Slideshow Quality

[ers1121]

I have read alot of the threads here about slidshow software. I have also downloaded several of the trials and still can't seem find one that's right for me. It's the quality of the images on the TV. The shows all have great quality on the computer screen but when played back on the TV the look like well...crap. I am using all high resolution images but they look like low res junk played on a TV set. I have tried different settings, image sizes and nothing seems to improve. I have tried Photoshop Elements, Photoshow Gold and a few others. Any suggestions?
Ed

[pommie]

You don't say what tv or monitor you have, but to generalize,
A HDtv has a resolution of 1366 x 768, even if your monitor is the same res there are things that will make the images look "crap". The tv is designed to be viewed from a lot farther away and is designed to show jerk free motion, therefore it needs less contrast and requires a soft focus to smooth out the 25 frames per second movies.
Have you tried viewing the images on the tv from your normal viewing distance and also playing with the colour saturation, sharpness (contrast)and tint settings on the tv.

Cheers David

[ers1121]

David,
Thanks for the reply. I did watch it from the normal viewing distance & have tried it on several tv's, both flat screens and regular. The images just don't seem to have the sharp, crisp look. They all seem to look out of focus and generally poor quality. I don't know maybe that is just the difference between a computer monitor (laptop flat screen) & the TV. This was my first attempt at a slideshow & it was for a friend so not really a big deal, just trying to do something nice for someone.
This proves the theory that no good deed goes unpunished.
Ed

[ZoneV]

This is probably going to get confusing fast so I'll apologize up front right now. The secret to great display presentations is to optimize the image to the display device pixel for pixel. This resolution is always established by using the native resolution of the display device (projector, CRT, Plasma, LCD or Monitor). If there's a computer in the chain the video card is set to the same resolution as the display resolution and your photo images are cropped and scaled to that exact same resolution too.

The confusion comes from the fact there are five TV resolutions and literally dozens of computer display resolutions available. I'm not going into all the different flavors here, it sounds like your using a standard definition television (the same one grandma fell asleep in front of watching Lawrence Welk).

Use a 4:3 landscape crop ratio for all of your images. Once you have your crop then adjust resolution to 640x480 (In CS2 use Bicubic Sharpener). Sharpen, over sharpen and sharpen again to taste.In case I didn't explain that very clearly, you might need to sharpen. That's it, that's all an SDTV can display. Everything else is getting thrown away.

Of course, if I'm wrong and your using one of the HDTV models all bets are off and you'll have to size for a different resolution, but the basic principle remains the same. Oh, BTW, good for you for helping a friend and being nice to someone. We all need to do more of that. I think I'm supposed to bestow some sort of caramel apple or something your way. I'll send some if I can figure it out.

Cheers and good luck
-kb

[ers1121]

Thanks for the information, now I can look for the settings to change the image resolution. And your close on the kind of tv, it's actually the one I fall asleep in front of, grandma didn't have color!!
Thanks again,
Ed

[loraksus]

Standard TVs only run at "720x480" (although it's not really 720, nor 480 - in fact, it's sort of half that, but for fun/simplicity, consider those your absolute maximum limits). It's going to look like crap regardless of what you do - just look at text. It's unreadable until you go to font size 20 or so.

You also have to consider your connection - RCA will be worse than Svideo will be worse than DVI/analog high def connections/hdmi

If you have a higher resolution set, those may even do upscaling / downscaling internally - even though a 720p set is "supposed to be" 1280x720 and thats the signal you're sending to it, the sets usually aren't, and you don't get a pixel to pixel mapping, but the image gets resized by some chip to match the native resolution of the panel (which probably isn't 1280x720) Sometimes that chip sucks and IQ suffers.
Shame, but mediocrity in image quality isn't punished by consumers, so we have the current crappy situation.
That said, some sets will report their true resolution when connected to a PC and you'll need your video card to be able to match it. They are few and far between though.

Oh, and American TVs use a system called NTSC - called "no two same colors" by people in the industry. It's a pretty cool format, when you get into the math and physics and think about it, but it's been around for far too long (It's basically a black and white standard where color was added as a (pretty cool) hack in the 1950s) and needs to die. Realistic expectations are in order

[träskmannen]

How do you watch the slideshow you made - is the TV connected to your computer or do you burn it to a DVD or similar? What is the image quality like if you compare to something similar from the same source? What I mean is: if it is a DVD, does a still from a commercial DVD look as crappy? If it is from the computer, does a photo from a normal viewer look as bad?

[ers1121]

DVD's play fine in the DVD player, I am burning this onto a disc to play on the TV. I'm trying the Pro Show Gold and the images a bit better but not what I was hoping for. I intend to tweak some settings this weekend the the heat goes down a bit, and hope for thr best.

[träskmannen]

What settings did you use to create the disc?

[ers1121]

I have tried both the 4:3, and the widescreen settings and I am not happy with either. I'm not really sure what size the images should be either, maybe this has something to do with it. I have tried using them full size (approx 8MB ea) and scaling them down but it all seems the same to me. I know you can set for a custom screen resolution, i'm going to try this next. Starting to get tired of using up the discs, esp since this a being done as a favor to someone.

[träskmannen]

First: Use rewritable discs. They aren't expensive and it is really worth it when playing around with these things.

Second: Your slideshow program should convert the images to the best possible size and standard. If you doubt that it gives the best quality I suggest that you resize the images yourself first. What size to use depends a bit on where in the world you live. If you're in the US you have NTSC TV system which is 720 x 480 pixels, if you're in Europe (among other places) you have PAL which is 720 x 576 pixels. You need to sharpen the photos a little bit after resizing them but not too much. The settings you used to create the disc are really interesting here, did you perhaps use something called VCD, SVCD or Half-D1 or similar?

By the way: What is the quality problem you have? Are the colours off, are the images unsharp or is it something else?

[ers1121]

I did the slidehow 1st in SVCD, then on DVD. My biggest complaint is that they just don't look as good on the screen as they do on my computer screen. Hopefully the temperature will cool of this weekend & I can get back to it. No A/C in my computer room!!

[träskmannen]

Good luck! I would still find it interesting to know what settings you used... I think that's the key to the problem.

Another possibility is different settings between your monitor and your TV, if your monitor isn't calibrated it may be that you have optimized your photos for viewing on this specific monitor. Showing them on another computer or on a TV would then give a different result.

[ers1121]

When I get it to look better i'll post the settings that worked, hopefully it will be this weekend. Thanks for replying & the advice.

[ers1121]

I finally got it!!!! After trying a few different settings I was ready to give up. Last night my dvd writer stoped functioning, I borrowed an external one from a friend and the slideshow came out just fine. Apparently this thing wasn't writing or burning or doing whatever correctly. Time for a new one!