Photoshop Elements 8 for Windows: The Missing Manual

Slideshows

Online albums are about the easiest way you'll find to make fancy slideshows to share with people in other places, but maybe you want more control than they give you, or maybe you want to add features like music or panning and zooming over your photos, à la Ken Burns. Elements makes it easy to create very slick little slideshows—some even with music and transitions between the images—that you can play on your PC or send to your friends.

By using the Slide Show feature, you can make really 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.

PDF slideshows are really straightforward to create, and look quite impressive, but you can't add audio to them or control how your slides transition. On the plus side, you can send a PDF slideshow to anyone, regardless of what operating system that person uses. As long as your recipients have Adobe Reader or another PDF-viewing program, they can watch your show.

The Slide Show Editor, on the other hand, lets you indulge your creativity big time. You can add all sorts of snazzy transitions, mix in sound (background music or narration), add clip art, pan around your slides, and more. It's a bit more complex to work with the Slide Show Editor than to make a PDF, but the real drawback to the Slide Show Editor comes in your choices for the final output. The slideshow file you create isn't as universally compatible as PDF slideshows, as ...