I was wondering if there is a way to set up a slideshow that starts a photos in B/W and finishes it in color?
Also is there a way to start a photo out of focus and end the photo in focus?
Not sure I follow the color transition request. If you just want a single slide to start off in B/W and then finish in color, you can do this: insert the image TWICE, one slide after another. Set the duration of both slides to 5.0s. For the FIRST slide only, use the Options palette and under “Image” move the color slider all the way DOWN (that’s the slider immediately to the right of the color wheel). That will make that slide B/W. Set the Transition between the two slides to Dissolve, and set the duration of that transition to 5.0s. Try it. The slide will appear in B/W and then slowly the color will appear as the second slide appears on screen. Make adjustments to your transition timing as you see fit.
If you want to START your entire show with a B/W photo and then END the show with a color version of it, just place the photo as the first slide and make the color adjustments mentioned above. Then for the last slide of the show, just insert the photo as is.
As for starting a photo out of focus and ending it in focus, I don’t believe that functionality exists in the current version of FotoMagico. You could try doing that in a third-party app and importing it as a short movie. Or do it in Photoshop using Blur commands and create multiple stages, from soft blur to crystal clarity (thank you, “Outer Limits”), then assemble the frames as you would a movie and do it that way.
Now that you mentioned that, I’d like to see that incorporated into FotoMagico as well 
One addition to the hint above (I’d have suggested the same, good one!): I don’t recommend to have the transition time exactly as long as the slide duration as this is a logical error and can cause issues. But in general this is a good way to achieve the desired effect.
There is no focus option in FotoMagico and I’m not sure how to achieve that technically to be honest, but we’ll keep it in mind. For now I also suggest you use an image-editing software for that (keeping in mind that FotoMagico creates shows with existing images and is no real image editing software).
Hope this helps!
I decided to put my money where my mouth was and try the focus blur technique I suggested. I didn’t pay any attention to timing, how long I’d like the blur to occur, or how smooth the blur effect occurred. I chose an image, opened it in Photoshop, and applied a Gaussian blur of Radius 10.0 pixels, then saved it as image_00.jpg. I went back to PS, applied a blur of radius 9.0 pixels, then saved it as image_01.jpg. I continued doing this, reducing the blur by 1.0 pixel each time, and saving the file with the respective name. The original file was named image_10.jpg. I put them all in one folder. I then opened QuickTime Player 7 Pro (on my Mac!! – you can’t do the following with QuickTime Player 10 – it must be done using QT 7 Pro, or another application). In QT I went to File > Open Image Sequence…, browsed to the respective folder, and clicked on the 1st image of the sequence (image_00.jpg). It asked for the Frame rate (I just chose 2 frames per second, but there are a lot of options). It assembled the 11 images (00 thru 10) into a QT movie. I saved it as an .mov file, imported it into FotoMagico, and of course it played just fine. It starts out blurry and over about 5 seconds sharpens to full in-focus clarity.
Very nice, thanks for the hint!