Ed Overstreet

Not sure I saved an unsharpened version of that large panorama stitch, if I get around to it I may check that out. Given that JRR had the same issues with the projector on his images, which were quite different from mine, I very much doubt that SX50 problem has anything to do with sharpening. And I never sharpen the sky, whatever else I sharpen (and the tearing/shimming issue we found wasn't specific to the sky, though of course bandng would be. But banding wasn't an issue with any of our tests.)

That's interesting, thanks Colin. I think you've helped me decide what desktop monitor I'm getting whenever my 9-year-old Trinitron CRT finally dies or has dimmed to the point where I can't calibrate correctly any more. I don't think it's going to be an LCD display. Yes they take less space, but my desk has been configured nicely to work around my 19" CRT so as long as I don't go into a much larger size (and I'm quite happy with the 19") I don't see any reason for me to switch to an LCD desktop, and you've just given me a good reason not to switch.

Hi Eric. Interesting question. No I haven't. But I've had many shows projected on the same projector and in the same room over the past few years, all with sharpened images, and I've never seen any shimmering or stuttering on my shows except for that one panorama panning problem that JRR and I have reported elsewhere on this Forum. So I don't think our problem is sharpening-related. I know there is a danger of over-sharpening images; I always base my sharpening for PTE on a visual judgment of the results on my CRT monitor with the slide viewed at 100% magnification. I especially pay attention to fine lines or high-contrast borders in or near the sky (e.g., pesky hydro and telephone wires, when I haven't edited them out of the picture or couldn't) to make sure I don't see any haloing around them, and if I do, to scale back either the amount or the radius of the sharpening. I mention CRT, versus LCD, by the way, because recently JRR and I have noticed that on some shows (the one where I spotted this was one of Peter Cole's sequences) we can see banding in the sky on an LCD monitor that doesn't appear on my CRT monitor but does on my laptop's LCD, using the same video card and resolution. (I've suggested to Jim that he maybe post a new thread on this, since he discovered the problem and I confirmed it, but he and Gwen are out of town for a few more weeks so it may be a little while yet.) I almost never edit photos or display PTE shows on my laptop's LCD monitor, I use my CRT exclusively except on the very rare occasion when I'm traveling with my laptop, or if there's a power outage at home and I feel the need to do something that I can finish while the laptop battery still has a charge.) I also noted on the thread about JPG sizing and compression that banding that others on the thread were seeing in an example on their (presumably LCD) monitors, I wasn't seeing on my CRT monitor. I'm not sure why this would be, and this is rather off-topic but not really, as it might also affect one's perception of sharpening. Next time I do some sharpening of new images (I'm currently up to my elbows in old images) I'll make a point of comparing the results on my CRT monitor (hooked to my laptop) and the laptop's LCD monitor to see if that matters. If it does, I'll try to remember to post something about what I find on this thread.

an update and a word to the wise, based on some more experience with this software I still love the software, but ... on my system (four years old, 1 GB RAM, no dual-core anything) this software is a real memory hog. The RAM monitor shows me that even with nothing else running, this program ties up about 99% of available RAM while it's executing. Trust me, you don't want to be multi-tasking with any photo-editing or photo-browsing software, especially any of Adobe's memory pigs, when running the Auto-Painter. Something will likely crash, in my experience almost certainly the Adobe stuff -- which in my experience and my system has been flaky at the best of times. Auto-painter hasn't crashed on me once, but it's ground Adobe Bridge to a crawl and then to its knees several times today. Close other software before running this application, unless you have a lot more RAM than I do. Even then, test it carefully with a memory monitor before trying to run it or something else in the background, particularly anything that's doing something you care about I could post all the details about my system, but there are so many variables that can affect this sort of thing there probably isn't any point. Just tread cautiously and gently if you're thinking of multi-tasking with this software. It won't crash, I think, at least so far it hasn't on my system, but it will sure clobber other stuff At least Adobe CS3 stuff. Which is unstable on my system at the best of times. Haven't tried multi-tasking with PTE in the background behind this yet, don't know if that would be a problem. In particular, don't start the auto-painter running on a photo, then swap out and try to do something else in other software with auto-painter running in the background. It's tempting, especially if you leave the "continuous" button off and let it run with the default number of brush strokes, because it can take a few minutes to finish. It's better to be patient, or to go make a snack and come back to the computer, than to multi-task while this runs. At least on my system that is true.

Again different strokes for different folks. For PTE I do most of my slide editing directly on the Nikon NEF (RAW) file in Nikon Capture NX2. After resizing the image accordingly and setting the view at 100% magnification, I use Capture's excellent Unsharp Mask, generally with the Amount set for 50%, the Radius between 3 and 5 depending on how the image looks on the screen when I play with it, and the Threshold at 0. For images in which I'm concerned that sharpening might increase noise in solid-colour areas (with high ISOs), I use the nifty little trick (I forget now where I got this trick, not I think from Nikon) of using the High Pass Filter with the mode switch set for Luminance/Chrominance, the Chrominance set at 0% and Luminance at 100%, and the blend mode set for Overlay, then adjust the radius to taste. This does an excellent job of sharpening only the edges without affecting those solid areas that would be prone to noise increases under sharpening. (By the way the same trick doesn't seem to work with Photoshop's High Pass filter, I've tried it and the results I got were awful.) The other choice in Capture NX2 for protecting solid areas from noisy sharpening is to use the U-point controls with the Unsharp Mask selectively to protect those areas. However I find the High Pass approach is faster and easier to use, if you want to limit sharpening to edges and protect pixels in broader areas. (You can also play with the Unsharp Mask's Threshold slider to try to limit sharpening to edges, but I often find that increasing the Threshold tends to reduce the edge sharpening more than I'd prefer in many images. But this is another thing to try if nothing else seems to work the way you prefer.) When I edit in Photoshop (usually only for prints), I always sharpen with Nik Sharpener Pro 3, following the manual's advice. For slides for PTE, when I (rarely) edit those in Photoshop, I use NSP3's "Display" algorithm, which works great for monitor or projection displays. (I verified with Nik tech support that Display is what they recommend for images intended for projection). BTW I find NSP3 does SUPERB sharpening for prints, enabling me to judge with the on-screen proof mode what to use for printing -- I find this works MUCH better for me than Photoshop's Unsharp Mask, and the interface and decisions you make for printing are logical, simple and user-friendly. You also have access to the U-point selection tools in the filter, if you feel the need to protect specific areas of the photo from sharpening. And NSP3 comes in editions for Lightroom and Aperture as well as Photoshop, but not alas for Capture NX2 (I've suggested this to them) which is why I do all my print editing in Photoshop even though I do almost all slide editing in Capture -- for the sharpening. Always resize the image for whatever pixel dimensions you'll use for your final output before sharpening with any tool, not after. (I make the same recommendation for noise reduction on an image, even though I know lots of supposed experts disagree with me on this. Noise reduction and sharpening always affect each other and involve a trade-off to the photographer's taste, and the results of the appearance of the trade off very much depend on the image resolution/pixel dimensions, if you're making that judgment visually on the monitor I think it is stupid to argue that noise reduction should be done before, rather than after, resizing, as I've seen some writers recommend. But, thank God, I'm not them and they aren't me, again different strokes for different folks. As always, you will get a range of opinions and advice, and in almost everything in photography there is never a single "right" or "wrong" solution to any technical or artistic issue, IMO. For whatever it's worth, these are my views, feel free to use or ignore at will

THANK YOU FOR THIS TIP, MARY! One of my favourite tricks in some of my AV shows is to morph an image into a canvas on which I tile other images. In the past, I've usually created the canvas with a 50-pixel Gaussian Blur on the original image, layered in Photoshop above a black background and fading the opacity to darken the image so it doesn't compete with the images I'm about to tile above it. Auto Painter gives me some MUCH more interesting options for a background canvas than Gaussian Blur (as well as providing some options for presenting "paintings" of images in their own right as the main image). Love it. I can see this could become a spiralling black hole for my time if I let it, though, must remember to ration my time with this software Thanks again for the tip. Neat software, reasonable price. Love the option to save the result as a layered PSD image for further tweaking. Just in time for a big project I'm starting, where I'm going to need a lot of textured canvases. And this is such a great tool for someone like me who nearly failed Grade Seven art class due to his lack of ability to work a brush or pencil; I hate using brush tools in photo-editing software except for very mundane clean-up operations. Being able simply to pick a template, click "start" and then click "stop" when I see something I like, then play with opacity and blend modes in the layer in Photoshop, is a wonderful tool for a paintbrush-challenged failed painter like me. Love it love it love it.

Interesting question, Dave. I guess the honest answer is probably part-inertia (on my part), partly also that it arguably doesn't much matter. The difference between 1050 high and 1080 high, at least, is trivial and wouldn't make any noticeable difference. Even 1200 high is only slightly more than 10% greater (linear) resolution, which I don't think is going to be noticeable on viewing or for the system overhead to do the up-sampling on the fly. My trusty Edmund Scientific Company lens resolving power chart, which I've used for literally decades to test all my cameras and lenses for resolution (based on a 1950s USAF chart for reconaissance cameras) has steps of 10-12% increments in resolution (depending on where you are in the chart), and while those differences are visible at 300% magnification on a monitor, at 100% magnification I find it's pretty hard, at least for my aging eyes, to see a 10-12% resolution difference. Ditto on a print. Which is why I don't get too concerned most of the time about the tech tests on different manufacturers' lenses that get all excited about 10% differences in line pairs per mm ... At some point I'll probably eventually start creating JPGs at a somewhat larger height, but even the jump from 1050 to 1200 isn't nearly as big, especially in percentage terms, as my last jump from 768 to 1050 and certainly from 600 to 1050. My own workflow involves creating JPGs immediately after editing the NEF file in NX2, then eventually retrieving the JPGs for an AV show, rather than going back later to the NEF and generating the JPGs a year or two later. So as long as that's my workflow and until I see a compelling reason to change it, I'll stick with a standard JPG size of 1050 high until display devices get significantly higher than that (and as I mention above, I don't consider 1200 high enough of an increment yet to get concerned, unlike what I faced a few years ago going from 600 or 768 to 1050. Mind you, it is pretty agonizing this weekend looking at 600x400 images and trying to figure how to integrate them into a show with 1400x1050 images without the tedium of re-scanning old slides, if I can ever find them. (The newer 600x400s were from NEFs and I am easily able to resize the NEFs for those slides I care about, but my old film-slide collection is another long, sad story I'd prefer not to read ) Digital photos are a heck of a lot easier to catalogue and retrieve than 35mm slides, at least the way I stored the things back when I still was shooting them ... Food for thought, maybe I'll think about upscaling the size for the next big chunk of files from our next trip, since I'm finally caught up on all my AV projects at the moment (from images shot before this year). It's all pretty arbitrary at the end of the day, as is the 4:3 vs 3:2 debate, which is totally driven by arbitrary industrial-standarization decisions made by goodness-knows-who and inflicted on the rest of us . But the issue of aspect ratio (something I refuse to get excited about, generally ignore, given my proclivity to crop my images however it makes sense to me to crop them, and then work around a way to display them reasonably well) is another horse we've all flogged to death on other threads ... Hence my comment about who serves what and why, and my refusal to let any technician or judge lecture to me about why I HAVE to use a specific aspect ratio or a specific file size. I use what looks reasonable to me and works into my current workflow and work preferences comfortably. My Dad took some marvelous snaps of my sisters and me as we grew up, on 2.25x2.25 film through a pretty primitive (by today's standards) camera lens, the negs and prints can't begin to stand up to what my D200 and D90 can produce, but I wouldn't trade one of those snaps for my entire photo collection if I had to. There's a lot more to photography, and to decisions about which photos you keep and which you don't, than technical minutiae. At least in my opinion. (As I tell some club judges who sneer sometimes at "snapshots," which of your photos do you REALLY think people 200 years from now are still going to be looking at -- given that probably for 99% of us only our direct descendants are going to be interested in our photos. I know which of my Dad's pix I kept and which I tossed in the landfill ... Sobering and humbling thought, really ...) But I guess I digress. Must come with the onrushing onset of the big 65.

Forgive me for maybe muddying the waters on this issue, and perhaps I don't understand entirely how the "fixed size of slide" feature works, in which case I will stand to be corrected. But here goes. Some of us (me in particular) produce EXE shows not only for projection but also to view on our monitors or to share with others whose display devices may vary in resolution. Some of that subset of producers (me also) don't prefer to make multiple versions of the same show, at different resolutions. So what I do is create a show at 1400x1050 (which is what my club's current projector can handle), but my shows all have the "fixed size of slide" box ticked OFF and the display set for Fullscreen. It is my understanding that if I do this, my show automatically resizes (up or down) to fit whatever display (projector or monitor) it is currently running on. If, on the other hand, (and here is where I may stand to be corrected) I were to use "fixed size of slide" and produce a show at 1400x1050 which I, or a friend or family member, decide for whatever reason (most likely limitations of their equipment) to display at 1024x768 or even 800x600, my show is going to display enlarged beyond the dimensions of that person's screen, not a very tempting option for me as a producer. So my preference is to create all my shows at what I think is a reasonable size (1400x1050, which certainly looks fine when up-scaled to 1600x1200 on my CRT monitor) but never using "fixed size of slide" as a project option, keeping that box ticked OFF -- so that when showing on someone else's equipment -- especially at a smaller screen resolution -- the show will look "normal" and not be cropped. Also when displayed at a larger resolution, the show will automatically up-sample on playback, fill the screen, and still look reasonably good (assuming the difference in resolution between the original show and the playback device isn't too extreme). If I am using PNG or smaller-scaled JPGs tiled on a canvas in my show, then I believe my options are to scale them to taste in O&A (in which case presumbly they'll resize automatically on playback as needed) OR if I want to be really safe, I'll do all tiling in Photoshop on a 1400x1050 canvas and insert JPG copies of the canvas into my main timeline (granted, this excludes the possibility of animating the tiled objects, but generally that isn't a big concern for me as I don't use pan or zoom all that much, and almost never with tiled objects). So for me, the "fixed size of slide" option is something I am never tempted to use. And for the record, I've never seen a 1024x768 projection of a 1400x1050 show, nor a 1400x1050 projection of a 1024x768 show, that bothered me, when taking this "fixed-size-of-slide turned OFF" approach. I am presently working on a couple of retrospective shows, drawing on some images that I created at 600x400 some years ago when the software and hardware I was using were much more limiting than what I have today, images for which I can't find the original captures or un-resized scans and for which I either can't find the original slides nor want to go through the agony of re-scanning those slides I can locate. Those 600x400 or 600x450 slides (mingled with my now-standard 1400x1050 JPGs) I've decided to tile into my show, using either the O&A or the Photoshop-canvas approach, as seems most appropriate and easiest for me. This is preferable IMO than having PTE up-scale my 600x450 slides to 1400x1050 slides; I've tested that, and the 600x450 images start to look pretty soft and sometimes even a bit pixilated on display. But tiled in Photoshop or O&A more-or-less proportionately relative to the 1400x1050 images with/over which they display, they look fine. (I hope this isn't worded too unclearly.) Different strokes for different folks, I guess, but unless I seriously mis-understand how PTE works, there can be some drawbacks to using "fixed size of slide" if you either don't know what display resolution will be used to view your show or intend your show to be used by more than one viewer, where you know or suspect that those viewers don't all use display devices at the same resolution. So my advice to our club members who ask for it has been, "size your images to fit on a 1400x1050 screen or canvas and set Project Options in PTE at "fullscreen" with the "fixed size of slide" box ticked OFF. Unless you want to start producing multiple sizes of your shows (which means multiple sizes of your JPGs), which is more work and tedium than even a retired person like me is remotely interested in getting into Also the approach avoids the very real financial and technology-overload concerns that Eric has voiced and that I share with him. Even without being on a pension, and especially being on a pension, there comes a time when I tire of feeling, or being told, that I have to buy the latest and greatest techology (whether computer, camera, or projector) every year or two. At some point most of us are going to draw a line and say "this is good enough for me, I'm not upgrading any more, it just isn't worth it, and I'm tired of subsidizing Nikon, Canon, Panasonic etc. at the expense of other uses for my limited funds." An option that I'd be very tempted to suggest to competition organizers is to provide competitors the option of telling the organizers what resolution they want used for their shows, and re-setting the display resolution during the event as requested during the schedule of shows. It doesn't take that long to do and isn't all that disruptive, especially if you have enough shows at different resolutions to justify grouping them before/after a break. One might argue that differences in resolution might disadvantage some entries, but I've heard that argument made in print competitions where 5x7 and 8x10 prints are up against 11x14 prints, and in my experience a great photo (or great AV show) is going to blow out the competition no matter what size it is, and a weak entry isn't going to be helped by a larger resolution or display size. But then I don't bother entering competitions any more, so it's easy for me to say this ... I have entered a lot and have organized them, though, and I really bridle at being told I have to fit my shows or images into a fixed size. In fact, I'd boycott the bloody event if I were told that ... But again different strokes for different folks. For me the real question is, does the technology exist to serve me, or do I exist to serve the techology? For me that's a rhetorical question.

Fergy, this sounds to me like something you might want to post separately under the "Ideas and Suggestions" part of the PTE Forum as a possible future enhancement, maybe providing a little more explanation, just to make sure Igor doesn't overlook it in this thread. I use a similar technique in Photoshop sometimes to differentiate images that I plan to layer on the screen, also to roughen the edges when I have several images in a sequence where the images vary slightly in aspect ratio (e.g., 15-20 pixels difference in height) and where the blend will produce a border that jumps up and down in a distracting way during a fade-in/out, whereas a wide and feathered edge usually can mask that variation in size without my having to take more radical steps. I agree that the feature you describe would be a nice feature to have in PTE, though maybe not as high a priority as some of the other things listed on the other forum. But why not post it; if it's easy to do, maybe Igor will get to it relatively soon.

Sari, if I understand your original post, you want some text to appear as part of a slide in PTE, but PTE isn't displaying certain characters correctly (e.g., ö if I'm reading my screen correctly). If you are using Photoshop, I can confirm (in Photoshop CS3 and probably other recent versions) that the text tool in Photoshop does correctly display these characters. I can create a file in Photoshop and type in the word "elsö" as a text layer (using any font on my system in conjunction with Windows Character Map as mentioned in my earlier post above), save the result as a JPG, and use that as a slide in a PTE show. Unless you're wanting to animate the text (in the Objects and Animations window in PTE), I don't see any disadvantage to imbedding the text in the slide in Photoshop (or other editing software, if it has a text feature and does display these characters correctly). If you don't want the text to appear superimposed over the image, you can create an expanded canvas around the photo and imbed the text on the portion of the canvas that does not contain the image. Don't know if this meets your needs, but check your photo-editing software and see if you can get it to display your text corrrectly. If it does, and you don't want or need to animate the text, then that's an easy work-around. Personally I never use the text features in PTE, since I don't like animated text and don't otherwise see any need for me to use PTE text features, given that I have that option in Photoshop.

Another option in Windows is to go to Start>All Programs>Accessories>System Tools and select Character Map. In Character Map you can select the appropriate letter, press the Select button then the Copy button which copies the letter into Windows clipboard, then paste it into PTE. Character Map also displays in the lower-right corner of its window the ALT-nnnn code that Lin mentions above. Using Character Map is somewhat clumsy, but it does work. Don't worry about which font you're using in Character Map, when you paste into PTE you'll get the character in whatever font you have active in PTE (or should, at least that's how it works in Photoshop where I use Character Map regularly for accented characters in text layers for title and credit slides).

Go to Project Options>Comments tab. Under that tab, near the bottom, find a blue "insert template" command and click on it. A menu pops up; select either "Picture Name" or "Picture Name (with Extension)" If your slides are already in your slide list, then click the button that says "set for existing slides." There are other choices in that menu; I often use "Slide Number" when I'm working on a show, so that I can preview the show fullscreen and see what slide is displaying. This makes it easy for me to note "problem" slides or transitions for further work. To remove any comment field once you're finished (assuming you don't want these comments to appear in the final show), go to the field beneath the "insert template" line, highlgiht everything in that box, and press the Delete key on your keyboard. Then click on "set for existing slides" which removes the comments from all slides you your show. There are also commands under this tab that let you position the comment on the screen, choose a font, a colour, and a size for the comment display. The user guide explains these features if you can't figure them out by yourself. If you want the file name only to appear with specific slides, you can do this using the Comment control near the top of the screen in PTE 5.6. To the immediate right of that field, click on the little "page" icon and up pops a Text for Current Slide box. Click on the blue line "insert text template" and you get the same menu that you get in Project Options. (Project Options affects the entire show; if you want to set options only for certain slides, you have to use the Comments or Customize Slide buttons) Good luck

My vote would be for the last option (using graphical editor for such conversions) in preference to doubling the loading time for the show. No question in my mind on that point.

In case others missed this (I almost did), Igor fixed this problem in release 5.6.3 posted a few days ago. I finally downloaded it on the weekend and verified yesterday the problem is fixed. Thanks Igor!

To be fair, I re-ran the show using my laptop's 1920x1200 17" LCD monitor. On that screen, I do detect slight evidence of pixellation on the Level 6 slide; the Level 10 and 12 slides look slighlty smoother (and equally smooth) in the blue sky areas. On re-running the show on my CRT (1600x1200 19") monitor, I really can't convince myself there is any difference among the three slides. So I suspect part of the issue is something to do with CRT vs LCD monitors. No idea what that portends for DLP vs LCD projectors. However, the difference I see on the LCD screen is only visible because I'm looking for it. If I were to run on my LCD screen a show filled with Level 6 JPGs I very much doubt I or anyone I know would proclaim "oh my those slides are all pixellated." The trouble with pixel-peeping is that generally differences are only visible side-by-side, and how many AV shows do any of us produce with side-by-side comparisons of variations on the same image, or sequential views of variations as in Jim's show? I remain of the view -- Much Ado About Nothing (with a nod to Xaver)

Thought I should throw in my two-cents' worth on Jim's test show, because my perceptions are obviously different from everyone else's. In viewing the show in my 1600x1200 19" CRT monitor, I can't see any differences anywhere between the three levels of JPG, and in my own tests over the years I've never been convinced that JPG compression matters a darn for AV shows either on my monitor or on our Canon SX50 projector, as long as course you only save the file to JPG once and not multiple times. In fact, to keep the file size down to the website submission limit, I recently submitted for display at our club (on the SX50 at 1400x1050) a highly-detailed Level 1 JPG which looked fine to me on projection, as well as on my monitor. Maybe it's different with LCD monitors, I don't know because I almost never use my laptop monitor. For my eyesight anyway, this JPG-compression-level issue is Much Ado About Very Little Indeed. For the record I generally save my JPGs as Level 8 in Photoshop and at the "Good Balance" level in Nikon Capture NX2 (which is where I do maybe 90% of my editing). But the compression ratio is nothing I ever lose sleep over. I don't see significant pixellation in the skies on Jim's test, I can almost convince myself maybe there's something there on the Level 6 image, but on repeated viewings I no longer see it. And I'm sitting with my face pretty close to the monitor screen. No idea what it looks like to my eyes on projection, as I don't own a projector and haven't seen this test series on one.

Hi John. It will be a couple of days before I'll be able to play with Wink, but will let you know what happens. If you want single frames from your monitor, I suggest using Gadwin Print Screen for that. It's freeware and works great, plus you can capture as many single frames as you wish and direct them to a folder of your choice, so you don't have to keep pasting from the Windows Clipboard after every screen capture, as you'd have to do with the Windows print-screen utility. I suspect (but shouldn't really say until I've tried it) that I'd only use Wink to capture motion (e.g. mouse movement, maybe also voice-over) from the screen but not individual frames. All the screen shots in my recent PTE tutorial document for my club were taken with Gadwin, and it was a joy to work with. I saved the captures as JPGs and later opened them in Photoshop to mark them up and annotate them with arrows, circles and text.

Thanks Stu and John, I'm downloading it and will give it a try. Now if there were some way of integrating a clip from Wink into a PTE show .... something along the lines of my suggestion a while ago on the other part of the forum for a new version of PTE (ability to insert an AVI or MOV clip into a show).

Interesting question, I'd be interested in something like this too. I've been using Gadwin Print Screen for my tutorials on PTE, but it only captures still snapshots of the screen, not a live movie of what's going on. But at least it stores multiple shots in a folder for later access, unlike the Windows screen-capture utility which puts the capture in the Clipboard, which means you only get one shot to work with unless you tediously dump each shot into Photoshop or somewhere else before proceeding with the next shot... I checked the Gadwin web page, they don't seem to have a product that does a live video capture of the screen, unless I'm missing something. I support you could always try a video capture with a camcorder or a compact digital camera (or an SLR if yours is one of the new ones that does AVI or MOV capture), but that is a workaround that produces inferior results, you end up with "waves" (that isn't the right technical term but I'm blocking on the word at the moment) on your image, because the frame rate for the camera and the screen refresh rate aren't in synch.

Just got a personal message from another member via that Forum feature. For whatever reason, I got two email notifications to the same message, both posted to my (ISP not Forum) inbox with the same date/time stamp. I don't know if this a one-off or if there's something wonky in the Invision software that's causing duplicate private-mail notices to be sent, but thought I'd mention this in case anyone else has this experience lately.

Hi again everyone. Inspired by a number of your responses to my original post here, I have prepared a tutorial for members of the AV Group of my photo club (the R.A. Photo Club of Ottawa, Canada) on the subject of “Handling Awkward Transitions between Two Images in PTE 5.6.” That is really the issue which sparked my post on the present thread. This is an issue that has generated a lot of thought and debate in my club and in my own mind over the years, and your comments helped nudge me into organizing and setting down my thoughts on “paper” and in a tutorial show. I am grateful to Peter for pointing out to me the real issue is handling awkward transitions of any sort, of which of course the landscape-to-portrait transition arguably the most awkward and vexing, at least for some of us, but it really only a special case of the larger issue. At Peter’s suggestion, I am posting my reference to my tutorial in the Tutorials and Articles section of the Wnsoft Forums, here: http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index....c=9817&st=0 Please address any comments on the tutorial to that other thread, not to this one. Thanks.

I'd like to second Eric's message. Even a large and relatively-well-heeled camera club like mine can't afford to buy a new projector or other display device every couple of years, on top of other demands from members for studio equipment, darkroom equipment (yes we still have members who shoot film and go into a dark room and play with chemicals!), room and facilities rental fees, etc. Not to mention most individual photographers who can't afford or justify to their spouses and families the expense of any digital projector, never mind one that is state-of-the-art, never mind buy the latest/greatest whatever whenever it is released. We make do with what we have, or try to -- hence concerns by me and others about getting some decent PZR projection out of the projectors that we presently can access and use. We'll certainly bear in mind the need for something better once it's time for replacement (and we have squirreled away the capital budget for it), but until then we need to cope with what we have.

AHA! Or EUREKA! Or whatever Thanks very much Xaver! Boy there are all sorts of neat little touches Igor has packed into this software. Now my only quibble is why isn't this written up somewhere in the user guide? (or maybe it is and I'm blind as a bat, which actually I am without my specs) I think I know the answer to that, writing user guides is a thankless and huge job, as I'm sure Lin and Jeff Evans can tell us in great detail I have to say that the more I work with PTE, and especially after a few months ago when I downloaded the trial version of Pro Show Gold to check out how it handles that SX50 panorama mess, then ran screaming from my computer room after two hours of struggling with the PSG interface, the more impressed I am with PTE (and the less I'm even remotely interested in switching to the competition)

I probably am going to feel silly when I get the answer to this question, but for the life of me I can't find an answer in the user guide nor figure this out on my own, so here goes In the main window of PTE 5.6 in the Timeline View, to the immediate right of the Timed Points button (which is just above the timeline) there is a box showing the start-time of the current transition point highlighted in the timeline. Next to that box is a pair of up/down "spinner" arrows. I had thought/hoped that, once I have highlighted a transition point on the timeline, I could fine-tune the start-time by clicking one of these arrows. But when I highlight a transition point and click either arrow, nothing happens. The transition point doesn't budge, nor does the time displayed in the window change at all. How can I get these "spinner" arrows to work? (Sorry if that's not the "proper" name for them, but that's the best my vocabulary can come up with this afternoon )

Thanks Lin. Returning back to the original topic of the post you and a few others are saying there is no technical limit to doing an entire show in a single O&A window, other than eventual undo/redo-log memory clogging and slowing down the system and risking a crash. Good thing to keep in mind. We (actually I) drifted a wee off topic by getting into the portrait-landscape issue, but not really because (at least from my standpoint) the only reason to try to do the whole show in a single O&A window is to be able to have asymmetrical fades on most or all of the images, and the only compelling reason for THAT, again in my personal opinion, is because you've either gots lots of variations in the image aspect ratios throughout the show or you've got a lot of arguably messy transition blends that might work better with a fade between the images. Though as Colin mentions you can to some extent finesse some of those problems by judicious use of black slides in the main timeline, though doing that repeatedly throughout the show might make some audience members wonder what's happening to the voltage going into the projector Reminds me of an AV night a few years ago when in the middle of someone else's show, and exactly on the beat of the music, the projector bulb suddently blew with a loud "bang." The screen went black of course, and a for a few seconds I thought "what a strange effect to put into the show at this point," until I realized what had happened. It was a much shorter night than we'd planned Interesting discussion, thanks for the contributions to everyone (not to cut anyone off who has another suggestion, of course