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Page 3 of 8  Make a Slide Showby Dave Willis Whether putting together a professional showcase of your work or just sharing with family and friends, slideshows are finally fun, and not just for the presenter. Powerful editing tools can give your slideshow the visual and auditory feel of a movie, with stunning effects and a soundtrack of your own making. Preview options make customization as you go a snap, and with that kind of instant review, it’s next to impossible to make mistakes, which means no more upside-down, backward images hopelessly out of sync with the music. In order to avoid yawns from the audience, make sure to use only your best material of sharp and perfectly exposed images. Take the time to play back your slideshow with different effects and transitions. Pay attention to the feel and flow of the images, giving consideration to colors, mood and themes that will naturally link one image to the next. Try not to sandwich bright images with dark ones, because this kind of harsh contrast can be sobering for your audience. And remember, too long is too long, no matter how amazing your images may be. Watch overkill in every sense of the word, from length to effects. Simpler is often better. Choose your music meticulously, too. Audio is as important as the visuals themselves. Again, pay close attention to the mood, tempo and style of the music, making sure it matches the content of your photos. Many slideshow programs offer automatic synchronization with music, but you can take the process one step further and alternate timing and duration of the images to follow the feel and swell of your soundtrack. And it may be tempting to make your images into music videos of your favorite songs, which is fine for personal use, but watch out for the long arms of copyright law when doing public presentations. Finally, decide on what you’re ultimately going to do with your slideshow and size images accordingly. Slideshows can be shared in a variety of ways, through CDs or DVDs, e-mail or online through photo-sharing Websites like Flickr.com. When sharing on the Web or through e-mail, large file sizes can cause problems in playback or upload. Resize the images in your show to the optimal resolution of your final display, whether it be computer monitor, projector or television. With most slideshow programs going for well under $100, software is an affordable way to boost your presentation power. Programs such as Photodex ProShow Gold 3.0 (www.photodex.com) or Ulead’s CD & DVD PictureShow 4 (www.ulead.com) can add motion effects, music options, transitions, numerous fonts, voiceovers and narrations. You can set transition times, dissolves, and color and size options, or, if you want fast plug-in and play, programs often include templates for predesigned, pre-edited presentations. Many photo-processing programs like Adobe Photoshop Elements (www.adobe.com) have slideshow capabilities built in, though usually with fewer options, effects and transitions than dedicated slideshow software. For Macs, iPhoto offers simple slideshow construction in only a few clicks. iPhoto also offers the Ken Burns Effect for documentary-style panning and zooming across images. Apple’s bigger gun, Aperture, builds on iPhoto for even more transition and effects, and both will automatically synchronize with songs, even directly from your iTunes library. If you want to take one more step and play all of this wirelessly on your TV, then Apple also streams content through its multimedia player, the Apple TV.   |
