done his last combat deployment. The image quality isn't great because the pictures were all snapshots taken by family members and most with cell phones, but it was fun for the grand kids ..... Best regards, Lin

Hi Jim, I'm relieved to hear that it's finally working! Actually, everything in that little show for my daughter you can easily do yourself. The "rubik's cube" was done with a great style provided by Jean Cyprien and also the Kaleidoscope was done with a Jean Cyprien style. The books were created with Photoshop actions by Panos Efstathiadas (Panos FX) from his new Books - Brochures - Boxes commercial actions. The waving flag on the last slide was created as an RGBA Alpha Channel avi video using Bluff Titler by substituting a PNG image of an American Flag for the default Holland Flag (just renamed the Holland Flag and named the American Flag Hollandflag.png) then deleted the "plasma layer" and the layer with the flagpole, then output as a compressed avi with transparency using the free HuffYU2.1.1 codec. The RGBA alpha channel avi was added to the last slide, then resized and placed where I wanted it and then that slide was converted to an MP4 h.264, converted with PTE and placed back as a video slide replacement for the original slide. If there is interest, I will create a little video tutorial showing how to use the above styles, etc., to do your own animations. Best regards, Lin

I "think" it's fixed now - sorry for all the issues. It was unclear to me why it wasn't published but appears that it is finally "fixed." Thanks for checking it Bert.... since you could see it, it should be available now... Best regards, Lin

This morning I saw a "not published yet" message. I click on "publish" so hopefully it's fixed. Someone else will have to try it because it's always worked for me so I can't be certain... Best regards, Lin

As some of you may know, most video sharing sites are limited to 30 frames per second which is simply too slow to support optimal animation. Even though 1080p looks great for still slides, when animation is present things get jerky. This is true of Vimeo or YouTube. YouTube is presently doing beta testing of 60fps with html5 but from all reports it's still very buggy and far from optimized. A google search revealed that Dailymotion supports 60fps at 1280x720 so I created a little show for my daughter and grand kids using their own low resolution (mostly phone photos) shots and output it from PicturesToExe at 60fps. It looked great on my own system so I uploaded it to Dailymotion and it doesn't look too bad. Whatever they did lowered the quality a bit, but it appears to be at 60fps and the animation is nice and smooth. Try it and let me know what you think - link below: http://www.dailymotion.com/linatdata2 Best regards, Lin

Nice one Dave, Thanks!! Best regards, Lin

A compendium of some of my Native American Indian Art photos using the PanosFX Books - Brochures - Boxes Photoshop/Elements actions... About 48 meg download... http://www.lin-evans.org/panos/panosactionart.zip http://www.lin-evans.org/panos/panosactionartmac.zip If you use Photoshop and have a need to create boxes, brochures or books these are dandy commercial actions... Best regards, Lin

Topic locked - this post was intended as informational only - not really intended for discussion and especially not for political discussion. If someone would like to start another topic for discussion please feel free to do so... Lin right on Lin ken

That's Great!! Thanks Igor and Bill... Best regards, Lin

Then you might want to consider having a look at some of the greatest Photoshop actions ever created. My friend Panos Efstathiadis, of (link) http://www.panosfx.com creates some of the most useful free and commercial Photoshop actions I've seen. Here's a few pictures from about 20 minutes work this morning made with my photos and Panos' new actions set...

Though I have multiple video editing programs, this little jewel is the fastest, easiest and most straight-forward editing tool I've found to date. Highly recommended. Extremely fast... Works on multiple platforms... Lin Link: http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/

Congratulations! Very nice Jacek!! Best regards, Lin

As most here know, Igor opened a great new official Facebook "Page" for PicturesToExe here: https://www.facebook.com/picturestoexe Hopefully, everyone who uses Facebook will go to and "like" this page to help promote a wider appreciation of our great tool! Join in the conversations and posts and let's help promote our favorite software! I decided to also start a PicturesToExe Facebook "Group" here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/picturestoexefans/ and invite all Facebook users to go there and put in a request for membership. Once you are a member of the group, then please invite all your Facebook friends whether or not they are PTE users. If you invite all your Facebook friends, they will become group members as quickly as I can add them. As a Private Group, their membership doesn't show when people click on their individual Facebook page group memberships. Only the "public" groups show memberships. So the only way outsiders can know that someone is a member of the PTE group is to go to the Facebook Group page and scroll through the membership. If some of your friends don't want to be members, they can easily opt out, but I think most will enjoy the things we talk about there. The group is private which means that people who are not members can see the membership, but not read the comments. There are good reasons for this because it allows us to discuss things privately about PTE and even other software without adverse comments or arguments from distractors. It will still come up on search engines and help promote PTE. There is no reason why we can't also have other PicturesToExe groups under different names such as the suggestions by Dave and Ian such as "Friend's of PicturesToExe", etc. These groups can be made public if users desire. So stopy by, request membership and it will quickly be approved then join in and post your comments, pictures, links to shows, and such. Your other Facebook friends who are invited will be members unless they actively decline and many of them may get interested and become happy PicturesToExe users! UPDATE: By popular request - the PTE Group is now public.... Lin

A Technique for Maximizing Chroma Key Extraction With PicturesToExe One of the issues with using Chroma Key Extraction with nearly any software not specifically designed for that purpose is that there is almost always a light green or blue “halo” which will surround the video subject shot against a green screen or blue screen backdrop. Even with powerful software designed to specifically extract subjects from green screen video, it is sometimes an issue. Of course there are certain “rules” which must be followed when doing the initial video capture. There must be no wrinkles in the backdrop which tends to change the uniformity of the shading, add shadows and make extraction much more problematic. Then the subject of the extraction must be sufficiently far away from the backdrop so that the green or blue shade doesn’t cast unwanted color reflections and of course the backdrop must be properly lit to create uniformity of color making it much easier to extract. With all of the above done properly, chroma extraction with PTE will still usually leave a slight green “halo” around the subject. After extraction, placing the subject on a backdrop of complementary color (such as green) will de-emphasize this issue, but in some cases, especially with amenable subjects, there is another way to proceed. Below are some screen snaps to show one way of dealing with this issue in PTE with amenable subjects. I created the running horse for chroma key extraction using Particle Illusion, a software widely used by the movie industry for special effects. Original – notice light green “halo” around the horse Conversion to Sepia – changes color of horse to a nice chestnut hue Conversion to grayscale – very close to original except no visible green halo! So essentially, what has been done is that in PTE the chroma key extracted video has been converted to either sepia or grayscale. In the case of amenable subjects this effectively removes the green halo without resorting to use of green backdrops to “blend” the halo. Obviously, if the chroma key extraction is of a video subject not amenable to this, it will not help, but in many cases the subject may already be of a more or less monochrome shade and the color adjustment feature of PicturesToExe can be put to optimal use. Lin

Hi Peter, To a degree that's true, but if you watch the video carefully you will see identical areas which are before stabilization and after stabilization and the stabilized views lose their sharpness. You can try it for yourself with a free trial of Mercalli or other stabilization software. I use Mercalli and Warp stabilization with Adobe Aftereffects and it really doesn't matter which - if you have significant stabilization the pixel sharpness is adversely affected by the stabilization algorithms, there is no way around this. It's especially evident if you are watching on a high resolution and large display. I use a 30" 2560 x 1600 display for editing video and the before and after stabilization versions are significantly different with the stabilized versions losing the crispness. As I said, sometimes it's unimportant and sometimes not depending on subject and background. Run them simultaneously - put the before and after entire videos in PTE on the same slide and watch them simultaneously and you will immediately see the difference. Fortunately with PTE we can sharpen the stabilized version and bring it close to the original in many cases... Below is a screen capture to demonstrate this at essentially the identical point in the two videos. See the red arrows... Best regards, Lin

Hi Gary, Yes, the "fish eye" is really not true "fish eye" with the GoPro, it's just extreme wide angle distortion which, for example, makes tall buildings on the right and left extreme appear to "tilt" or "lean" in toward the center of the image. Distortion correction with a video corrects this appearance then allows you to "crop" the areas of edge along with some top and or bottom which are necessarily left after the fix so you can retain the aspect ratio if you like. So the "fisheye" correction is indeed a distortion correction algorithm. The PD software actually adjusts on all the axis as Mercalli, but it's "automatic" and you have no control over it. With the more expensive software you can pick and choose the type and degree of correction which gives you more flexibility but at the greater expense. Here's an example from what is probably the best distortion correction software available for still images, DXO ViewPoint 2. Best regards, Lin

Hi Gary, Actually, for your GoPro, ProDrenalin probably is the better choice, but it actually doesn't have nearly all the bells and whistles of Mercalli for doing stabilization, rolling shutter correction, etc. What PD does do that Mercalli doesn't as Aginum says is correct for the normal distortion of your super wide angle lens in the GoPro. The difference in image stabilization is that ProDrenalin has only basic stabilization while Mercalli does multi-axis stabilization. Best regards, Lin

Hi Aginum, I may have accidentally deleted part of your post - could you repost your 11:35 pm information it is missing. If you don't have it I'll try to get Igor to recover it. Sorry if I have overwritten - that sometimes happens when I copy/paste for some reason... Best regards, Lin

Nice job Jeff! I loved the old railway and deserted machine show with the big ANC lathe. Amazing how, in the old days, most every part of the trains were built by the railways on-site. Great choice of background music too. My only change would be to add a couple seconds or a black slide at the end to let the music end less abruptly. I too believe black and white was the best choice for this - give it the antiquity feel it deserves. Best regards, Lin

Hi Jeff, Thanks for checking it out... It's looking like it will run on most systems smoothly which is great news... Best regards, Lin

Hi Mur, I created an mp4 at 1280x720 resolution then converted it to avi with PTE's conversion. It's not a good as the exe, but I think you will be able to see it on your system. The link is below - about 480 meg zipped avi - I'm including the link in the original post... http://www.lin-evans.org/pte/whatcanidozippedavi.zip Best regards, Lin

Wouldn't this preclude shows which are interactive? Best regards, Lin