Posted on by Matthew

New Release: Theater Add-on for Backlight

Backlight’s Theater Add-on is now available in early-access. The Theater Add-on is Backlight’s successor to CE4 Stage.

By early-access, we mean that the add-on offers only a limited number of presentation types, with additional presentations, features and refinements planned for future updates.

At present, the presentation types available include (linked to demonstrations):

The Theater Add-on is available for $25 USD, and can be purchased from under the “Add-ons” section of the Backlight Store page. If the current version supports presentations that you will use, then buy it now; you’re waiting on a presentation type from CE4 Stage that is not yet supported, then do not buy the Theater Add-on. Tell us in the forum what you’re waiting for, keep an eye on our news feed, and buy the Theater Add-on when that presentation type, or an equivalent replacement, appears in an update.

Upgrade pricing is available for owners of CE4 Stage. I have updated existing orders to include discount codes, and have sent notifications, so check your email to claim them.

  • For purchases on or before January 31, 2016, click the link in your email or lookup your order by email address and order number; you will find the discount in the attached TXT file.
  • For purchases newer than February 1, 2016, click the link in your email or recover your orders to your email address; the discount TXT file is inside the zipped CE4 Stage package, so unzip the download to access.

For those of you curious about the name change, and why I’ve opted not to call this the Stage Add-on, some background. When I first created the Stage plugin for Lightroom, Flash-based image galleries were all the rage. I had created a number of Lightroom plugins for popular Flash galleries, and Stage was conceived as a companion piece, to create embed pages with branding, navigation and such, things that were generally missing from the Flash gallery components. So you’d set the stage, then bring on the players. Nowadays, Flash is essentially dead, our product is less about creating embed shells for external players, and presentations are built-in. Over time, the product has evolved from a playhouse into a theater. Ta-da!

So please, check out the demonstrations, and purchase if you like what you see. Let us know in the forum what’s working for you, or if something isn’t; let us know also which presentation types you’re keen to have sooner than others.

For the full-screen presentation, you will also need to create a full-screen page template, so we have that documentation prepared for you. It’s easy to do, and the full-screen presentation works nicely as a Home page!