8. Making Prints

7.7. Slideshows and iDVD

If you have a Mac equipped with a DVD-burning Super Drive, you have yet another slide show option: In stead of running a presentation directly from iPhoto, you can send your slide showmusic and allfrom iPhoto to iDVD, Apple's simple DVD-authoring software. Using iDVD, you can transform the pictures from your album into an interactive slideshow that can be presented using any DVD player. (Just picture the family clicking through your photos on the big-screen TV in the den!)

WORKAROUND WORKSHOP
Small Photos, Big Show

You can't control the size of your pictures as they appear during a slideshow, as they always fill the screen. To ensure that the results look professional, you must make sure all your photos are sized to fill the screen properly, as mentioned earlier in this chapter.

But what if you're stuck with photos that simply aren't big enough? Suppose you're charged with putting together a slideshow for the family reunion, and the only pictures you have of Uncle Rodney happen to be scanned photos that are only 640 x 480 pixels?

You can't cut Rodney out of the slideshow, but at the same time, you know Aunt Lois won't take kindly to having her husband appear onscreen hideously distorted . ("Why does Rod look so jagged?" you can imagine her saying. "What did you do to him?") Here's one simple way to display smaller photos in a slideshow and keep everyone happy:

Using a program like Graphic Converter or Photoshop Elements, create a new document that's exactly the right size for your screen. If your monitor's set to 1024 x 768 pixels, create a document that's 1024 x 768 pixels. Fill the background of the blank document so that it's black, to match the black between slides. (Actually, you can use whatever background you like.)

Now open the small photo that you want to include in your slideshow. Paste a copy of it into the center of your blank document. Save the results and then import the image file into iPhoto.

You now have a new picture, perfectly sized for your slideshow. Your small photo will appear onscreen at the proper size, with a black border around it. No, the photo won't fill the screen, but at least it will appear just as clear and distortion-free as the larger photos.

Learn how to perform the iPhoto-to-iDVD conversion in Chapter 12.

UP TO SPEED
How Big Is My Monitor?

To know if your photos are large enough to be displayed distortion-free on your monitor, you first must know how many pixels it takes to fill your screen.

And to know that, you need to know your screen's resolution. Choose System Preferences, and open the Displays panel. In the Resolutions list, youll find all the resolutions that your monitor can handle, with the current resolution highlighted. If the selection says, for example, 1024 x 768, you know that photos must be at least 1024 pixels by 768 pixels to fill your screen without iPhoto having to stretch them to fit.