nch photostage slideshow free version reviews

If you’re short on ideas, there’s also access to the NCH Sound Effect Library, which, despite the name, includes plenty of free music. PhotoStage can add a soundtrack, or record a narration for your slideshow. It’s not PowerDirector - you can’t apply effects, take full control of the animation or save templates - but the program squeezes a reasonable amount of functionality into its single dialog. You can enter one or more lines of text, set their alignment, font, size and opacity, fade them in and out, even set them to scroll for a basic credit block. The final option is a versatile text tool.

But the Zoom tool is more interesting, allowing you to set up a custom zoom area for each image (zoom out from a face to the full screen, say). The Animation effects are also a little gimmicky, spinning your image around or adding water-like ripples. They’re not much use and we’d generally prefer to work on any issues in a real editor, but PhotoStage Slideshow Producer supports that too, with an 'Edit in external editor' command. Individual images may be customized with simple image editing tools (Brightness, Crop, Rotate), and a few effects (Oil Painting, Negative, Sepia, more).

There are 35+ fades, wipes, dissolves and so on, and while they’re a little basic, the program has enough for most purposes. There are also transition icons in between every image, and you can use these to change the transition type and duration. They’ll appear on the timeline, and can be dragged again to reorder them.Įach timeline thumbnail has its duration clearly visible, and this can be changed to anything from one second to an hour. Just as you’d expect, you can drag and drop your source images onto the program.

Timeline at the bottom of the screen, two audio tracks (music plus narration), assorted effects and transitions library top left, preview window on the other side, it’s all very straightforward.

If you’ve ever used a video editor then the PhotoStage interface will feel very familiar.

Nch photostage slideshow free version reviews