I apologize for the confusing formating of yesterday’s post. I tried to send the formatting I laid out in Word to my blog, but somewhere along the way the step numbering got messed up. I’ve since cleaned it up a bit.

Also, I’ll have more to say about this in the next installment, but for now, make sure you do the following. When you begin to make your slide show in the Organizer’s Slide Show Editor, set the flag to crop landscape pictures in the Slide Show Preferences dialog box.

Until next time,

Don

It is relatively straight forward to make a slide show in Photoshop Elements and then the using its output as the input to your DVD burning program to end up with a DVD that plays on your widescreen television. The only problem is the final image on your screen will have borders. Generally, we are more than willing to accept this so as not to compromise our initial composition, especially if our pictures include a lot of portrait mode images.

If we are willing to recompose/crop our images, and accept the fact that those that remain in portrait mode will have borders, we can end up with a DVD that will present the slide show utilizing the full 16:9 aspect ratio screen. It does require several steps to do this, but none of the steps are that difficult.

I will assume you are using one of the later versions of PSE to make your slide show. For most of the steps, I’ll assume you know how to do the details. My purpose is to concentrate on the steps and their sequence. We’ll cover the first several steps in this post. In a later post, I’ll discuss burning the DVD.

1. Select the pictures that you want to include in your slide show. If your basic order in your slide show is going to be in sequence by time, make sure you are viewing your pictures in the Organizer by Oldest First.
   
2. Put them into a new Album and then adjust their order as needed.
   
3. Select all of the pictures in your slide show and then click File > Export on the Menu bar. The Export dialog box shown below will open.
   

4. Enter the following information:

• File Type = JPEG
  
• Photo Size = Custom > 1920×1080 (Full HD Resolution)
  
• Quality = 12
  
• Location = Browse to/make the folder where you want to save these images. This is a temporary folder that you can delete using Windows Explorer after you have burned your DVD.
  
• Filenames = Select Common Base Name; type in the desired name
  
• Click Export. The pictures will be copied and renamed at this point.
  

5.  We are going to crop the pictures to a 16:9 ratio using Microsoft’s Photo Gallery. Photo Gallery comes with Vista. If you are using Windows XP, Photo Gallery Live can be downloaded for free. It has the same capability we will be using.
6.  Open Photo Gallery and navigate the folder you just exported the images to. Select all of the pictures to make things go as quickly as possible.

7. .  On the Menu bar click on Fix. Then in the right pane select Crop Picture > Custom > 16:9. Now adjust the size and position to accommodate the desired and possible composition. I usually make the rectangle as large as I can first and then move it within the image get the composition I want. Click Apply and then the left point arrow in the viewer to advance to the next image.
 

8.  Repeat Step 7 for all of your pictures.
9.  Now go back to PSE and import the cropped/sized images into your Catalog using File > Get Photos and Videos > Files and Folders. You may want to make a second Album, but you don’t really need to. However, you will want to give this group of photos a Tag so you can quickly archive or delete them later when your DVD slide show is totally done.
10.  Now make your slide show using the Slide Show Editor in the normal way.
This concludes the workflow or steps for this installment. In a future post, I’ll cover outputting the slide show from the Slide Show Editor and then actually burning the final DVD.

By not only cropping the images to the 16:9 aspect ratio, but also significantly reducing their file size, the follow-on steps to actually burn the DVD with a video editing program will go much more smoothy. In fact, for long slide shows, working with these smaller images may be the only way your computer will be able to complete the task. However there is something to remember. Do not reduce the file size for those pictures you are planning to zoom in real close using the pan/zoom feature of the Slide Show Editor. For best quality you want to retain all of the pixels possible.

Until next time, take care.

Don

This post was prompted by a student’s question. She had a group of pictures she had added captions using Photoshop Elements. She wanted to make a CD for a friend that would contain the pictures and their captions. The problem was that using Share >  CD/DVD did copy the captions, but they were not visible using Windows XP Explorer.  The captions are there, but not easily seen by Windows Explorer. She knew she could make  a slide show that would display her captions and would even allow her to adjust their style and location. But she did not want to go to that trouble.

To be honest, after exchanging a couple of emails, I failed to give her a better way to do what she wanted than to make a slide show. Later it struck me that there was at least one alternative. Make an Online Album and save it to a CD. We generally do not cover this in my classes. Maybe we should, and I might include it in the future.

For now, I decided to make a video tutorial showing how to make the CD and then effectively play it back. The video runs for about 19 minutes. To watch the video, Click Here. After several seconds, it should begin to play. If you have trouble viewing it let me know by posting a comment below.

By the way, those of you reading this who are former students, both the South Bay Adult School and Torrance Adult Center are beginning formulate their plans for the fall term. I should have some news with regards to the classes I will be teaching at the two schools in a couple of weeks or so.  Stay tuned.

Until next time,

Don

Those of you that just finished the photo editing class at Torrance Griffith Adult Center remember we made a very simple photo collage consisting of only two photos and a background image. The key technique we used to blend the photos together was to borrow the Layer Mask that is part of an Adjustment Layer and apply it to a normal layer. PSE does not have the capability to apply masks to normal image layers like Photoshop CS4.

Expanding the technique to more pictures and making a more interesting collage is possible, but it would take a fair amount of time. The process is only slightly shortened if you use a plug-in that directly gives PSE Layer Masks for normal image layers. By the way we do deal with such plug-ins in the Advanced Editing classes I teach.

But there is a much easier way thanks to Microsoft’s Research Labs. They have created a program called AutoCollage 2008, and it’s free to download. Here is the link to its home page.

            http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/cambridge/projects/autocollage/

There is a link there to download the program, which is Version 1.1 now. It is very easy to use. After you start the program, you basically just select your images and it does the rest. You do not have very much control of the placement, but you are done in a couple of minutes. One thing I did learn about using it is to avoid select portrait mode images. The program tends to rotate these, which normal you would not want to do.

I find this program to be very useful for making title slides for slide shows and videos. Using it for that, I just select a few of the pictures from the slide show. If you are using PSE, you can use the File > Export command to copy your chosen pictures to a temporary folder. Run AutoCollage using the pictures from that folder, and then delete them after you are done. Remember, since you used the Export command, they were copies that PSE disowned once they were copied. The originals are untouched. Below is an example from a recent slide show I made.

Until next time,

Don

Did you ever own a Disc Negative camera? In the 80s and for a few years, Kodak had a line of cameras that put  very small negatives onto a circular disk that resembles an old ViewMaster disk. Each disk had 15 pictures spaced around its circumference.

I had one of those cameras for awhile and ran across a few disks today. The negatives are so small, I could not even tell what was in the pictures. I first Googled to see if there are services that would transfer the images to a CD or at least print them. There are few places. My first thought was to send the disks I found today and have all of their images transferred to a CD.

I immediately went to Plan B once I discovered how mach that would cost. From my quick research, it appears that it would cost about $20 per Negative Disc. Here is the link to one company that provides such a service.

   http://www.pixmonix.com/110-126-disc-disk-negative-scanning.php

My Plan B was to scan the disks with my Epson V500 scanner. I put the disk into one of the larger negative holders that came with the scanner and used Vuescan to do the actual scanning.

Here is what a single frame scan looks like.

After cropping, straightening, etc in PSE 7, I was able to isolate images that are about the size from a 1-2 Mp camera. However, the quality is nowhere near that. The images will make a 4×6 print with reasonable quality and size wise are suitable for PC screen display or slide show DVDs. Below is an example of one of the pictures after enhancing it in PSe 7.

Now that I know how to do it, I will see what is on the other Disc Negatives I d found.

Until next time,

Don

Photoshop Elements has an easy to use Slide Show Editor that is really quite powerful. One of its features is the ability to apply pans and zooms to your still images, commonly called the Ken Burns Effect. Many other slide show programs also include this feature, for example Photo Story 3 by Microsoft. However, I find PSE’s very easy to use, so it is my personal choice for making slide shows.

One of the prime ways I use to share the pictures I take is to make a slide show, and then burn it to a DVD for viewing on a widescreen high definition television. PSE cannot actually burn the DVD, but it can produce a video file that can then be imported to a typical video editing program for the burning of the DVD. If you also have Premiere Elements, there is even a more direct way to produce the DVD that is compatible with players attached to your TV.

However, what has been somewhat frustrating, is PSE, even PSE 7, does not directly support producing borderless wide screen or 16:9 aspect ratio .wmv files. It does support producing DVD quality .wmv for standard 4:3 aspect ratio DVDs. Questions on how to do this with PSE frequently come up on user forums. The following link is to a recent discussion on this topic.

http://www.adobeforums.com/webx?128@@.59b73505

After participating in some of these discussions and trying various experiments with PSE 7, I have come up with a series of steps that at least work for me for making a .wmv file in the Slide Show Editor of PSE which can then be imported to a video editing program for burning the DVD which will be borderless when viewed on a high definition widescreen TV.  True there is certain level of loss quality that results from making the intermediate .wmv file, but frankly I can’t see it, the final results look great on my wide screen TV.

Ok, with that as a background here is what I did.

• Resize/Crop the slide show images to a 16:9 aspect ratio. I used 1920×1080 pixels.

This not only gets the images to the right aspect ratio, but it tremendously reduces the image file size which will make rendering the slide show movie a lot easier and quicker. You do not need anything near your camera’s image resolution to produce a high quality DVD.

• Put a checkmark in the Landscape option in the Slide Show Preferences dialog.

When you start a new slide show the Slide Show Preferences dialog pops up. See the figure below. As it turned out, this was the key to producing a borderless DVD.

•  After you have designed your slide show, and are ready to share/produce or output it, select Output > Send to TV > Widescreen High Definition (720p) to produce the .wmv file.

This is not the recommended output format for producing DVDs as described in the slide show editor.

• Open Premiere Elements (PRE) or another DVD burning program such as those from Nero or Roxio etc, and import the .wmv video file from the above step.
•  In PRE Burn the DVD using the WS 720p preset. Similar profiles are presumably in other DVD burning programs.

 The advantage of the above approach is all of the transitions, pan/zoom effects etc that were easily generated in the PSE  Slide Show Editor are maintained.

 I still have some details to work out regarding things like how to handle portrait images, what if the images are not cropped to a 16:9 aspect ratio, and how best to handle extreme zooms.  But at least the above process results in a very good quality DVD that plays on my widescreen TV without the borders.

Until next time.

I just realized that it has been some time since I have posted anything. I get involved with so many projects time flies by. Recently, I have been rediscovering PDF slide shows that can be produced from the Slide Show Editor in Photoshop Elements. I use the Slide Show Editor a lot, but generally use it as the first step for making a DVD for TV viewing.

Normally I do not output the PSE slide show to a PDF file. Reading their basic restrictions stated in the Slide Show Editor’s Output Command basically turned me off. They do not support video files, pan and zoom, and some transitions. It finally registered that there was no mention of music not being supported. I often include background music in my slide shows and generally don’t associate a PDF file with music. Well, apparently the PDF file has gained a lot of additional versatility over the years. 

I have been experimenting with various formats and picture sharing sites to display some photos from a camping trip last summer. I decided to give the PDF file slide show a try. After the completing the slide show, click on the OUTPUT button as shown in the figure below. Then select PDF in the dialog box.

The image size in the PDF file can range from 640×480 up to 1600×1200 pixels. I have tried 800x 600 and 640×480. The 800×600 size looks good on a monitor set for 1024×768 when displayed full screen. The 640×480 is somewhat soft. My particular show included about 40 images with background music and runs for four and one-half minutes. The 800×600 pixel version had a file size of 15.3 Mb, while the smaller one required 12.4 Mb. You probably want to keep the file size down to less than 10 Mb if you are planning on emailing your slide show, and that is assuming they have a high speed Internet connection and are interested in seeing your presentation.

To me the big advantage of saving and distributing slide shows in PDF format is that almost everyone has the capability to view your show, even if they are using a Mac. Also, if you post the file you can easily move it from one host to another. Right-Click here to download and view the 800×600 version of my PDF slide show. Or you can left-click on the the link to view it online. Doing it this way, the first image will display and the music will begin to play. But you will have to click your mouse button to advance the images.

All recent versions of Photoshop Elements support saving slide shows in PDF format. You may need to update your free Adobe Reader (formally Acrobat Reader) to hear the music etc. I will be using this output more and more in the future. Give it a try. I think you will like it also.

Until next time – hopefully not long.

Don

Well, I just realized that it has been quite some time since I updated my blog. That is not how bogs are supposed to work. At any rate, I just returned from my Norwegian Cruise Lines Western Mediterranean Cruise. Everything went well and I came back with a load of pictures. Fortunately for my students there are a several that make great starting points for class exercises. They have real problems that Photoshop Elements (PSE) can fix. I have another guest lecture gig coming up in mid-December that I am looking forward to now.

For any of my students who happen to read this, I still do not know my fall schedule for either school. My web site still shows the spring schedule. Once I do, I will update the web site and also send out my usual email for those on my distribution list.

One of the reasons I have not added a new entry here is that my discussion of converting catalogs from older versions of PSE to PSE 6 attracted some comments that I tried address. Even with the number of excellent books available for PSE, none really discuss the details of working with the Organizer mode of the program. I really believe there is a market for such a book. What do you think?

Using the Gray Eyedropper in Levels to Correct Color – With a Twist

Those of you who have taken my photo editing classes know that I am a big user of the Levels command and its use on an Adjustment Layer. In the more advanced class we learn about how to use the gray eyedropper to help correct the color balance by clicking on something in the photo that should be a shade of gray. But what if there is nothing in the image that is neutral gray? How many of us shoot a test shot with a gray card in the scene?

I learned a new twist to this technique from the free e-magazines available from www.photographybb.com. I think it was in Issue No. 2. By the way, this web site has a wealth of information and is an excellent source for free actions that run on PSE. The article that I adapted my approach from discusses  several techniques to correct color.

I have been using the approach outline below that is based on the discussion in the above article to work with some of my problem photos from my cruise. Here are the basic steps.

1. Duplicate the Background.
2. On the Background Copy layer, click on Filter > Blur Average. That layer now takes on the color cast of the photo. Well balanced photos will be gray.
3. Select the Eyedropper Tool from the Tool Box and sample the Background Copy Layer, setting the Foreground Color Swatch to the sampled color.
4. Delete the Background Copy layer.
5. Open the Levels command on an Adjustment Layer.
6. Click on the Gray Eyedropper in the Levels dialog.
7. Click on the Foreground Color swatch – the top square at the bottom of the Tool Box. The color cast should be removed.
8. Click on the Auto button within the dialog box to set the white and black points for proper contrast.
9. If required you can use the middle sliders in the Levels command dialog box to fine tune the brightness, contrast, and color of the image. However, I have found that for a large number of my pictures, the Auto button is all I need.

I do not use the above steps for all of my photos, only those that have a definite color cast. When they do, I have been using it recently, instead of adjusting the sliders on the red, green, and blue color channels. Below is a before and after example. This photo was taken of the Italian countryside on the way to Florence through the tour bus widow.

Here is the original. A definite green color cast is evident.

Still not that great of a photo, but at least it is worth keeping now.

Try this technique and see what you think. It is working pretty well for me.

Until next time,

Don

I am getting ready to participate in our neighborhood’s annual garage sale. It is a big event in the local area. It’s well publicized and people seem to come from everywhere. You have to be very careful coming and going to your home, because people and cars are everywhere on the neighborhood streets.

One of the items I was preparing to sell on eBay or include in my garage sale list was an old slide duplicator attachment made for a RCA video camera I had in the early 80s. I sold the camera many years ago in a previous garage sale. I had never really used the attachment, because the quality of the slides as recorded on the video tape was so poor it was not worth the effort. The technology was not ready for what I wanted to do. By the way, this attachment was for a video camera that recorded onto a standard VHS video tape, so you can imagine how bulky and heavy the camera was.

The attachment itself is an RCA Model FSA 036A Slide Adapter that originally cost $100. Mine looks brand new and is still in its original box with all of the packing material, included the plastic bags holding some of the accessories – some unopened. The kit includes the basic slide adapter itself, a filter, filter size adapters, and slide holders for 35 mm and at least 110 mm film strips as well as a slide holder.

In my garage sale preparation, I also ran across an unopened package of GAF Pana-Vue slides of the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway. Over the years they had deteriorated to the point where the image was almost pure red. At first I thought I would try to see what I could do with them in Photoshop Elements. But I quickly discovered they would not fit my 35 mm slide scanner. They were a bit too big, which probably explains why the package was never opened.

As I was getting the slide adapter ready for sale, I thought I would see if could be attached to my Canon XTi Rebel. Not only did it fit, I did not even have to use any of the filter size adapters that were part of the slide adapter kit. I also found that its slide holder was able to accommodate a slide slightly larger than the standard 35 mm size. With now preparation whatsoever, I attached the slide adapter to the Rebel, put in a tramway slide and, pointed the camera out the window, and took the picture. Some cropping/vignetting occurred. But it worked.

I now had a reasonable good copy of a badly damaged non-standard slide. I uploaded the picture to Photoshop Elements 6.0, and quickly found that not only was color gone, there were a lot of spots etc presumably caused by some sort of fungus, I guess. At any rate, I used Levels to bring back the color, the Healing Brush and Spot Healing Brush to fix the worst stains, and sharpened it a bit.

The result is shown below. This by no means is a good picture, but the improvement was dramatic.

Here is the XTi original.

It now looks like this.

There are four more pictures of the tram. Based on these results, I will try to salvage each of them. I have some old odd sized negatives that I might be able to do something similar to using the slide adapter. Needless to say, it will not be part of my garage sale items. In fact the slide adapters position in life has been raised from being stored on the shelf in the garage to now residing inside the house.

Until next time,

Don

PS Don’t hesitate to leave a comment. It seems that is the only way that I can tell if anyone has read the article.

Most of my digital photography classes cover Photoshop Elements pretty much exclusively. However, I teach a photo projects class that uses Photoshop Elements, Movie Maker 2, and Photo Story 3. One of the things I try to emphasize in my class is that you may want to develop your multi-media presentation using two or more programs making use of their individual strengths and features.

I was loaned a panorama photograph of my high school class taken in 1963. It showed some signs of wear and I wanted to get it into the computer and ultimately record it on a DVD that we could play back at our reunion next October. I shared my basic steps with my class, and decided it might have some value posting them here.

Since, the panorama was too large and would require it to be scanned in sections, I decided to use my Rebel XTi to capture the image. I really did not take a lot of pains taking the pictures. I leaned the photo against the back cushion of the couch, put my camera on a tripod and quickly took three overlapping images. An Example of one of the images is shown below.

I then used the Photomerge Panorama feature of Photoshop Elements 6 to stitch the pictures together. Staying with PSE 6, I cropped and straightened the picture. Then I used primarily its LEVELS  command to adjust the brightness/contrast and finally sharpened it using the UNSHARP MASK command. The final image size was 7200×1846 pixels. I had to reduce the size slightly from its original size, because 7200 pixels is the largest dimension Photo Story 3 allows.

Although, PSE 6 has a very capable slide show editor that includes a pan/zoom capability, I wanted to do my pan and zooming with Photo Story 3, because of its ability to handle large image sizes allowing me to really zoom in on the panorama. It is a bit more difficult to continue a pan/zoom from one image to the next in Photo Story 3 than in PSE 6 where you simply click to add each picture. I used eight copies of the panorama to get the zoom and pan I wanted.

About the time I was beginning to put the finishing touches on my project, I received my weekly newsletter from PapaJohn. In this issue, he discussed how to make a countdown clock you often see at the beginning of a film using PS 3. His technique also included how to add images to the spinning pinwheel. After a little bit of trouble, I succeeded making my own countdown clock customized for my project.

By the way, PapaJohn has a fabulous web site that not only covers Photo Story 3 and Movie Maker 2 extensively but has a wealth of information regarding related aspects of video production.

I then used PSE 6 to make a title slide for my project. I used Movie Maker 6 (Vista’s version of Movie Maker 2) to assemble all of the pieces, the countdown clock, title slide, the pan/zoom of the photo itself, background music, and final panorama  image, and then render the final .wmv file needed for the DVD. I used Nero to actually burn the DVD.

The final photo story is about 3-1/2 minutes long. you can see a low resolution version by clicking here. Even this small size version is approximately 3.9 Mb.

This was a fun project that was really not that hard. I do think I can do a better job on the background music and will make another version with different music and blending. Here is a small size version of the basic photo that I used for panning and zooming.

Until Next time,

Don