Photography requires a huge range of skills, whether you’re making pictures professionally or it’s your hobby. And those skills cover a broad range. There’s the obvious creative part, the understanding of composition, lighting, location etc. You need to know how to set your camera with the appropriate aperture, shutter speed etc and to focus in exactly the right place to achieve the desired depth of field and sharpness or to capture motion. And then, increasingly, you need to be computer-literate, so that you can bring the best out of the images that you’ve captured.

Inevitably people vary and have strengths and weaknesses at different points on that spectrum. I know my weakness is in the creative end, for instance (I am a bit of a nerd, after all!)

My new SlideMaker plugin, which has just been made available on the Adobe Creative Cloud marketplace, grew out of seeing the horror on fellow camera club members’ faces when told that they needed to submit images for club competitions as digital files, with a whole raft of requirements. There is usually a maximum width and a maximum height in pixels; the image often needs to be saved in sRGB; there may be a maximum file size; and there may be rules for setting the image title in metadata, for copyright text and for how the image file is named.

While thinking about that I also realised that I was spending far too much time and effort on the simple, repetitive grunt work required to get from feeling I’d done all the processing I wanted to do on an image to having a file that I could share. And that was true regardless of whether I was thinking about a photographic competition, preparing for giving a slide show, delivering images for a digital photo frame or even just sharing them on social media.

Yes, I could just do a quick export from Lightroom, but I want more control to adjust sharpening, to add a keyline (stroke) around the image, to pad extra space with black, to adjust metadata and the file name to export to …

And that’s where the idea for SlideMaker came from. Set up a preset for any individual camera competition’s requirements, or for a photo frame, projector etc, or for the sizes that you’re happy putting on social media. Then, when you’ve done all the edits you planned, it can be one click to do all that grunt work; or a few more if you want manual control of how much sharpening should be applied and/or want to review or adjust the metadata handling for each image.

You can even process all of the images that you have open in Photoshop in one go.

I may regret offering this, but as a special launch offer until the end of April 2025 you can send me the competition entry rules for your camera club or other organisation. I’ll create a preset for you and send it back embedded in an image file so that you can extract it and save it for your own use. Send to info@bailey-online.org.

SlideMaker page on this site: https://www.bailey-online.org/slidemaker

And on the Adobe marketplace: https://exchange.adobe.com/apps/cc/a202d8cd/slidemaker