New to PE and was wondering if there is a way to add borders to my images. I am trying to build a slide show, but when I play it on a dvd player, I lose about 5-10% around the edges. SO – I am hoping there is a way to add a border so what I am losing is "air" instead of captions.
I’m having trouble visualizing the problem, but that’s OK. I haven’t gotten into this DVD stuff yet. Would it work to increase the size of your image canvas – maybe put the images on a colored or black background?
You could play around with File>New, set it to a resolution to match that of your images, and then drag/drop your current image on top. You’d have to play with the numbers to get the right size canvas, but then you can place the image centered, have the top and bottom margins larger than the sides, or ???
I’ve obviously never tried this, but it might work. Or, the software you’re using just might resize everything and sabotage your efforts! Good luck. If this idea is worthless, repost and somebody else will come up with a different idea.
Since PE cannot produce slideshows that are TV compatible (unless I’m mistaken), you must be using another software to convert your PDF slideshow to TV standards… is that right? If so, you might have to resize your images before you put them in a slideshow. Post again with more details.
What KJKJ is experiencing is the overscanning that TVs do. TVs pretty universally cut off a minimum of 10% (the "action safe" area) to 20% (the "title safe" area) of the image.
In terms of computer-like square pixels (don’t ask; it’s a long story), North American & Japanese TVs (NTSC) have a display area of 640×480. So, not being nearly as good at PE as most people here, I *think* what you want to do is keep the canvas size the same, but decrease your image size by 20% (512×384). Then create a background layer of black or white, or some color. That would guarantee that everything on your image would display properly on a TV (within the title-safe area). You could also use PE to stretch it horizontally for the rectangular TV pixels, if your DVD software doesn’t do that for you. PE does a great job at that.
For folks here to help you better, you might want to mention where you are (or what TV standard you use: PAL or NTSC), whether you’re using Mac OS or Windows (and which version), and what software you’re using to create your DVD slideshows (iMovie, iDVD, MyDVD, DVDIt, etc.).
To prepare an image for inclusion in a video slide show, you can add "canvas" to your images in PE (Image > Resize > Canvas Size…) and give each image a 10 to 15 percent border. This should give your DVD slide show the elbow room it needs to account for the over scan on the TV.
Edit: Then you can use the "Save for Web" option to size the output to suit your slide show authoring software.
Raymond, that’s right, but that’s for TV’s rectangular pixels as opposed to your PC’s square pixels.
So, using NTSC DVD as an example, what you want to do is to crop/create an image at 640×480 pixels. Then when you’re done editing it, the last thing you do is resize it to 720×480 pixels. That will make it look horizontally stretched on your PC, but will make it look normal on a TV.
Most consumer programs (MyDVD, iDVD, Pinnacle Expression) will do this stretching for you. Not sure about Adobe’s new DVD editing program.
Unfortunately, the key to solving this problem is to "shoot for television". In other words, be aware that the television is going to "crop" your pictures and then make sure you allow for that. I worked in television back in the olden days (don’t ask). But that was always one of the challenges we faced when trying to use slides and video footage. I get so accustomed to cropping my photos so that they look good on the computer monitor and for printing, and I sometimes forget to allow for the loss around the edges if I’m preparing images for a video presentation. Just practice a lot. If you have a digital camera, I would just keep shooting some test images until you become comfortable with a shooting style that works for you.
KJKJ here – Thanks to everyone who offered advice & explanations!!
What I’m building is a family album dvd. I’m restoring scanned photos in PE and building the dvd in Roxio 6. (Roxio was little help with this problem, but let’s not go there.)
The idea is for family to be able to watch the slide shows (photos only w/ captions) on tv, since not everyone has dvd capabilities on their computers. (The whole family is in the states, so we won’t run into compatibility issues.) The upswing on the dvds would be that everyone would be able to print off their own copies of whatever photos they wanted.
Thanks again for the help! Looks like I have some great ideas with which to start. If anyone has anything further on this topic, feel free to add it on – I need any help I can get. :}
Beth & Kyle – I think you may have solved it with the canvas suggestions. Thanks so much. (And thanks Kyle for giving me the steps to do this as well!) I still need to do a "test disc" before I get too cocky here, since I’ve only played with one image, but I think this may be the problem.
While it does make the photo itself smaller, it’ll be so big on tv, I don’t think it will matter. A perk of this will also be that I can go even smaller (make the canvas larger) if necessary and add the captions below the image instead of superimposing them. This will be a nice touch since they could just be trimmed away from any photos people want to print. It’s hard to get that nice antique look about them with the Times Roman font splayed all over the bottom, you know? :} Also, sometimes the captions just don’t fit anywhere good on the photos, but I hate to leave them off since we will no longer have the option of flipping them over to see what’s written on the back.
Thanks again! I’ll work on this over the weekend and let you know how the test disc comes out.
Congratulations!! Now… How about posting what you did? You got several suggestions; what worked the best? Feel free to include sizes for us lazy people. 🙂
Raymond, yes it is confusing! TV pixels and PC pixels are not the same thing. They’re square on your computer monitor, but rectangular on a TV. A TV also can’t display as many colors as a computer, and has particular problems with pure blacks, whites, and reds. Luckily, most consumer DVD-making programs take care of all this stuff nowadays so you often don’t have to worry about it.
I’d love to post a before & after with this. Beth, I’ve never posted photos before, so let me figure this part out & I’ll let you know. (Neophytes! Don’t you love ’em!)
Yeah – I’m still catching up to this decade – but I’ve really gotten into all this so I can preserve the past in the best way I can find. I’m still so impressed each time I restore a photo on PE. To think what this was going to cost me just 10 years ago. The software has more than paid for itself.
K, you don’t really have to post photos – unless, of course, you’d like us to admire your work, which we’re very good at! I thought maybe you could tell what size canvas you chose, in comparison to image size. You worked really hard on that part, too! 🙂
That sounds good. I’m basically adding half an inch on the canvas size (top/bottom & side/side) regardless of the image size. I’m scanning all the photos and reducing the shorter side (be it vertical or horizontal…) to 1" before saving to a file.
The extra half inch canvas size gives me enough border around each image that the whole image is now viewable once I burn them to dvd and I’m no longer losing the edges when I play them on the tv. I like that I can add my captions below the images now. It’s making for a much cleaner look. If I have a bigger caption (2 lines) I make the top/bottom canvas width just a tenth of an inch or two more so as to not lose the caption upon burning.
I’ve also liked that I can change the canvas color to enhance whatever the image may be (black for high key photos… white for darker ones…). Trying to keep it all fairly straight forward though – don’t want to overwhelm the slideshow with added jazz, you know??
Again, I can’t thank you enough for the suggestions. It was the one missing key to really pulling off this project.
One more foot note on this. As I am doing photos that need larger captions (many people, descriptions necessary, lots of info…) I have to make the vertical portion of the canvas larger to fit in all the writing. Since, the photo is centered on the canvas, the top portion (where I am not writing) is also large. Once I get all my writing done, and I use the crop tool to then frame around how I want the finished image to look. Thus – the photo is now more to the top of the canvas. It doesn’t look so dorky now that I have chopped off the top and I still have enough space for the captions.
I’m sure there is a faster PE way to move the photo up, but I don’t know the step, and this also crops off the extra bit of canvas I don’t need.
