Need to switch from 35mm slides to Powerpoint...software suggestions?
 

We give a half dozen or so lectures a year.( across the country...hence the travel- tie in) We have always used 35mm slides in a carousel to show images as we lecture. Our industry ( gardens) is one of the last strongholds of this medium. Well... we are beginning to see the "light" and many are switching over to powerpoint presentations.

I have been told that PhotoShop is the best software for putting together these powerpoint image only picture shows. I don't think I can afford Photoshop unless there is a mini-version without all the bells and whistles....

On the other hand I have been told that MS Powerpoint is not a very good program ( easily crashes the computer was one comment) and Photoshop was the way to go....


Our presentaion would be a simple photo "slide" show ....no graphics or sound. (At least until we get our feet wet in this new medium)

Any thoughts?

Thanks.

Photoshop is a photo editing program. It's very much overkill if you just want to run a slide show. Photoshop's real utility is as a digital dark room, and you may find it useful for altering and enhancing your images, but there are plenty of other programs that will display them in a slide show just fine, and for basic cropping/enhacing, etc., Photoshop is still overkill.

Powerpoint is the name of a Microsoft product that is designed for giving presentations. It allows you to incorporate photos and graphics, but is mainly focused on text and slide layout. It too is overkill if you just want to display a series of photos.

What you need is a simple photo organizer with a slideshow function, of which there are dozens of decent free (or inexpensive) programs. Apple's iPhoto (for Mac only) or Google's Picasa (for Windows only) should fit the bill. Both are free. Those programs are focused on organizing your pictures, not on editing them (although they do include some basic, easy-to-use editing features).

If you find those programs insufficient for your needs, Adobe also sells a couple of stripped-down versions of Photoshop that would do what you want. Photoshop Album is $50 retail and Photoshop Elements is $100. Both are probably available for discoutns, or bundled with many scanners.

But my guess is that iPhoto or Picasa will do the trick just fine.

One thing I recommend is having your existing slides professionally scanned by someone with a good slide scanner. The cheap flatbed scanners out there that come with slide-scanning adapters can't compete with the quality you get from a professional-grade slide scanner. Once you've scanned your slides, you can take future photos with a digital camera and you won't have to worry about scanning yourself.

Some links:

Picasa (Win): http://picasa.google.com/
iPhoto (Mac): http://www.apple.com/ilife/iphoto/
Photoshop Elements for Mac: http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopelmac/
Photoshop Elements for Win: http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopelwin/
Photoshop Album (Win only): http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopalbum/

Photoshop is overkill for most people (in both budget and features).

Everybody uses PowerPoint. As much as I hate M$, you should use PowerPoint. It's pretty easy to use. You can use it together with PhotoShop (or another image editing program).

If "no graphics" means no pictures, then you don't want PhotoShop. But you want "image only"???

How did you use 35mm slides? What if you needed to change a slide 5 minutes before the presentation? :D

We used the 35mm slides in a carousel. It was thought that in our 'industry" the 35mm slides gave us better color saturation and true color of the plants we talked about.. We did not make any last minute changes....

I actually have picasa on my computer...I need to look at it a little more carefully.

Open Office Impress is a free alternative to MS Powerpoint, and it can read and save powerpoint files. The current version is pretty good. Earlier versions weren't as good.

http://www.openoffice.org


-David

Photoshop Elements (linked above) is Photoshp without some of the bells and whistles. It still has a lot of power and sounds good for what you want. It is less than a hundred dollards to get it. Check it out.

...and indeed is less than $50 from this source, which I have used a few times in the past for various items:

www.computersworth.com

I actually bought the $44 Photoshop Elements (and rather disposable digital camera) from this site with no problems; I've also gotten anitvirus and Office software from this site cheap. Never a problem.

Pros and cons of using Photoshop Elements vs. Powerpoint:

--Photoshop Elements apparently doesn't have a selection to change slides via mouse click; instead, you have to choose a time duration for the slides. This could be very tricky for you.

--Photoshop Elements allows some very easy pan/zoom effects (known in the business as "Ken Burns" effects) that may be nice to enhance your presentations.