HenrikM

@GarryP I posted the original message some time ago. I went with PowerPoint in the end. I tried a bunch of other programs, but none of them measured up in terms of features, quality of transitions, and ease of use. Acrobat Reader is not very useful to me, I am afraid, except as a PDF reader, of course. As an example: The most recent animation I did was to illustrate the difference between vertically and horizontally sliced requirements for large scale software systems development in terms of the effect on multi-team process flows. I can't do that with Acrobat Reader, or any of the other solutions people have proposed to me, in this thread, and elsewhere. PowerPoint is not ideal, but it does the job, at least with fairly simple animations. The animation I mentioned above still has some kinks, due to the way PowerPoint handles morphing (it does not morph curves with connectors properly), but those kinks can be worked out, or worked around.

For a lot of things, a PDF would be sufficient. On the other hand, it would not work for me. My photography presentations are, for the most part, technically simple. I use a simple cross-fade most of the time. There are 2-3 exceptions in most presentations though, when I need a bit more than PDF can provide. Also, when I make presentations about systems and complexity thinking, I often need to show how things change over time, and then, animation tools are really handy. PDF would not do at all. So, it depends on what you want to accomplish.

Prezi is a good presentation program. Unfortunately, their pay-until-you-die ransomware subscription model eliminates Prezi as a contender no matter how powerful the software is.

I am afraid you are in the wrong thread, but yes, there is a lot of material on how to use Affinity Photo: Serif has videos on Youtube that are very good. Plenty of material made by others too. There are books available. Check out the Serif home page, or just the splash screen of your application. The online Help is actually helpful. Try it and see.

Thanks for the video. I downloaded the 30 day trial version of the program, and I do not think there was a Blend transition in it. The transition looks good, but all things considered, I'll go with PowerPoint this time around, despite its flaws. The information I got about the license server was from the text in the licence agreement. The hardware configuration of my computer changes several times a week, because I connect different devices depending on what I do. The changes I make probably do not trigger a search for the licence server, but then again, they just might. With PowerPoint, at least I know what I'll get: A presentation program with a paradigm so bad it contributed to two spaceshuttle crashes. Most of the other programs I have looked at try to emulate the program that made the spaceshuttles crash as closely as possible. One would think there would be room for better products in the market.

Thank you for the tip. I downloaded SoftMaker and tried it out. When I tried to do a fade between two slides, the screen first faded to black, then went from black to the second picture. That is a bug, plain and simple. A cross fade must not have a fade to black in the middle. I also tried a dissolve, and the picture dissolved into rather large pixels. Very far from the smooth transition you get with Keynote. The other transitions were a mixed bag. Some looked pretty good. However, the abominable cross fade is a showstopper. Cross Fade is the transition I use for nearly all slides in a presentation, and the reason for that is simple: It is the only one that does not look jarring when you watch a presentation. I have paying audiences. I will not show them anything that looks clunky or ugly (except when on purpose, of course). There are a couple of other problems too, like the software locking up if it cannot access a license server, which it tries to access at random intervals. That means if the company that makes SoftMaker goes out of business, the software will eventually lock up and become useless. It also means the software can suddenly lock up while you are about to do a presentation, if it decides to check for a license server, and cannot access the Internet. So, I am afraid this is not the presentation software I need or want. It looks to me like PowerPoint, despite its many flaws, is the only thing that comes close to a professional presentation program running on Windows. For now, that is probably the way I have to go. If Serif did a presentation program, as long as it has a working cross fade, I'd ditch PowerPoint in a second.

I did suggest that Affinity Presents would be part of the Affinity suite. I listed several reasons for why this would be a good idea in my original posting. Even so, creating a new app would require time, and quite a bit of work, and that would slow down development of the applications they already have, so whether it is a good idea, depends on how good the business case is. I believe there could be a good business case, but that is for the people at Serif to decide. If they add a new application, any new application, it would not have the same constraints as the existing applications. If it had, it would not be able to do anything new. Photo, Designer, and Publisher have a partially overlapping set of constraints, but it is not the same set for all applications. A new application in the suite would also have a set of constraints that are partially new, and partially overlap.

There is no good reason to add animation to the current suite of programs. However, a presentation program would be another matter. For a presentation, a simple animation feature would make sense.

I do not want anyone of those! Except for Keynote, the programs on the list are either crapware presentation programs, or programs that are not presentation programs at all. For example, Camtasia is a very good program, but it is a screen recorder, not a presentation program, Windows Movie Maker is a video editing program, and so on. Most of the presentation programs in the list don't work offline. Many of them have pay-until-you-die subscription models. The first program on the list, CustomShow, you can't even buy without talking to a sales person first. LibreOffice Impress can't handle a simple cross fade correctly. Reallusion requires Google Slides to work, and Google Slides presentations loose all pictures when you try to show a presentation while offline, even if the pictures you have linked to are stored locally on the hard drive. It is because of junk programs such as those on the list, that I believe there is room for a simple, but high quality, presentation program on the market.

There is no good presentation program in the PC/Windows market. Even a very basic presentation program built on the Affinity Photo/Designer/Publisher platform and licensing model could be a killer app. I occasionally do presentations, on topics ranging from photography and digital art to management history, agile methodologies, systems thinking, and complexity thinking. I am not the best presenter around, but I am good enough, and well know enough (, in my little corner of the world), to get paid to present. A couple of years ago I switched from using Macs to using PCs, and I more or less stopped doing presentations, except at work, where I used PowerPoint. Can't hold a candle to Keynote, but I used it because someone else paid for the licence. Now, I have been asked to do a couple of presentations outside of work, in locations where there may not be a reliable WiFi connection, so I started looking for a decent presentation program that runs on the PC. I could not find a single one! First, I'll describe the showstoppers that keeps me from using the PC software I had a look at. Then, I'll write about why I think adding a presentation program to the Affinity suite would be an excellent idea. Showstoppers: Licensing model: Most presentation software for the PC have a pay/month licensing model. If I was a full-time professional presenter, that might be worth it, but I am not. I expect to use the software 4-8 times per year. Dependency on the Internet: I need to be able to run the presentations locally on my computer. WiFi guest networks are not always available. When they are available, they tend to be unreliable. Quality: Basic things, like doing a cross fade between pictures, tend to suck in opensource programs like LibreOffice. Don't get me started on the cluttered LibreOffice Impress user interface, designed to show off as much functionality as possible, while completely ignoring how presenters think and work. Each one of the three problems above is enough to stop me from using a presentation program. While a bad user interface is painful enough on its own, if the quality of transitions is bad enough, I won't even use a free one. I believe there are many other people who feel the same way. That creates an opportunity for Serif: The Affinity products use the licensing model I want. Affinity products are designed to work offline, while at the same time taking advantage of online features, like online picture libraries, when Internet connection is available. The quality of Affinity products is already excellent. They take advantage of fast processors, and fast graphics cards. In addition to solving the showstopper issues, Serif has several other strong advantages if the choose to make a presentation program: Much of the functionality has already been built: Excellent drawing tools Great image processing tools Asset manager Online image libraries Page management ...and so on. The only things missing are page transitions, simple animation features, and a presentation mode. Because of the very tight integration between Affinity products, I believe a presentation program would require a modest investment in terms of time and effort. At the same time, the integration would make it uniquely powerful. It would be possible to design the program so that it focuses on graphics, not on bullet points, which would be great. What do you think of the idea?

I worked on a multi-page document yesterday, and quickly got frustrated because I could not find a way to override the No. of columns setting at the paragraph level. It is useful to be able to do this because you can then have titles and introductory paragraphs than span the full width of the text area in the same text box as the main text. This makes master pages way more flexible. You do not have to create separate text boxes for titles and introductory paragraphs. You can also do other things, like having a wide text column, and then, in the text flow, you can override the number of paragraphs, and have a multi-column section right in the main flow. FrameMaker could do this, and it was very useful, both for short articles and longer non-fiction documents.

If I could choose the scripting language, I'd definitely go with Python over Javascript or Applescript. Applescript is out, because I currently use a PC running Windows. Javascript is a horrible mess of a language. I have used Javascript rather extensively in the past, because I got very well paid to do it. Today, I am not remotely interested in using it, for any reason. Python is a well designed, easy to learn, and very powerful language with very extensive support in the form of libraries. It fits very well with professional programming practices like TDD and BDD. If choosing between those three, Python is the best choice by far.

Thanks! There is room for improvement. There are some things I'll do differently next time. Still, I am happy with the results, and more importantly, so was the model.

@Alfred and @Smee Again, Here is a version without frequency separation.

For a recent portrait, I decided to try out the Frequency Separation functionality in Affinity Photo to remove skin discoloration. Worked very well.