Digital Photography: The Missing Manual

Simple Slideshows in Elements

Like digital photos themselves, digital slideshows come in many different flavors and formats. When you view a slideshow on a site like Kodak EasyShare Gallery, you’re looking at a Web page. Some programs, like PhotoShow, save slideshows as a video file.

Photoshop Elements gives you two options: A super-simple PDF slideshow and an elaborate custom slideshow (think Ken Burns), which you can read about in Section 17.3. Elements’ Simple Slide Show is easy to assemble and you can email it to anyone, regardless of operating system, since all computers these days can run Adobe Acrobat or another free PDF-viewing program. The Simple option is great when you’ve already edited your photos in Elements and just need a quick way to share them. The resulting PDF is impressive, but you can’t edit your photos during the creation process, add music, or control the transitions between slides. (The Custom Slide Show, on the other hand, lets you edit away to your heart’s content before you finalize your slideshow.)

Emailing a PDF slideshow is almost as easy as emailing a single photo. In fact, you create the slideshow right in Elements’ email window:

1. In the Organizer, select the photos you want to put into a slideshow. Then, in the Shortcuts bar, choose Share → E-mail, or press Ctrl+Shift+E.

   Actually, you can even start by choosing just one photo, since you can add and remove photos in the Attach to E-Mail window as shown in Figure 17-4.

   Tip

   If your photos are widely ...