"As a professional wedding photographer, I'm always thinking about new ways to please my clients and market my business. Slide shows have proven to be an invaluable tool for doing both, and now they are the cornerstone of my business. If you're a professional photographer, ProShow Producer's professional-grade features are indispensable tools for growing your business."
-Mark Ridout, professional wedding photographer
Weddings are all about the details
Every part of the wedding, from the invitations to the dress to the flowers, is special to the bride. When I shoot a wedding, I make it a point to take the time to focus on details. This has always been a priority of mine, but I think about it in a different way now that I am making slide shows. Capturing something special, like the intricate beadwork on the wedding dress, means even more now that I can showcase the images next to more traditional shots in a slide show.
Although there is no "right" way to create a slide show, I follow a general process when I start working in ProShow Producer. There are all sorts of tricks and techniques that I use, more than I could begin to talk about here, but hopefully this will give you an idea of the overall process. It's important to remember that you can save yourself time and come up with some great ideas by keeping slide shows in mind when you're shooting. Think about how you could use different textures and settings in your shows, and, most of all, think about what will matter most to your client.
In the following how-to, I'll create a basic show using ProShow Producer. There are so many features in the software that you could spend hours on one show, but getting started is pretty simple. Where you go from there is up to you.
Step 1: Dragging in images, video, and audio
After I edit the images I want to use, I find the folder I saved them in. ProShow Producer makes thumbnails of all the images, so it's easy to see which ones I want to add. In this case, I'll just add the whole folder from a wedding I shot recently. I'll just click in the File List, press CTRL+A to select all the files, and then I can drag them to the Slide List. This works the same way for videos and audio—you just drag what you want to use into the Slide List. ProShow Producer supports all sorts of file formats, so you can bring in AVIs, MPEGs, and even camera RAW files.
Figure 1: In the File List, files added to your show will have a green checkmark next to them
Step 2: Timing
All the images I added show up in the Slide List now. This next step makes a huge difference in the feel of your show. You can change the slide times and transition times to make the show go as fast or slow as you want. This particular show will be slower paced, so I want all the slide times to change to six seconds. Just click in the slide time box, type a new time, and press ENTER.
Figure 2: Highlight all your slides and type in a desired slide time. Then, press Enter
Step 3: Choosing transitions
ProShow Producer has close to 300 different transitions to pick from. Click on a transition button between two slides and you can look at all of them. If you move the pointer over any of them, you can see a preview in the bottom left. To choose one, click on it. Generally, I use just a handful of these so that they don't distract from my photography. If you pair certain transitions with certain images, you can end up with some neat effects. Here, I used an image of a curtain I shot. Then, I picked the Slide Open – Horizontal transition so it looks like the curtain is opening. When I set the transition time to 15 seconds, the curtain "opens" slowly to show the next slide "behind" the curtain.
Figure 3: You can create special effects in your slide show with transitions
Step 4: Customizing slides
This is where things really get interesting. Double-click on any slide to open Slide Options. Here, you can add captions with motion, edit video and audio, make image adjustments, and so on. One of the main things I use is Motion. You can add motion (pan, zoom, and rotate) to any layer on any slide. The amount of motion you add and how it behaves is up to you, and it's completely customizable. For this particular slide, I am just going to add a subtle pan and zoom. All I have to do in ProShow Producer is set up my Starting and Ending position and the software fills in the middle, creating motion.
Figure 4: You can see the motion path of your image in the starting and ending previews
You can also overlay a border on any slide. For this slide, the image will move, but there will be a still border on top of it. There are borders built in to ProShow Producer, so I'll just open MediaSources in the Folder List and click the Borders folder. The simple black border will work well for this slide, so just drag the border to the slide. Press CTRL when you drag the border so that you add it to the slide.
Figure 5: Built-in borders give shows a polished look
Step 5: Previewing and saving
At any point, you can preview your show to see how it's coming along. In the main window, click the green Play button and the preview will start. If you want to see a full-screen version of what you're working on, right-click on the preview and then click Full Screen Playback. Also, don't forget to save your work. Make saving your work a habit. Though ProShow Producer autosaves every five minutes, I can get a lot done in that amount of time, so I save constantly. You can even press CTRL+S anywhere in the program, anytime you want.
Step 6: Output
When I am through making a slide show, there are generally two ways that I distribute the show: as a DVD and as a Shared Show. ProShow Producer has built-in DVD authoring with all kinds of options, from quality settings and encoding options to creating menus and branding. This saves a lot of time because I don't have to use any other software to create menus or burn DVDs. Clients love watching my slide shows on their TV and they love sharing that experience with their friends and family. Using Share Show output, I can upload any show to the Photodex Web site for free. So, all those people who didn't see the DVD can watch the show online. Some of my shows have been viewed over 9,000 times, which means great FREE marketing for me and a worthwhile service for my clients.
Figure 6: Show Sharing is free on at the Photodex Web site
Mark Ridout is a professional photographer based in Lindsay, Ontario. You can view more of his work at Ridout Photography.
To download a free trial of ProShow Producer or purchase the software, please visit the Photodex Web site.
