This weekend my wife shot a wedding for a friend, and like a good husband, armed with a 15'' Powerbook and lots of cool effects, I went along to do the slide show.

Before the day began I reminded my wife to set her camera to shot both RAW and small JPG, because I knew it would be impossible to sort through 1000+ RAW images, to find the 40-50 best, and then crop and apply effects in under 30 minutes. (RAW images are great, but not when you are in a hurry. Plus for a slide show you only need screen resolution quality (72 ppi) anyway.)

My first task when getting to the reception was to start backing up the CF cards onto the computer and to a separate external drive (iPod). We only had 4.5 GB of media cards and shot over 10GB so we had to reuse the cards. I definitely don't recommend this. Even after copying all the images to the computer and the external drive clearing the media card was a bit unnerving. As I copied the images to the computer I sorted the RAW and JPG files into different folders.

My next task was to go through all the JPGs and pick my favorite 40-50 images. I used Adobe Bridge and marked all my favorite images with a rating of 4 stars. After my wife's last reception responsibilities, cake cutting, first dance, etc., she came over and went through the images. She marked all her favorites with 5 stars. We ended up with 53 images for the slide show. I copied these images out of Bridge to a new folder in the desktop, and then opened all 53 images in Photoshop.

We went through the images one at a time cropping if necessary and then picking the best effect for the image. Since the images I was working on were copies we just saved the image right back to the “Favorites” folder on the desktop. In some cases we would try one effect and it wouldn't look good so we would use something else or leave the image as is.

Because I had actions and scripts to automatically apply the effects this process went pretty fast, but with ShowIT this would have been so much easier and faster because everything would have been a click away.

After we were done we set the screen saver to use the “Favorites” folder on the desktop and let it play. I stood back to proudly watching the slide show and to my dismay the 3 vertical images we had just "Closed" without applying an effect to were sideways. I instantly remembered something David Jay had said when we were discussing ShowIT, "All of the images need to be opened up and saved even if there is no effect applied so that all the images will display correctly."

Well I learned my lesson, and I will be making a few changes to ShowIT so that it will be nearly impossible to close am image without it being saved. I am also going to add an Undo button so that when an effect is applied and it doesn't look good you can go back to the open state and try something else.

This was a great experience for me, and now that I really understand the difficulties and pressure involved I can make ShowIT the best tool for the job.

(bows down to you)

great master of showIT

I'd like my last wedding to be the final one without ShowIt too!!! Any idea on ETA???

Stoked you're doing this for us Mr. Nitorix .... In fact, I'm so stoked, I think I'm going to nickname you "X" from now on. So it is written, so it shall be. Forest is now to be forever known as X ... unless you want to call him something else ;-).

PS ... If X sticks, you owe me one ... that's gotta be the coolest online name ever.

I think the Mac cult has really infected Mr. Sanders.

Forest - you're the man! Now you can really imagine what a life changer ShowIT will be!

I can't wait...

BRING IT ON X!!!

Mr. X Factor

Thanks for all your work and experimentation Forest. I am so excited for ShowIt.