Barry Beckham

Edd The one thing you don't say is that for the discerning customer, PSG simply does not work correctly. I tried it again myself only the other day. I took a few images from my Botanical Artistry Slide Show that PTE handles a dream and tried just 3 images from that show. Two were 1920*1200 one was larger for animation. PSG just could not handle the animation at all, so much so that it even interferred with the transitions between the animated image and the static one too. It made the simple fade transition stuttery as well as the animation. Which for me makes it unusable. It seems to me that PSG works OK for many people because it meets their needs. However, once you leave basic behind then it just doesn't do it. I wish it did, so that I could make a few tutorials using PSG, but I can't. Every time I try and make a demo to demonstrate what we are going to do, the demo is awfull and I will not put that sory of work in front of anyone with my name on it. I don't want to appear too defensive of PTE, but the debate of which is best has already been won. Most serious AV enthusiasts gravitate to PTE and the reason is pretty simple, because its the best. PSG asked me to demonstrate for them once at the National Exhibition Centre in the UK, but I just couldn't accept their invitation because I couldn't get their software to work right and it still doesn't.

Peter Yes I have been told this and that beta 2 will solve things, I will remake the two slide shows and repost them for mac users and hopefully the issue is dealt with B

Modern cameras make photography a little easier, but they cannot make the decisions for us, which was the point of the slide show. There must be a few on the forum that feel I am talking a load of twaddle (no change there then) with regard to exposure and what you see is not what you get. To those I would suggest a small experiment. Put a pad and pen in the camera bag and next time your out on a bright sunny day, make a simple sketch of the subject in front of you. Write down what you can see in the shadow areas, the highlight areas and other various parts of the scene. Then take 3 bracketed exposures of that scene. More often then not, when you get any one of the three images on your PC screen they will not match your notes. The detail you could see with your eyes from the shadows will be gone and they may be completely black. Other areas will be very different too. Once we understand and accept there is a gap between what we see and what we can capture, then we can sometimes do something about it while we are still in front of the subject. Not always though as this isn't an exact science. I have found that I can do something it in enough cases to make a significant difference to the quality of my photography. Its rather stating the obvious as the saying goes, but AV is just two things, the A and the V and in my view the V part is squarely in our control. What appears to be an insignificant light area when we look through the viewfider of our camera is often enough in the resulting photograph to drag the image appeal down to the level of a snap, a record shot only. Once we realise and accept that, it makes us far more careful when framing up an image, but if you have a digital SLR you should be adept at exposure compensation and bracketed exposures. Its worth getting that instruction manual out. Dave Thanks for your comments on the images, which although I never said it, makes my point. These are all recent. Any competant photographer can find 12 great images from the last 5 years, but the last few months is a different matter. It makes the point that if you get this right, your success rate climbs sigbnificantly

Not being a Mac user I thought I would pass on this comment received today. I have copied it here becuase the two shows he mentions are the ones that were made with the new beta version using PTE sound, Botanical Artistry was not. Hello friends at Beckham Digitall, I was formerly a PC user but late last year changed over to all Mac and have written you several times before about your great work! Both during our PC time and then when going to Mac. I just downloaded both "Perfect Exposure" and "Everlasting Home" and both played perfectly except the audio in both is missing and thought you would appreciate the feedback about the audio problems. I immediately downloaded and played "Botanical Artistry" for a test and it played perfectly both video and audio. My system is a MacPro Quad 2.93 6GB Ram and is a late 2009 model. Thank you

I think I have been listening to the nonsense spouted by far too many on these issues for years and decided enough was enough. However, understanding exposure and accepting that important fact that what we see is not what we get makes a lot of difference to the standard of our photgraphy. Edd, No problem using the tutorial Geoff. Australia is fine, well into late Autumn now, but today was sunshine and 26c a glorious day

Here is a serious look at Exposure, but also a pop at all those who still whine all the time about image manipulation Top of the page http://www.beckhamdigital.co.uk/freestuffdigslidesw4.htm

I believe they are made of fired clay and they are all set in this fabulous woodloand in the Dandenong ranges of Victoria. It was the music that inspired their use. David P If everyone else is getting it to work, then it tends to point to something on your machine. I think we all have one or two issues like that. I can't use the Healing Brush in Camera Raw without Photoshop Freezing, but I guess others do.

Top of the page for Mac and PC Made enttirely with PTE 6.5 beta 1, no Audacity http://www.beckhamdigital.co.uk/freestuffdigslidesw4.htm

I am not sure to be honest, I have been putting together a presentation and using the beta version for the entire thing including the soundtrack. I just can't play with software, I need a practical project to get my head around it I am sure this will all come out in the wash too, but I did find I needed to do a bit of maths at the end to make it all come together. I am using two tracks, cutting the first back short and crossfading that over 15 seconds to the second track. I found that when I wanted to cut off and fade out track 2 I could not use the overall length of the slide show for that purpose. I had to take the first tracks adjusted length of 3:22 and cut off and fade out the second track after 1:20 seconds or thereabouts, taking into account the time lost in the crossfade. The length of the final show is around 4:42, hope that all makes sense. I am sure all will be well when this is all on the timeline. I would like to be able to put silence at the end of a track though. I don't like the abrupt way some slide shows end and feel you just need a second or two on the blank before the it jumps back to wherever it was launched from, but then I am a fussy bugger.

Sorry I don't see the relavance to Audacity, I was suggesting an idea, which I did not know already existed.

Dave Thanks, I had not picked that up, I tried it with the Offset that I was working on and it doesn't reset that one, but your right it does reset the important ones.

Eric I appreciate that, but it hardly helps here in a beta version of PTE 6.5

Igor This may be premature as I expect what I am about to suggest will be overtaken when the music controls appear on the time line. However, in the PTE work I have done so far, I found I was looking for a reset button in the music editing windows to take the sound file back to default after I had fiddled with it. B

Alien Skin - Snap Art is one of my favourites

Sorry DG I am not sure trying all the different convertors is the best way forward. For a start where do we get all these convertors to try, then how much time do we commit to them. You have to use a chosen piece of software for quite a while before you really have all the evidence to judge it. In my experience we have neither the time, inclination or the analytical mind to do that. Best way forward? Look at images you really admire created by someone else, ask them what they use and try that. Often, especially in the digital world, enthusiasts spend so much time trying out different software that they rarely get time left to make a decent slide show. On a personal note, I like to use Adobe Camera Raw. It is convenient, very powerful and I also love the ability to open images up as smart objects. Smart objects are rather like live text. You can be working on an opened Raw file in Photoshop, decide you want to make a change to the raw settings, double click the layer thumbnail and Camera Raw reopens your image and you can make another change. Bearing in mind of course that you would be working on Raw computer data, so your not making a change to a change. This is great when you have a landscape where the foreground needs a different Raw tweak than the Sky. Photoshop CS 4 added gradients to camera raw so you can apply a sort of graduated filter over any image you produce at any angle. Apply it as a neutral density, or add some colour to your sky. It is superb for landscapes as you can add the intensity to skies to give your images more appeal and impact. CS4 also introduced the Raw adjustment brush so you can lift the tones in a small area such as a face, or dark shadow without affecting all the other settings.

Peter With the greatest respect to DG you cannot get it right in the camera most of the time for a very simple reason. Our camera (no matter how much we paid for it or how much photographgic knowledge we have) cannot capture what we see with our eyes. What you see is not what you get and image manipulation however we come at it, bridges the gap between what we saw with our eyes and what our sensor/film was able to capture. What is, best, Raw or Jpeg? The answer is Raw, every day of the week and twice on Sundays. Using Raw and a little practice your image quality will improve dramatically because we can better balance the tones and contrasts in any image shot in Raw. What do we use to convert the files, well some swear by Lightroom, but I think that rather depends on how fussy you are with your images (ie individual manipulation of the images) and to some degree what your particular work flow is generally like. I was sent a copy of Lightroom when it first came out and I worked hard at it, but I just could not fit it into my own way or working and after some time I came to my senses and removed it from my PC. I found myself struggling to find a use for it, over an above what I was already doing with Photoshop (or Elements) I work every image through Raw individually so for me, Lightroom just didn't suit the way I work. I doubt it is better or worse than Photoshop just different in the workflow. You will hear all sorts of views about what Raw convertor is best, but in my view pick one and stay with it. Once you find your way around you will then get the best from that convertor. Better that, than those who flit from one bit of software to another and NEVER get the best from any of them. Unless someone has extensively tried the many Raw convertors around, how can they really state what is best, but I am told quite often that this is better than that. I have used Adobe Camera Raw for ages because I have always used Photoshop and I love it. In CS4 the power it gives us just blows Jpegs out of the water. Learn to use a Raw convertor effectively and it will elevate the quality of your images to a new level. If your like me, you could be struggling to make a bit of software like Lightroom fit in when it clearly doesn't.

Stop stop stop stop Relax everyone, I do use SRGB and I failed to get my original point accross. Relax guys

Andre You can make colour space as important to your workflow as you like, my point here has been largely missed I think or members are keeping their heads down. A bit of controversy often gets the forum buzzing. . I was trying to say what I meant without offending anyone and that is difficult sometimes. Colour space is the least of the problems that AV enthusiasts have.

Because I consider myself a pretty average person and I certainly don't know all the answers. I am never comfortable with the "Expert" title. It assumes you do have all the answers and ........ ........gulp some experts don't seem to know an awful lot about the software and techniques they are labelled expert in. There are also a large number of ways to do some things, none are right or wrong, just a preferred course. Perhaps you should have asked another question such as who makes the decision on who merits these acolades such as "Expert" ? I am sure it's not the moderators, so I guess it is derived from the number of posts a person makes. If that is right, then what do you think? Does writing a lot makes a person an expert? From a technical standpoint I don't consider myself very strong in that area, be it PTE, Photoshop or any other software. Having said that I don't think that you don't need to be a technical wizard to use modern software, that's what the software developers do for us. I think I can hold my own from a practical use standpoint, but "Expert" just doesn't feel right to me. There are far too many experts if you ask me and over the years (not referring to anyone on this forum) I have leaned that most couldn't find their way out of a paper bag.

Err, let me think............No

Colin All my images are in Adobe RGB, so thats where I must be going wrong

Forgive me for saying this and it is a general statement, but why get bogged down with things like colour space. I say this with all due respect, but there are a 101 other areas that need our collective attention in AV before we get bogged down with this. Colour space has never been the tiniest thought in my head while making a slide show, has it prevented me from doing that. Not a jot Here are two of those 101 that are missed over and over again. Image quality and matching images to music and niether of those will be helped with all the theory in the world about colour space.

I am not a user of Lightroom myself, but I assume it will do much of this for you, but don't disregard manual sizing of images. It does allow you to take strategic parts of images and that can be an advantage sometimes

Claudia You need to avoid using 5mb files in a slide show. We don't need high resolution for slide show images, but we do need to retain quality. If your making your slide shows to fit your monitor for example, lets assume that monitor runs at a 16:10 format using a resolution of 1920*1200 pixels. You make your images all that size and this is how you do that. Open the PSD images into Photoshop or Elements and select the crop tool. In the options at the top of the screen enter the resolution you want. In this example 1920px for the width and 1200px for the height. (don't forget the PX) Click and drag the crop shape to determine what part of the image you want to show, hit the enter key or the tick to complete that. You may want to add a little extra sharpness in your images after cropping. Now save your image as a Jpeg file and use level 6. Level 6 is the default setting and is a great balance between size and quality. You will hear lots of nonsense talked about this compression setting with people suggesting you will lose quality. Ignore them and judge for yourself. You will find it is just right abd I have been doing that for years. Why can we get away with images in our slide show that would be considered low resolution for any print we would want to make? Because slide show images will not be enlarged and we view them in a similer way as we do web images, as they are presented. In addition they are only on screen for a few seconds. If and when you want to add animation to an image, lets say add a delicate pan, then you can create a larger image for the one image you want to pan. Try 2300px for the width and 1200px for the height. We don't need to add extra height if our intention is to pan. If we wish to zoom, then we will need extra pixels on the width and the height. I did write something about this on my web site, that might be of help http://www.beckhamdigital.co.uk/audiovisual/images/image%20%20size.htm

Nice to see your fixing the size of the slides to make sure your images don't lose quality on a higher resolution monitor. I seem to recall you becoming quite upset when I first suggested this. Nice when a plan comes together isn't it