backtoafrica

Morning,

Well, i am in the process of creating a DVD of my pics from my recent time in africa. Can anbody offer me advice on how to get my images sharp on the screen. Im converting my pictures to srgb and using MYDVD at the moment but have just ordered pinnacle studio. Will that make any difference. Anyone experienced in such matters.

HELP ME PLEASE

PHiri

cary999

Well, maybe I can help a little. But I'm no expert, just what I've learned over a few years. Sharpness - the TV, standard NTSC (or PAL) picture, is gross compared to your PC and the pictures you have. Unless you have a true High Definion (HD) set, 1024x768 or better. But even then your standard DVD player is NOT HD so were right back to crummy NTSC format. However, there are HD DVD players available and if you have one great. I do not have any experince with them yet. Maybe someone in this group has and can give us a comparison.
Most all DVD players will "play" jpg pictures. You do know what jpg pictures are, yes? You just copy the jpgs onto the DVD. Pop it in your DVD player and probably a menu will come up listing each jpg. Press the "play" button and an automatic slide show will begin. At least that is what happens with the two DVD players I have. Now, if you intend to show the DVD on a PC, that's different, but I think WIndows XP will help you along.
With Pinnacle you can do a lot more such as; slide titles, fade in/out with full control of timing, individual slide timing, background music, music timed with slides, color correction of slides, insert movie/video clips, and at least a hundred more. No, I have not used Pinnacle but it is well regarded. I have started, Sept this year, using the program "ProShow Gold" to put together a slide program. It works really easy and can do lots of neat things like Pinnacle.
You probably already know, for DVDs use the re-writable kind, DVD-RW or DVD+RW, to play on until you get your "keeper show".
Merry Christmas - Tom

Pumbavu

As long as your initial images are "crisp" then the should be crisp on the screen. The resolution of a digital photo should be much higher than your TV could achieve.

In Paintshop pro I sometimes add "sharpness" and sometimes a bit of saturation... although I've been known to over do that a bit!

backtoafrica

hi Tom,

Merry crimbo to you too. Thanks for the advice. All my RAW images i converted into 16 bit TIFFS so that could be my downfall. I will try with the old Jpgs and play with my colour space too. ALthough Photoshop helps with the NTSC colour filter, i cant alot of help.

Many thanks
Mr Phiri

Kavey

I convert all my RAW files to TIFFS too but I only save the output as 8 bit files. I'm saving RAW versions too so I could always run the conversion through again if I need higher bit depth for any reason later.

As TIFF is a lossless format it's the best accessible way of storing my images for all purposes - printing, selling etc.

NOTE: When saving TIFF files you can apply LZW compression - this compression is NOT lossy - no data is lost at all.

However, for sharing images, JPEG is probably better. However it's compression IS lossy and every time an image is opened, edited and resaved more data is lost. It's not advisable to save master copies of images in JPEG for this reason. BUT of course the files are much smaller so it's ideal for sharing.

Any images I'm sharing (via email, internet or DVD) I size down to smaller resolutions (anywhere between 500 and 800 pixels on the longest size) and then save as JPEG. I do that as the last step in the workflow so that the image does not need to be resaved in JPEG format more than once.

Does this help or just make it worse?

Kavey

PS Even with LZW compression a TIFF file is still HUGELY bigger than the JPEG for the equivalent file, even if it's a maximum quality minimum compression JPEG.

PPS JPEG does not support 16 bit colour depth so all images do need to be converted to 8 bit before saving as JPEGs.

cary999

Phiri,
Let us know how it goes doing this. Go ahead and try the TIFFs but if it doesn't work then try jpgs.
Merry Christmas -

backtoafrica

Tom,

It seems that I have found the culprit. The packages do not seem to like working with TIFFs. Once converted to jpegs, using my orginal colour space, adobe RGB, everthing is running smoothly. Although I am eternally grateful for your help, im not to sure the rest of family will be. Six months of Africa photos are a lot to go through! Im yet to look at South Luangwa, yet alone sort all my Kwando pics.

Thanks again
Mr Phiri