iPhoto 5: The Missing Manual, Fourth Edition

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 show—music and all—from 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 WORKSHOPSmall 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 ...