Photoshop Elements 4: The Missing Manual

Slideshows

Elements makes it easy to create very slick little slideshows—some even with music and fancy transitions between the images—that you can play on your PC or send to your friends. Elements 4 ships with a new Custom Slide Show feature, which lets you make extremely elaborate slideshows. If you prefer the simple life, you can quickly create a plain vanilla PDF slideshow in about as much time as it takes to email a photo.

The PDF slideshow is super simple to create, and looks quite impressive, but you can't add audio to it or control how your slides transition. On the plus side, you can send a PDF slideshow to anyone, regardless of what operating system she uses. As long as your recipients have Adobe Reader or another PDF-viewing program, they can watch your show.

The Custom Slide Show, on the other hand, lets you indulge your creativity to your heart's content. You can add all sorts of fancy transitions, mix in sound in the form of background music or narration, add clip art, pan around your slides, and more. It's a bit more complex to work with the Custom Slide Show window than the PDF one, but the real drawback to the Custom Slide Show comes in your choices for the final output. The Custom Slide Show isn't as universally compatible as the PDF slideshow, as explained below.

Note

If you plan to create a simple PDF slideshow, you need to do all your photo editing beforehand, since the Simple Show just sends your photos as is. The Custom Slide Show, on the other hand, lets ...