Be sure the caption is the size required and placed exactly on the slide where you want it before the screen capture else the elements won’t line up when you insert the captured caption jpg as a layer. The blurred layer can be colored to suit your show. Adjustment to the White Point may be useful depending on the color chosen to make it show up better.

This isn’t the only method to achieve the flashing effect and may not be the best solution if you wish to put something underneath the effect. If you desire transparency, try using the Chroma Key to remove the background.

Here’s Ray Jacott’s cool demo. The effect appears in the first couple of seconds very briefly in the show.

The effect was key-framed this way in the tutorial. I didn’t give the timing for the key frames for the 3 second slide effect as the desired effect is bound to vary somewhat from show to show. You must have a handle on key-framing to work it out and also knowledge of how to apply variant amounts of opacity. The tutorial just gives an overview of the basic technique.

KF 1-2 0% to 0% opacity
KF 2-3 0% to 100% opacity
KF 3-4 100% to 0% opacity
KF 4-5 0% to 0% opacity

For those of you who don’t fiddle with your photos in a digital editor but would like the ability to apply effects to your photos that mimic Photoshop actions you’re in luck.  Barbara Coultry’s Frame Locker site just released some goodies that can help you do it all in Producer!  Effects were inspired by film-processing techniques, camera techniques, and by graphic arts.

I applied the effects found in Photo Shifters sets to one photo just to see the different results.  There’s no fancy animation within the slides in this show because the effects are fancy enough all on their own!

While it looks like a plasma gradient, it’s not.  This is an easy way to create a backdrop to fill the screen under your smaller photos.  It also helps establish a nice color scheme for the show if most of your images have the same colors in them.

Rather than creating a plasma bottom layer, I like to use one photo from those displayed in a show to pull off that background effect.  In this particular instance it’s the LANDSCAPE image of the Siberian dog displayed at :47, placed on the bottom layer of nearly every slide to fill in the areas where the default background would have shown through.  Please note, this is NOT a background, it is a bottom layer in the slides.  Show backgrounds are static and can never be animated, whereas layers can be animated.

Choose an image that contains 2-3 main colors for the color scheme for your show then adjust the image and animate it.  The image above was chosen for the blue, golden brown and green tones.  After adjusting the image and blurring it, the prominent blue and golden browns solidified the show color scheme and colors for other elements.

YMWV (Your mileage WILL vary) on the following settings since all photos are different.  But this is what was done to that image to create the effect.

Layers>Editing:
White Point +40
Black Point   -20
Contrast      +37
Blur             +46

Effects>Motion Effects
Zoom 250
KF1 Pan 0/45 >>> KF2 Pan 0/85

The resulting background is this:

Settings depend on the photo and how much more or less you want it – lighter/darker/contrasty/vibrant/blurry as compared to the images you wish to draw attention to that sit on top of the bottom layer. Range of pan settings depends on average length of slide time and amount of zoom applied to the image. If you only want a faint amount of movement, a longer slide time can afford a longer pan range whereas a shorter slide time will need a smaller pan range.

Use the eye dropper to match color tones for the vignetted frames around the smaller images. This repeats the two main colors seen in the blurred layer to pull together the color scheme.

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In the example, a 3rd kf was added at the end of the movement to give the viewer a short rest on the image (kf2 and kf3 settings match) but it isn’t necessary.

Here are two more examples of this effect in this short video.

I like to do things the easy way when I can, so no Photoshopping is necessary to accomplish this task given the elements used and desired end effect are similar to the example. Since photos will vary and your choice for the end result may vary as well – YMMV (your mileage may vary). You may have to resort to the more difficult task of cloning out the person in Photoshop after all. But for now, here is a simple way to do it.

Obviously, you’re not limited to just removing people.  This works for anything distracting in the scene  that you want to remove in your slide.  If you never want the element or person displayed at all, leave out layer 1 and that should do it!