PREPARING YOUR PHOTOS

This will be my first post in how to make a DVD slide show.  You can see the results of my most recent production in my last post.  Hopefully this will be helpful to anyone that desires to make a slide show in the future, as well as a reference for me to look back on and remember how to do this the next time I want to make one!  I decided to use a lot of screenshots in order to make it easier for people to follow along, so this may end up being a pretty long series.

First, scanning in pictures.  This is one of the easiest parts of the whole process but is important nonetheless.  I'm sure professionals would understand image quality and video resolutions better than I do, but I will simply explain the process that I went through.  First, it is important to know the final destination of your pictures.  In my case, this was a DVD for viewing by players in the U.S.  U.S. players use the NTSC format which has a resolution of 720x480.  For all of you digital camera folks, this is less than 1 Megapixel.  Surprised?  Think about it this way:  when you're watching TV, you're usually sitting 10 to 15 feet away from the screen.  When you're so far away from the TV, it is hard to notice such big differences.  Anyway, my main point is that for the purpose of producing a DVD slide show, resolutions higher than 720x480 don't help much.

For scanning, cropping, and touching up pictures, I downloaded a free trial of Adobe Photoshop.  For what I was doing, this was overkill, but I saw it as a fun opportunity to play with some of the fancier features of photo editing.  So I was able to get rid of sticky tape marks on the pictures, remove red-eye, and even remove a person who was walking in the background of one of the pictures.  Once you get your pictures scanned in, retouched, and cropped, the next step is to resize them to the proper resolution.  Microsoft Office Pictures Manager has a convenient feature that can resize 100s of pictures all at once, so I did this to resize all my pictures to 800x600.  Once you have all your pictures resized, it is helpful to rename them numerically in the order that you will want them displayed in the slide show.  This will make importing them in order much simpler.

Resizing pictures

Well, that's step one!  Next I'll blog about how to take these pictures and put the video together.