Adobe Captivate 5: Affected by Effects

by Kevin Siegel

How many times have you wanted to make Captivate slide objects animate like you can do in PowerPoint (you know, make an image fly in, flip, rotate, follow a path... the standard stuff you've been able to do since the dawn of time in PowerPoint)? And how many times have you been stymied when it comes to adding effects because well, Captivate simply did not offer the feature. Did you notice I said did not? That's right, the new Adobe Captivate 5 offers effects... and not just a few vanilla effects. Captivate 5 features so many effects, we just might have to offer a dedicated class just to cover them all.

Add an Effect

During the steps that follow, I'll show you how to add a few simple Effects to an image (but keep in mind that you can add an Effect to just about any slide object and you can combine Effects).

1. Right-click the image and choose Apply Effect.
   
   
2. On the Effects tab, which is new to Adobe Captivate 5 and is grouped by default with the Timeline, click the Add Effect button (the button is very small and is located in the lower-left of the Effects panel).
   
   
   
   Shown below is the full Effects menu available to you in Adobe Captivate 5. Each menu has several effects.
   
   
   
   
3. In the screen capture below, notice that I've added an image and positioned it at the far left of the slide. Then I selected Entrance > Fly In > Fly In From Right.
   
   The slide position of the image is important. As the image performs the Effect, the image will fly in from the far right of the slide and stop at the designated slide position.
   
   
   
   
4. When you add Effects, the effect appears on the Effects panel (as mentioned above, the Effects panel is new in Adobe Captivate 5 and grouped with the Timeline). In the screen capture below, notice that I have also added a Glow effect.
   
   
   
   
   
   You can easily control which effect occurs first (in the screen capture above, the Fly In From Right effect will occur first, followed by the Glow effect). All you will need to do to reverse the effect is drag the objects left or right on the Effects panel (just like controlling the timing of objects on the Captivate Timeline).
   
   Two final things, but I think they are both kind of cool. First, many of the Effects will have Properties you can edit. In the screen capture above, the Glow Effects include Blur and Strength properties. Second, there is a Save icon (the little disk) on the Effects panel that will allow you to save your Effects for future use.
   

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Looking to learn Captivate? We have a couple of options... we offer two online classes (Beginner and Advanced). Click here for details on the Beginner class. Click here for details on the Advanced class. We also have a 3-hour class devoted to Advanced Actions. Click here to learn more about that class.

Comments

[Ryan Tracey]

Is Captivate becoming Flash for non-Flash developers?

[wheat]

You can extend Captivate projects with Widgets, which are created in Flash. So having some experience with Flash development can be really helpful for developing in Captivate.