I have done a number of simple slide shows in Lightroom. I like the dark background with a white frame around every picture. It makes pictures stand out superbly, simple and very effective.
Now I am trying the same in FM4 and only find this possible for individual pictures.
Is there a way to apply the same frame to all pictures of a slide show?
I was also hoping to change the color of the background in FM4 for different sections of the slide show. How could I achieve that?
I just tried to accomplish the first goal – apply a frame around ALL of the pictures of a slide show ALL AT ONCE. It actually worked, although there appears to be a problem with the display during the process.
I selected all of the images in my timeline – basically by doing a command-A, then in the options palette on the right side went to the Image section, clicked on the Border box to change the color, and then adjusted the border width. When finished, it appeared that ALL of my images had a frame with the correct color and width.
The problem in the display was that everything in the frame turned black (in other words, they just disappeared from view), but they showed up again when I was done. I tried it again on just one frame that had four images. Applying color and width to ONE image allows you to see the change in real time. If I selected MORE THAN ONE image at a time, they disappeared, but showed up when I was done.
As for changing the color background for DIFFERENT sections of a slide show, unfortunately there’s no way to do that – easily. You CAN select the background color using Slideshow > Settings… from the main menu – but that applies to ALL the slides. The only other way to solve it is to create an image large enough to fill the stage and import that in as the bottom layer. Unfortunately, again, it uses up ONE LAYER of your six in doing so.
I’m going to throw that into the Feature Requests section, just so the guys at Boinx will have a record of it…
In addition to @stantstic s comment: You can use the following work around to create a background of any color by using either the “Color Tint” option or the “Border” option of a white background slide:
- Create a small totally white image (e.g. by screen-shooting a white area from a finder window, just 100x100 pixels will do, or download the barely visible white image attached to this post)
- add this image as the lowest layer to the image where you want to have a different background color
- change the size of this small white image to fill all the stage background as well as in “Start” and “Finish”
- open the “Options” panel on the right
- go to the “Image” section here
- setup a different “Color” for this background image
if you can’t archive your desired color (because you need to have if darker than this option let you set it up) you can use the “Border” and “Border Color” option:
- click into the “Border Width” value field on the right and enter 1200 (or what ever big number you need to fill up the stage with a border around the white image)
- change the “Border Color” to anything you want.
Now that you setup this background image you can copy it to other images by dragging it in the timeline while pressing the alt key.
@stantistic is right: This operation cost you one slide slot in your stack and shouldn’t be that complicated to set up. I put it on our feature wish list.
Thank you both very much for your quick response. Following your suggestions I got those features implemented in my slide show.