It’s become more or less a standard issue for every new product to come with a presentation so individuals know what to expect. Presentations can be anything that makes a good impression, with tons of applications like Ashampoo Slideshow Studio Elements that let you create neat ones from pictures, with various editing options.

The application comes together with some extra offers, so when installing it, pay attention every step of the way if you’re only interested in what this product has to offer. The deployment process only takes a little while, and doesn’t make any significant changes to your PC to cause trouble.

In terms of design, there’s nothing out of the ordinary, with more effort put in functionality rather than visuals. Most space is covered by the canvas, which is surrounded by a library for themes, logos, and subtitles, as well as a timeline editor for careful timing of each frame.

You only get to work with pictures and supported formats count a JPG, TIF, GIF, PNG, and BMP. These can either be dragged over the main window or added via the open dialog. Sadly, they are not stored in a gallery, but automatically placed in the timeline so you carefully have to separate the ones you use from the ones you don’t.

Elements you can add aren’t abundant, but enough to allow a certain degree of flexibility. Different geometrical shapes can be created, with custom colors, size, and transparency levels. Text comes in two forms, plain and circular, and can benefit from all common font options. Apart from this, extra pictures can be added over frames, which comes in handy for inserting watermarks or logos.

Customization can take some time if you manually add aesthetic elements to the project. This is where the presets library shines, with an impressive array of different themes, logos, and subtitle positions and styles to automatically fit to all slides. Once added, these can be further tweaked on the canvas, just like regular objects.

The timeline is incredibly easy to use, even for beginners. Duration of each slide is displayed on the thumbnail, and it can be increased or decreased by dragging its borders sideways. The same can be done for transitions and any extra elements and objects you decide to add.

Make sure to fine-tune or edit your picture before adding them, because there aren’t any built-in effects whatsoever. When you’re done, hitting the Produce Slideshow button generates a new WMV clip with configurable quality settings. Sadly, it’s the only output format.

To sum it up, Ashampoo Slideshow Studio Elements provides an essential set of editing and building tools to create stunning presentations to accompany you all the way through. Although not abundant, editing options make sure you don’t spend too much time building the perfect slideshow, but have enough resources at your disposal to cover various areas of activity.