A ProShow Enthusiast forum member was curious as to how to make the subtle animated background with Pro Show Producer as seen throughout this brief Four Feet Fotos dog show I photographed and produced.
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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