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The Signal and Image Processing Institute has a Polaroid ProPalette 7000 for the production of 35mm color slides from computer files. While this devices is primarily intended for use by SIPI faculty, staff, and students, SIPI will also produce slides for other parties at a reasonable cost.

The Polaroid ProPalette 7000 is connected to both an Apple Macintosh computer and a Windows PC and is designed to expose 35mm color slide film with images from software on either platform . Some of its features include:

There are numerous things that must be done correctly by the creator of the slides in order to get quality results from the ProPalette. Below are some topics that should be read by anyone planning to make use of the slide making service.

Compatible Formats

Some programs and file formats work better than others in producing slides. Here are some tips on which ones work and which ones to avoid.

Fonts

Confusion over the use of fonts in the slides is the single biggest cause of problems in producing slides. Read and follow these tips.

Films

Information on supported films for those who wish to supply their own film.

Guidelines for Producing Slides

Here's a collection of wisdom on how to make sure your slides come out the way you want them to look.

Prices and Administrative Procedures

How much it costs, forms of payment, where to take the work to be done, etc.

On the PC, many slides are shot from Microsoft PowerPoint. In addition, individual slides can be imaged using a program called RasterPlus95. This program can read files in a wide variety of formats and create a queue of slides to be exposed.

The situation on the Mac is similar. Slides can be exposed from within a presentation program like Microsoft PowerPoint, or from a separate program (RasterPlus) that has the ability to read many file formats. Any program that has the ability to print can output to the ProPalette. Individual slides can be exposed from whatever program is capable of reading the files containing the image data.

Producing slides from individual image files (as opposed to PowerPoint files) can be done if the document are in one of the file formats that can be read by the software on the PC and Mac. Most programs on the PC or Mac save their document files in a proprietary format that is unique to that program and can usually only be understood by that program. In order for the ProPalette to read the pictures, it is necessary to have the programs save the documents in a standard format that the ProPalette can understand. Below are some of the formats that the ProPalette software can understand.

PICT

PICT files are a Macintosh proprietary format for storing graphics of all kinds. Nearly every Mac application that creates pictures can output a document containing the picture in PICT format. Each PICT document contains one picture. Most Mac programs have an option (usually under the "Save As..." or "Export..." command) for saving the document in PICT format. Programs like PowerPoint can save all the slides in an entire presentation as a folder of individual PICT files. It has been our experience that for some reason, shooting PowerPoint presentations directly from the Macintosh to the ProPalette is not as reliable as saving the slides as individual PICT files and then shooting the PICT files. Problems have occured with PowerPoint slides containing things like rotated text. When the slide was saved as a PICT and imaged individually the problem went away.

Scrapbook

A Macintosh Scrapbook document is an extension of the basic PICT format that allows the document to contains multiple PICT format pictures. Microsoft PowerPoint on the Mac can save a sequence of slides as a single Scrapbook file. This format is sometimes more convenient than a folder of PICT files since it keeps all the slides together in the order they need to be exposed.

TIFF

TIFF format is a file format that many program, Macintosh and PC, can generate. It is a raster image format which is generally not desirable for presentation graphics since the resolution of the image may not be high enough.

JPEG

The JPEG format is similar to TIFF in terms of flexibility. It works best for raster images rather than presentation slides.

Postscript and EPS

The ProPalette software on both the Mac and PC can image Postscript (or Encapsulated Postscript, EPS) images onto slides. The Postscript drawing can be a separate file of just Postscript data, or can be a graphic object in a PowerPoint slide.

Photoshop

The RasterPlus software for both the PC and Mac can read native Adobe Photoshop image files in either 1, 8, or 24-bit per pixel modes.

The complete list of file formats supported by the PC software consists of: EPS, GIF, JPEG, Kodak Photo CD, Kodak FlashPix, Macintosh PICT, PCX, Portable Network Graphics, Photoshop PSD, PostScript Level 2, SUN Raster, Targa, and TIFF.

Pictures being designed for shooting on the ProPalette should only use Postscript or TrueType fonts. In other words, any font that looks good when printed on a LaserWriter or other Postscript printer should work fine on the ProPalette. Avoid using low resolution bit-mapped fonts like the ones Apple used to supply for use on the ImageWriter printer (London, Venice, Athens, etc.).

Any Postscript or TrueType font used in the slide must be present on the SIPI PC or Macintosh that runs the ProPalette in order to have it appear correctly on the slide. The Macintosh the runs the ProPalette has all the normal fonts that are found in the LaserWriter printers: Times, Hevetica, Courier, Symbol, Avant Garde, Bookman, Helvetica Narrow, New Century Schoolbook, Palatino, Zapf Chancery, and Zapf Dingbats. Also on the Macintosh are the Apple-supplied TrueType fonts that come with the current MacOS: Chicago, Geneva, Monaco, and New York.

Any other Postscript or TrueType font can be used but the customer must supply the font description files when delivering the work to be done. SIPI will load the new fonts on the system before shooting the work. If you have any doubts about whether a font will work properly, check with the SIPI staff.

Some Mac programs require that special fonts be loaded onto the system in order to operate correctly. For example, the equation editor built in to Microsoft Word uses a special font called "MT Extra." Users must make a point of knowing if any special fonts are needed to produce the document. If these special fonts are on the system as Postscript or TrueType fonts, then they can given to SIPI with the document in order to work correctly. Be aware that just because the application that used to create the files will not be used in the slide making process does not mean that the special fonts won't be required. For example, a document create with Microsoft Word that uses the MT Extra font will only reproduce properly on the ProPalette if the MT Extra font is on the system, regardless of the fact that the Word program is not used at that time.

The basic film used on the Polaroid ProPalette any ASA 100 speed slide film. There are many versions of these from numerous manufactures. Some are intended for the consumer market, others for professionals. All vary slightly in their reproduction of colors. The ProPalette software uses internal film tables compensate for differences between them to achieve the best results. At the present time, the ProPalette software supports the following films.

Kodak Elite II 100

Fuji Sensia RDII

These are ASA 100 consumer slide films, available everywhere, for just about any type of use. SIPI normally uses one of these for shooting the slides.

Kodak Gold Plus 100

Fuji Super V 100

These are ASA 100 negative films. The ProPalette can expose these and they can be processed and printed at a 1-hour developer

Presentation Chrome

This is a Polaroid 35mm slide film (non-instant type).

HC Polachrome

Polapan

Polagraph

These are Polariod instant 35mm slide films. Polapan and Polagraph are black and white films. They can be processed in a small unit for quick results. SIPI rarely uses these due to the cost.

Polaroid HD4 Neg 100

Kodak Dyna II 100

Never heard of these, so it's unlikely we'll be using them.

SIPI uses either the Kodak Elite or Fuji Sensia film for its slides. In general, it is not necessary to use exactly the film supported by the software. Any ASA 100 slide film will probably give very similar results to the Kodak or Fuji films listed above. Black and white negative can also be exposed by using a film like Kodak T-Max 100.

The following is a collection of tips and suggestions for getting the best results from the ProPalette.

Size and Shape of Exposed Image

The ProPalette software automatically expands all pictures to be as large as possible on the slide. The expansion is done by equal factors in the horizontal and vertical directions so there is no resulting distortion of the image. The area on the slide that is exposed has a 3 x 2 aspect ratio. In order to fill the whole area, the document being imaged must be of some size that also has a 3 x 2 ratio. For example, a picture that says it is 9 inches wide and 6 inches high will fill the whole slide. If the picture is not a 3 x 2 aspect ratio, there will be blank black space either on the sides or on the top and bottom of the slide. For this reason, the horizontal and vertical dimensions specified in the Page Setup dialog for setting the size of the slide are not important, only the ratio of the dimensions matters. A slide that is specified to cover 9 inches by 6 inches will be scaled to cover the 36mm by 24mm area on the slide. The same will happen to a picture that is specified as being 3 feet by 2 feet. If you require a picture to only occupy a portion of the slide, this can be done by creating a black slide of the proper dimensions and imbedding the picture within it. The above describes what happens to slides being shot in landscape mode. The process is the same for slides in portrait mode except the slide's exposed area has a 2 x 3 aspect ratio.

Most presentation software like PowerPoint generally have an option somewhere that allows the user to specify that the output is for 35mm slides. In most cases that will create output that has the proper aspect ratio for the slides (see above). However in some cases this creates output that is slightly off from the 3 x 2 (or 2 x 3) aspect ratio required. If this is the case, then the document size should be setup manually with the dimensions that are exactly 3 x 2 (or 2 x 3). This should always be done in order to get the best possible results.

Raster Data vs. Object Data

Most drawing programs like Deneba Canvas and Adobe Illustrator, and programs like Microsoft PowerPoint that have drawing tools, use collections of object to create the drawing. These objects can be scaled to arbitrary sizes and still retain their shapes. The program knows that a circle should be a circle even if it is blown up to ten times its original size. Slides created with object oriented data look the best since the ProPalette has no problems going from the resolution used to create the object on the computer screen (maybe 72 dots per inch) to the resolution of the slide, about 2700 dots per inch. Curves that were smooth on the screen will be smooth on the slide.

Raster data, such as that from a program like Photoshop, can have problems when scaled to the sizes need for exposing a slide. To the software, the raster image is just a collection of pixels, maybe 600 wide by 400 high. If it has to be expanded to go on the slide, the pixels have to be replicated to make a bigger image. Lines that were smooth before are now jagged.

As a rule, slides should be exposed from object data rather than raster data. You should never save a file from a program like PowerPoint in a raster format (TIFF, JPEG, GIF, etc.) and then try to expose slides from that data. They should always be exposed from the object data if possible. If they must be saved as raster data, the image dimensions should be as close to the pixel dimension of the slide (about 4000 by 2700) in order to not loose resolution of the image.

Postscript Images

When imaging Postscript drawings remember that in many cases the background color may show through parts of the drawing where nothing was drawn. Many Postscript drawing program don't start off a drawing with an opaque white background as the bottom layer. When sending Postscript to a laser printer this isn't usually a problem since the white of the paper forms the background. However, the ProPalette uses black as the default background color. This may result in large sections of the drawing coming out black if nothing was drawn in these places to block the black background from showing through.

There have been some problems with EPS (Encapsulated Postscript) figures pasted into PowerPoint. In some cases the EPS files contains a low resolution raster preview image that allows PowerPoint to show a rough idea of what the figure looks like. If not, PowerPoint will put up a white rectangle with a message printed in it stating that the figure does not contain a preview but should print correctly on a Postscript printer. It's been our experience that if the slides are saved as PICT files and then processed by the RasterPlus software, the actual Postscript data gets ignored. The slide ends up with either the preview image or the white box exposed on the film, rather than the higher resolution Postscript image. We are currently trying to fix this problem. This problem does not occur with separate Postscript or EPS files which expose normally.

Portrait vs. Landscape

The ProPalette software automatically rotates images 90 degrees in order to expose the largest image possible on the slide. Slides that have been created with the vertical dimension longer (portrait mode) will be rotated so they come out in the proper orientation on the film.

Backgrounds

Remember that the slide is probably going to be projected onto a screen. It is usually best to use a darker background color and lighter type. There are many books and articles on graphic design for slides. The SIPI staff will be happy to give advice, but we are amateurs in this area. If your work requires professionally designed slides, some of the outside slide service bureaus can provide this service.

There are occasionally problems with using a "graduated fill pattern" as a slide background. This is a background that changes gradually from one solid color to another across the slide, such as starting as light blue at the top and changing to dark blue at the bottom of the slide. PowerPoint can generate slides with this type of background. When these are exposed the transition from light to dark is sometimes not as smooth as one would hope and there may be visible steps in the transition instead of having a smooth transition across the slide. In most cases this effect is not objectionable, but be advised that it may be visible. If this is unacceptable, you should use a background that consists of a single color.

Avoid Very Small Text

Make sure that text that appear in objects that are pasted into a slide from another program are in a font large enough to be seen. Due to the high resolution of the ProPalette, especially small fonts can virtually disappear from view...they're there, but imaged so finely they can't be easily seen. Using bold fonts is sometimes a solution since that makes the fonts thicker.

Keeping Slides In Order

Customers should make sure there is some way to identify each slide so as to tell them apart from the others. The slide mounts are usually not numbered and you should not depend on them being in any special order where you get them back. If the ProPalette software is given a folder full of files to expose, it may expose them in the alphabetical order of the filenames, which may not result in anything like the intended ordering of them.

The following table summarizes the service charges.

To summarize, the cost is $3 for each frame exposed, plus $20 for each roll of film used and processed. For customer provided film and processing, the cost is $3 per frame, plus $5 per roll with $20 minimum charge for the order.

SIPI does not offer a "paper to slide" service in which customers can bring in drafts of slides on paper and have slides created from the artwork. The above prices only apply in cases where the slides have been designed by the customer, are provided to SIPI on diskette or via network, and are ready to be placed on film without further manipulation of the slide images.

Email ctcsouth@aol.com with questions or comments. Glad you're here! 
                          CTC Home  updated November 15, 2006