The photos in my slideshow are stretched from their original image.

mpatmcg wrote on 11/5/2008, 9:08 PM

Some upright pictures are stretched to screen width but the original images look the same.

Comments

ralftaro wrote on 11/6/2008, 8:06 AM

This kind of thing would usually hint to some kind of problem with the aspect ratio - or rather a conflict between an actual/source and intended/target aspect ratio. From your description and screen shot, I'm not really sure I understand the nature of the problem. Your screen shot seems to show the overview mode with both some portrait and some landscape format photos in it. Are you suggesting that one of the portrait/upright photos is stretched horizontally? I can't really make that out in the picture. Does the same effect occur in the actual preview monitor? I guess I just need some more clarification here. Where do the pictures come from? Are they from a digital, 4:3 cam or are these possibly scans? In the PhotoStory program options, do you have the option to stretch photos that deviate only slightly from the 4:3 aspect ratio enabled? With some more information, I might be able to tell you more.

ralftaro wrote on 11/7/2008, 12:03 PM

Thanks for the additional info. Without having the actual, problematic photos here, I can't really make a definite call, so I might be totally off, but I think it's probably due to the aspect ratios getting messed up during the cropping process. Keep in mind that it's no good idea to just crop down to a section of arbitrary dimensions if your intention is to mix the photo(s) in question with other photos for a DVD slide show. Ideally, you should aim to only use pictures with the identical aspect ratio and that should be either 4:3 or 16:9, depending on what kind of screen you're creating your show for, or possibly another format that can easily be adapted to one of those aspect ratios (e.g. 3:2 film/slide scans). Naturally, there are other ways to reconcile other, deviant aspect ratios or portrait/upright photos with your slide show, but personally I always find the handling somewhat awkward. I would definitely avoid creating completely non-standard aspect ratios by freely cropping a picture. If you need to crop a picture for better framing, that's no problem. However, a lot of decent image editing/photo optimization software will give you the possibility to use crops that will actually maintain the correct aspect ratio.

So, these are my thoughts on this issue. As I said, I might be missing something here with regard to the problem you're dealing with, but maybe the info above helps to get around it.