Hi - I’m new to FotoMagico - what is the best format for all my photos before pulling them into FotoMagico? I’m planning to do the HD 1080 and create movies for Youtube - I want high quality HD and I’m hoping to create m4v’s of my slideshows. The current image size of all my photos is 4948 x 3280 300 pixels and they are .psd’s created from raw files. I’d like to resize before pulling them into the slideshow.
What’s the best size and then I’ll batch process them?
I can offer a little help – but I haven’t created any HD 1080 movies or m4v’s, so I can’t address that issue.
When I (and my wife) create our slideshows, we’ve always planned on presenting them directly off the computer, either from FM itself, or by creating a stand-alone player. It’s the best way to maintain high quality images. Creating a Blu-Ray version would be just as good, but I don’t have any experience at that because we don’t have a Blu-Ray player or writer.
Since projecting them from our MacBook Pro’s, I set up a slide show using “Display of this Macintosh”. Our photos are coming off the camera at 180 dpi, and we usually just leave them that way. We DO do a lot of Photoshop work on them – adjusting brightness, contrast, color, cropping, etc. We have NEVER had to change the pixel resolution. And I’ve used some scans in slide shows as well, created at both 300 dpi AND 600 dpi without a problem. We don’t adjust the “size” of the image either, other than for cropping out what we don’t want. That obviously creates slides that may be narrow in width or height of the full screen display (creating black edges left/right or top/bottom) – but we don’t consider that a problem. In fact, it adds a bit of randomness to the presentation, rather than every image taking up the entire screen (which would mean having to lose part of the image when displayed). We crop to make the photo look better, not to make it “fit” the screen. When necessary, we use FM’s zoom function to get the size we want.
As for your last question – NO, you MUST save your photos in .jpg format – .psd photos will not work (so, you’ll have to save BOTH types on your hard drive if you want to go back to make edits in PS).
If I were you, I’d experiment a little using different final screen sizes and resolutions for the presentation, and also different image sizes and resolutions for importing. You only need a couple of photos to see what’s going on. If it all works, you’re good to go. If not, you’ll have to make adjustments. The only problem I can see is importing an image that’s so large that it takes time for FM to pump it to the screen fast enough (depending on the options you have set for duration, transition, etc.). That problem goes away when you create a stand-alone presentation (via any of the options for output).
Thanks so much for your help. I like your idea to experiment first before I go for the final big slideshow. I’m leaning toward making the photos all 1980 x 1080, save as .jpg, and I’ll experiment with the dpi. I do want those images to be high quality since it’s my photography. I’ve been reading throughout this forum but couldn’t find too much on this issue, and to me, it’s the first thing I need to know before I create the slideshow - preparation of all my photography. Again, thanks so much for taking time to help me out!!
Catherine, I use my pics as they come from the camera, and improve them with Photoshop. Finally the .jpg’s have a size of 5-8 MB, the .mp4 clips about 30-50 MB. I also use panorama pictures with a size of about 50 MB. I use all the features FM offers, zoom, comments, background musik, masks, and so on.
The only trouble is my hardware. I have really no problems with my Macbook Pro 2.3 GHz late 2012, the slideshows are running very soft, no jerks. I allways save my final diashows and use the Standalone Player.
Have fun!!
DPI: FotoMagico is ignoring the dpi value because it is useless for a screen presentation. It only matters if you are printing an image on paper dpi (or ppi) means “Dots per inch” (or “Pixels per inch”) and is only valid when printing an image or presenting it on da device. E.g. If you are projecting your work on a wall you automatically reduce this value to maybe 10 dpi because the photo gets so big! But this is just a mathematical fact and nothing you have to worry about.
JPEG vs PSD: FotoMagico is able to display PSD files too. Sometimes it makes sense to use PSD instead of JPEG: JPEG is a file format that compresses image by reducing the quality! Once you unpack an JPEG you don’t get the same pixels back that you had before saving it to the file. If you work on an image with lots of “opens” and “saves” sooner or later your will notice that there are pixel artifacts that become bigger and bigger. If you have an PSD file this won’t happen because the PSD file is compressed lossless which means that you get back the same pixels as you have saved them. My suggestion is to keep actually 3 versions of you photos: The Original file from the camera, the PSD file where you are working on, and an final exported JPEG to put into FotoMagico (just because it is light weight). If you are not satisfied with the image in the slideshow you can go back to your PSD, change it, export it as JPEG again and import this new JPEG into FotoMagico.
For resizing your images: FotoMagico does some magic to the images anyways when running a presentation to get the optimal image size for high quality output. My suggestions is to keep them in the original size. Once you finalized your slideshow you can use FotoMagico build in feature to automatically reduce the file size to the optimum by clicking on the yellow triangle in the timeline on each slide.
I redact my comment about having to use .jpg-only files in FM. Sorry about that. My wife does a lot of Photoshop editing of our photos after a trip and creates adjustment layers, etc. that can be tweaked later if needed. She always merges/flattens the layers to create a final .jpg image that we throw into FM to create our presentations. For some reason I was under the impression that we HAD to use .jpg. Well, I can’t be correct ALL of the time
