Slideshow Help - Beginner Question

[DJett]

:?:
I'm trying to create a VCD to send to grandparents and I've read where the quality isn't the best. Most of the pictures I'm working with have been cropped to 4x6 @ 300 dpi for printing purposes. When I view these pic's in Organizer's slide show they look acceptable for my purposes. When I then go to Creations and create a slide show, the pic's look terrible while viewing them on the computer monitor. The best way I know to describe the look is as though they have been over sharpened. Why is this? Do I need to change some settings? Do I need to reprocess every picture at a different resolution? If so, is there a quick way to do this? WIll they look OK once the VCD is created?

Thanks for your assistance to a beginner.

[TonyW]

For a VCD you would probably be better off cropping to the standard TV aspect ratio of 4x3 - 6x4 will give black bars top and bottom. VCD resolution (on NTSC) is only 352x240 so the quality isn't great but it should look better on a TV than on a monitor. You can do a lot better by making a DVD although that does need additional software (if you have a DVD burner you may already have it)

That being said I have made quite acceptable quality VCD's with Elements however I'm still not sure what it was I did right to get them. I've got to try some experiments and this time take notes of what I did :oops:

Tony

[GoTigers]

Tony,

You say that you need additional software to create a DVD. If I have a DVD drive on my computer, does Photoshop Elements not provide a way to create a DVD?

[MikeH]

Hi...

Elements only creates VCDs. You do need other software like Premiere Elements, Pro Show Gold, Nero to make a DVD...

Mike

[TonyW]

Just to add to what Mike said, PSE3 does include the capability to create wmv files from slide shows in the various formats you need to make VCD, SVCD, DVD etc but only includes the authoring software to create a VCD from the appropriate wmv file. My DVD burner came with Nero Express which will make VCD's and SVCD's and a Lite version of ULead Video Studio 7 which will make VCD's and DVD's from the appropriate wmv file. While neither has all the bells and whistles they do a reasonable job however I finished up getting Pro Show Gold since that has more slide show capabilities than PSE3.

So there are a lot of possibilities and it does get very confusing - I'm still looking for a good simple explanation of how it all works and haven't found one yet :cry:

Tony