Create a Favorites Category for Your Slide Styles in ProShow

Slide styles are great for adding quick effects to your photos and videos in ProShow. Chances are you have a group of favorites you tend to use again and again. Instead of searching for them each time you’d like to use them, make a Favorites category and group all your top effects in one place. Here’s how to do it!

1. Open ProShow Gold or ProShow Producer and click on the FX button in the top toolbar.
2. In the FX dialog, you’ll see all your installed Slide Styles. Select your favorite effects (for multiple selection hit CTRL while clicking) and then click the Categorize button towards the bottom of the window.
3. Click the ‘Add’ button and type in a name for the new category you’re adding. ‘My Top Ten’ or ‘My Favorite Styles’ will work great.

   

4. Then hit Apply and the slide styles you selected will be added to your new category. You can always go in and add more slide styles to your new category at anytime. Just use the steps mentioned above.
5. Now, go to the Slide Styles dialog and you’ll see your new category. Click on it to quickly access all slide styles you’ve categorized there.

We hope this helps you keep your effects more organized and easily accessible!

Quick Sync Your Slides and Music in ProShow

Learn how to perform a quick sync to match your slides and audio to end at the same time in both ProShow Gold and ProShow Producer. A quick sync will automatically adjust the length your slide times and transition times so that they end simultaneously with your soundtrack. You can do this to all the slides in your show or just a selection of slides. Syncing your audio is easy to do with ProShow, watch the video to follow along!

Fun with Adjustment Layers: Create an Ink Drawing

ProShow Producer’s adjustment layers work like a camera filter. For instance, if you place an amber filter on a camera lens, the scene in front of the camera turns amber. If you add a fog filter on top of the amber filter, the scene has amber fog. You can do this in your ProShow Producer slideshows with adjustment layers, but you can also create effects that camera filters never dreamed of. For instance, a pen and ink drawing.

Create an Ink Drawing in ProShow Producer

1. Add a photo to your slide list to create a new slide.
2. Double click on the slide to open Slide Options.
3. On the layers list on the left-hand side, click on the [+] button, then choose Add Adjustment Layer > Add Solid Color. Click OK to accept the solid white color.

   

4. Click on the Adjustments tab at the top of Slide Options.
5. While the solid color layer is selected in the layers list, click in the Colorize checkbox for instant black-and-white.
6. Now it’s time to get extreme by changing these settings. In the Adjustment settings dialog, change the following:
   • White Point 100%
   • Black Point 0%.
   • Sharpen 100%.
   • Contrast 100%
7. Even more extreme: Select the photo layer in the layers list, then set Sharpen to at least 70%. (You’re sharpening the sharpening!)
8. If you’d like, select the white adjustment layer and choose any color you want in Colorize to change the color of your ‘ink drawing’ creation. After all, ink isn’t always black.

   

9. As a finishing touch, select the photo layer and apply a white outline sized at 5 to give your pen-and-ink drawing a border.

   

A nice use of this effect is to create a pen-and-ink drawing in one slide, place the original photo in the next slide, and then fade from the first into the second.

Time to play with your new toy! Try anything and everything you can think of to change both an adjustment layer and a photo layer. If it knocks your socks off, save it as a style.

Today’s guest post is from Barbara Coultry, owner of The Frame Locker, ProShowThink, and The Playground. Learn more about controlling adjustment layers on Barbara’s blog.

Barbara is also a guest contributor to Secrets of ProShow Experts by Paul Schmidt.

Show of the Week: Kick-Off to the Spring 2013 Soccer Season

This week’s spotlighted video comes from Janice Harrison. We love the way she combined short video clips with action shots to create this fun video for the Jackson Fireballs youth soccer team. The use of the Fire + Action Arrows effects from Transition Pack 2 help add punch to her video!

“I just recently upgraded from Microsoft Movie Maker which was so limited to ProShow Gold in combination with Transition Pack, Volume 2. Love the program, looks so professional and so easy to use. What a fun way to document season after season and provide an archive for the boys to look back at the progress and growth they all have made” – Janice

Managing Color Workflow in ProShow

Every monitor and television is different. What looks like pure, rich blue on one screen may look like an odd shade of purple on another. These differences are caused by the settings for the individual screens. Using color profiles can help prevent this.

Both ProShow Producer and ProShow Web are equipped with color management tools to provide you with the most accurate color possible in your slideshows. Photographer David Cardinal explains how to tame color in your ProShow slideshows in this informative article on the DataColor Sypder blog. Click here to read >>

5 Ways to Wow Your Wedding Clients

Wedding season is right around the corner! We reached out to a handful of seasoned pros and asked them to share what they do to go the extra mile and really ‘wow’ their wedding clients. Read their advice below!

1. Be More Than Just Photographers

One of the ways we wow our wedding couples is to just do all the little things better, not just be photographers. We show them that we really want their day to be the best ever. That means being there for them when things don’t go as planned. Maybe the groom could use a hand with cuff links or his tie. Maybe the cake table doesn’t have dishes and forks when it’s time to cut. Maybe the bouquets could use water when they are placed at the wedding party table. Maybe we nudge the DJ to get things going when we sense the guests are getting bored. It’s all the little things that add up. The better the wedding, the better our pictures will look. As photographers, we’ve seen lots of weddings, we know when it’s time to step in and give a hand. – Stacey Chance, Discovery Bay Studios Wedding Photography

2. Under Promise and Over Deliver

Brides are extremely excited about the work and anxious for everything. The worse thing you can do is promise something and not deliver on time. For example, we like to post a sneak peek on Facebook shortly after the wedding but when the bride’s asks about it, we always say it should be a few weeks after the event. Usually, it’s a few days! That’s the same for delivery of the proof set, products, you name it! It’s not a matter of lying or making up things – be realistic about all of the things that could go wrong with your business (or god forbid your personal life) and take that into account before making promises! – Steven Somfalvi, Artage Pictures

3. Surprise Them

Similar to under promising and over delivering, always have some surprises ready for your client. It definitely enhances their experience with your studio and it reconfirms that they are important to you. It can be a free print, product upgrade – really anything. We advertise in a national magazine and they send us a box of them to hand out. Every bride who comes through the door gets one and they just love it! – Steven Somfalvi, Artage Pictures

4. Create Excitement at the Reception

We produce same-day slideshows at every wedding. It’s a total surprise to the couple. The bride, groom and their guests are totally floored and I’ve booked weddings of bridal party members because of them. I use ProShow Producer to output to MP4 on to a flash drive and loop it on an LCD flat screen TV at the reception. – Joe Pulcinella Photography

5. Be Passionate

My secret to wowing the bride and groom and the complete wedding party is being passionate about the wedding day. To me, a wedding day is the most important day in a couple’s life, just after giving birth to their child. I want the experience to be memorable. Quality of photography is very important to bring to the wedding, but your personality is the secret to making the day more memorable. I never demand anything from the wedding. I work with what I got and I make the magic happen. Ego and attitude should never be part of a wedding photographer’s personality. – David Zumaya, Weddings at California

What do you do to wow your clients? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below!

Wedding Video: Yasmin and Kris

Photographer Mark Ridout shares his latest video on our blog today featuring a destination wedding set on the beautiful banks of Algarve, Portugal. Mark created the video in ProShow Web, then opened it in Producer, tweaked a few final slides and uploaded to Vimeo from within software.

Love the song choice? We do too! It was licensed from our friends at SongFreedom, a music licensing company that makes it easy to license real music for your video slideshows. Their catalog features legendary artists like Frank Sinatra and Etta James, to more contemporary artists like Jason Mraz and Train.

Their licensing runs $34.99/song for a ‘Standard License’ which covers wedding videos, senior slideshows, engagement shows, anniversary shows and so on. You can read their licensing FAQs here for more details: https://www.songfreedom.com/FAQs

We’re giving away a free song!

Comment on this post to win a free song from the kind folks at SongFreedom! We’ll pick one winner and announce on Monday!

WINNER UPDATE: Congrats to Sally Keena! You’ve won the free song! You’ll be hearing from a rep soon.