Especially with the popularity of mobile devices for viewing photos, slideshows are a perfect way to show off the best of your images – or simply to share the highlights of an event or trip. Creating quality slideshows can be a time-consuming process, so any tool that helps me make better shows, faster, is a good thing. Regular readers will know that I’m a huge fan of Proshow’s offerings – Producer and Gold on the desktop, and Web for when you’re mobile or on a Mac. However, I’ve struggled a bit with how to leverage Proshow’s powerful Wizard tool while still having customizations like beginning and end captions. Fortunately, the clever Remix command has come to my rescue…

For those not familiar with Proshow Producer’s Wizard (essentially the same technology built-in to Proshow for the Web), it lets you simply choose a selection of images, music (yours or from their library), a Proshow theme (which adds slide styles and transitions), and an energy level. Then it creates a complete slideshow for you. I’ve found it to work incredibly well for many of my projects. You can then customize your show further of course. Specialists who delight in creating the perfect blend of styles and transitions as part of their ultimate product may look down on using a Wizard like this, but for me they are a great timesaver.

However, I like to introduce and end my slideshows with captioned slides that display simply on the screen. And for some shows that involve multiple locations or events I want to separate the pieces using captioned slides – and perhaps different themes for each. That isn’t possible with the Wizard, since it creates your entire show. That’s where the Remix tool comes in.

Using Remix (found on the toolbar of Proshow Producer and Proshow Gold since version 5) you can select any subset of slides and Remix only those slides – applying a new theme or simply having another go at applying their existing theme. This lets me have the best of both worlds. I can hand edit my caption and transition slides and then use Remix to do the heavy lifting of creating a great show from the bulk of my show.

As an example, here is the show I just did of our Photo Tour to Myanmar (Burma) and Cambodia in December. I’ve placed my favorite sunrise & sunset slides with captions at the beginning and end, while Proshow took care of most of the rest:

If you enjoyed the show, think about using either Proshow Producer or Proshow Gold for your own shows. And if you’d like to have experiences and images like this of your own, please consider joining us for our next visit in December.