Tech Tuesday—ProShow Web Update and New Mobile Wacom Tablets

Video slideshows play an ever-increasing role in professional photography, whether it be a motion slideshow as a free add-on for your favorite clients or a paid add-on to photo packages.

Photodex (whose ProShow Gold and ProShow Producer desktop software are two of my favorite slideshows programs), offers an online video slideshow creator, ProShow Web. Although the company’s desktop software is Windows-only, this online service is available for Mac and Windows; there’s also an iOS app for creating, viewing and sharing slideshows on the go.

ProShow Web has offered advanced options from the beginning but Photodex recently made some important updates including the ability to set custom times for photos, video clips and text slides. A widescreen layout has been added, and captioning is available for photos and video clips. In addition, if you want to get really creative, you can add various effects to the captions. Dropbox has been added to ProShow Web’s other import options (which already include Smugmug and 500px, among others); finished slideshows can now be stored and shared via Dropbox. As expected, ProShow Web comes with access to music tracks and slideshow themes. And now, you can create your own themes from effects; essentially this means you’ll have a template to keep your slideshows consistent when producing them individually or for batch-processing. Another update is the ability for Plus and Premium users to create videos as long as 20 minutes (or 500 photos).

ProShow Web offers three levels of subscriptions: free, Plus and Premium. Pro photographers will need the Premium subscription ($150/year or $25/month) to obtain commercial licensing. Plus membership, which offers some of the benefits of the Premium service is $30 a year. The free version is restricted to 15 photos per show, with other limitations as well . (You can find a comparison chart of subscription levels here.) Free trials are available, so take it for a spin; you’ll be surprised at how quick and easy it is to create an impressive  slideshow.

In other news, Wacom just announced two new mobile tablets and a pressure-sensitive stylus pen. Be sure to check out the details on PDN, our sister publication’s website.