Image Background - Full Screen?

[rtbtat]

Hi:

I imported a bitmap image into a Captivate 2 project that we want to use as our background. We think that looks much better than a plain old color. Even though the image looks great, it's only taking up about 70% of the screen size. I've desperately tried to find some setting to make our bitmap take up the entire screen as background, but cannot find that setting. There must be a way to do this.

Thanks,
Robert

[CatBandit]

Hi Robert,

Find the image on your timeline and double-click it to open its Properties. On the "Location and Size" tab, set the location at "0, 0" and the size to the size of your project. That should stretch the image to fill the entire background. Then just right-click the image and select "Merge" (image into background).

As an alternative, each image has its own "handles" which can be grabbed by your mouse and stretched ... in other words, you can do everything described above by using the mouse to drag and stretch the resizing handles for the image.

You may have issues with warpage of the image - especially if the act of making it fit the stage of your Captivate project ends up changing the aspect ratio of the image. You will have to check that as a separate issue and I'd recommend doing all this on a new project file (use File > Save As).

Good luck Robert!

[rtbtat]

Hi Larry:

Two questions.

1. Is there any difference between changing the settings manually you described versus using the mouse to resize the image. In other words, will the first option retain the aspect ratios?
2. Why does Adobe make something like this so difficult? Why isn't there a simple option to use an image as the background?

Thanks for taking the time to answer my question.
Robert

[rtbtat]

Hi Larry:

The HELP file is atrocious! What is the timeline? How can I find it? I clicked on Edit the Slide, View Timeline, but I can't find it. I keep clicking to show the Timeline and then turn it off, but where is it? It would be nice to have a graphical image so I know what it looks like.

Since I can't find the Timeline, whenever I click on the image, I only get the slide properties, I cannot get to the actual image.

Thanks,
Robert

[rtbtat]

Hi Larry:

As stated above, the help file was atrocious so I searched the web and found a tutorial on the Timeline. As a result, I was finally able to open it up, however, the graphical image does NOT show up on the timeline. It has 3 components,
1. Text
2. The Slide Properties
3. The Audio

I cannot find nor see the graphical image I imported on the Timeline. I can still see the image taking up about 70% of the screen, however, it does not show up on the Timeline.

Robert

[Captiv8r]

Hi Robert

If an image is set as the background, it will not be an object on the TimeLine. Instead, it is an attribute of the slide itself. The background attribute. If you want the image as an object you can manipulate, you will either need to re-add it to the slide as an image object, or if you no longer have the image, you may right-click the slide itself and select "Copy Background" and paste the background image into an image editor such as Microsoft Paint, Photshop, the Gimp or any of the other bazillion editors out there.

Cheers... Rick

[rtbtat]

Hi Rick:

Thanks for joining the discussion and explaining I wasn't seeing things on the Timeline.

OK, obviously I'm thoroughly confused so I think we need to start from the beginning. I have a .bmp file that we want to make our background for the 8-10 slides we will be using for an overview of a new software application at our agency. Once it's the background for the entire slide, we plan on adding text to each slide. Please give me the steps I must follow to make the .bmp file the background [filling up the entire slide].

Why is this so difficult? You would think this would be a common request for Captivate users.

Thanks,
Robert

[Captiv8r · Accepted solution]

Hi Robert

First, I'll try to answer your question. You asked:
Why is this so difficult? You would think this would be a common request for Captivate users.

Of course, I have no clue as to your background and experience level with other applications, so I can't make any assumptions. But it could be that you simply aren't comfortable yet with applications such as Captivate. You may wish to consider attending some formal Captivate training? (LOL, I should point out that I'm more than a bit biased that way, as I'm an Adobe Certified Captivate Instructor. )

Okay, now for the steps.

1. Insert your .BMP file on the first slide where you want it. Do this by clicking Insert > Image... and browsing to the image.
2. Drag the image to one of the corners of your project. It doesn't matter which corner, just place it in a corner.
3. The image should have sizing handles around it. Little squares that you may click and drag to adjust the size. Opposite the corner where you dragged the image, click the sizing handle and drag it so the image now covers the entire "stage" area of Captivate. (The stage area is where the image was placed when you inserted it. It's where you make all the edits to your Captivate project.)
4. After you have covered the stage, right-click the image and select "Merge into Background". You'll receive a rather ominous and catastrophic warning dialog advising that it cannot be undone. But disregard it and click Yes.

At this point, the image is in your project and you have configured it to be the background for this slide. Now let's outline how to configure the other slides to use this image.

First, note the slide number where you merged the image into the background of the slide.

1. In the Film Strip, select all the slides you wish to use the same background.
2. Right click the selected slides and click Properties... on the context menu.
3. Click the Change Background image... button on the Slide Properties dialog.
4. In the Backgrounds section, select "Slide X Background". (X represents the slide you noted earlier, where you merged the image into the background)
5. Click OK to dismiss the "Select Image from Library" dialog.
6. Click OK to dismiss the "Slide Properties" dialog.

Give that a go and see if it helps any. Hopefully it will!

Cheers... Rick

[rtbtat]

Hello Rick:

First, thanks for the detailed instructions which illustrate the fact that you are an instructor. I can say that with confidence because I'm a software trainer. The instructions appear to be crystal clear so I'll let you know if I have any problems when I try it later this morning.

Second, you wrote:
[First, I'll try to answer your question. You asked:
Why is this so difficult? You would think this would be a common request for Captivate users.

Of course, I have no clue as to your background and experience level with other applications, so I can't make any assumptions. But it could be that you simply aren't comfortable yet with applications such as Captivate. You may wish to consider attending some formal Captivate training? ]

I must disagree Rick. I thought my point was self evident, so let me try again. One's level of computer expertise shouldn't be the criteria, in fact, it should be irrelevant. I think this is something that would be fairly common, I know you can do it with other applications. In my opinion, one should be able to insert a .bmp file into a slide and there should be a menu choice whereby one could select, "Make this the background for the entire slide". It should be that easy, I shouldn't have to go through so many steps to do something, that on the surface, seems pretty routine. What do you think?

Robert

[Captiv8r]

Hi again Robert

I offer my sincere apologies if my explanation caused any grief. I certainly didn't mean for it to.

I think that more often than not, folks expect Captivate to operate very close to the way PowerPoint operates. I suspect a large part of this is because it has a "slide based" presentation similar to PowerPoint.

I know Captivate is a moving target and has evolved a lot from its early days when it was called FlashCam. So I'm guessing that as it evolves even further (and I'll be willing to bet that as new features are added in, some will claim it's "DE-volving") that it may indeed become very PowerPoint like. But at this point in time, it's primary purpose is to create eLearning. And to a very large degree, that is done by launching Captivate and recording what happens on the screen. As the recording takes place, each step along the way results in a screen capture. The screen capture becomes the background image attribute of each slide. As almost each of the backgrounds will be different, there really has been no need to do what you are suggesting.

But this doesn't mean it won't always be the case. As Captivate 3 has just begun shipping, I'm reasonably certain that the development team is probably working on the feature set of Captivate 4. So this would likely be a perfect time to submit this as a suggestion for a new feature. You may do this by clicking here and filling out the form.

Sincerely... Rick

[rtbtat]

Hi Rick:

You certainly didn't cause me any grief, we just had different opinions on the functionality of Captivate. I work with software applications all the time, and usually, one can tell when the developers thought about and/or solicited the input of users. Those applications have excellent help files, and more importantly, they make it easy to accomplish tasks by building in the type of functionality I mentioned earlier. In sum, the developers anticipate and/solicit the needs of their users and that's what differentiates outstanding software applications from the rest of the pack. I can think of two or three applications that do such.

So far I really like the primary purpose of Captivate you described earlier, capturing screen images as one demonstrates how to use an application. In fact, I think that's very cool. I don't know if it's better or less efficient than Camtasia, but it appears to be pretty good.

In my opinion Rick, even though it isn't the primary function of Captivate, a good development team would anticipate the need to do what I want. So I agree that my need may not be a primary one, but I think it's something so common that the development team should have implemented the feature. On the surface, it seems as if it would be pretty simple to add that capability.

Robert

[rtbtat]

Hi Rick:

I followed your steps to make an image fill the entire background and that seemed to work. However, when I tried to copy the background image to other slides, it did not work. I must have made a silly mistake when trying to do the latter. Nonetheless, I feel good about finally learning how to make an image fill the background. At least it seems to have worked.

Thanks so much for your help and now I'm going to see if I can duplicate my success a 2nd time. And then I'm going to troubleshoot the copy to other slides procedure to see what I did wrong.

Robert

[jasonf67051344]

This response is a decade old and doesn't seem to be useful on Captivate 9. 

[Lilybiri]

Whar do you want? I can lock this thread, I can delete it but there are still CP-users around with very old versions. This thread could be useful for them.

[jasonf67051344]

Thank you! and I understand. I did figure out the issue though after a little more investigation and tinkering a little after commenting so I think I am good now.

[LizAN-S]

When applyingh an image for the background, there appears to still be no way to set an image to "Fill slide" or "Fill screen" as you wold expect. Only "best fit" which leaves space at the sides/edges if the image is not the exect size and ratio of the slide. Bizarre.

[Lilybiri]

A thread dated 2007?

Do you really want to distort an image to fill the background? Which type of image do you use, probably bitmap. If it hasn't the same W/H ratio as the project, filling would mean a distortion. Just make the image bigger than the slide size so that it fills width and height without a distortion.