Making title slides with your computer; welcome to the S4C creative slide competition

To make title slides in the old days you had to obtain a print of the background that you wanted and then place text on the print with either block letters or with Chartpak (rub on letters). You would then need to take a new shot of the print. With today's computers and software, these things can be accomplished much more easily. Monitors that are currently available allow you to even obtain the final image by shooting the screen. In this article I will be talking about Photoshop 6.0 running on a Mac platform, even though there are other fine programs out there that can do the job.

Getting The Image Into The Computer

One way to do this is to purchase a slide scanner, scan the image using Photoshop, and then save it on the computer as a .tiff (Tagged Image File Format) file. There are several excellent scanners out there that can do this. I suggest staying away from flatbed scanners that can scan slides, due to their lower transparency resolution. Scanning slides should be done at 2700 dpi or greater. In any case, you want to avoid having the scanning software interpolate the image. If you need to have part of the image enlarged, I would suggest the bicubic interpolation in Photoshop or with Genuine Fractals. Both will do an excellent job.

Another way of obtaining the image is to have a service bureau place them onto a Photo CD. This may be done at the same time that you are having your slides processed.

A third option is to take the photograph with a digital camera and transfer the images directly into the computer. I suggest using a higher end digital camera for this.

Creating The Title Slides

I use a 21-inch high resolution color monitor with a screen resolution of 1600 x 1200 lines at 85Hz with the background set to a gray tone. The minimum working image size should be 6 in. x 9 in. (2 by 3 format) with a resolution of 150 dpi. This size with a 300 dpi resolution is what I use. I can enlarge the image on my monitor without having Photoshop interpolate the image.

Remember the monitor and slide both deal with transmitted light. That is, the light must be transmitted through the image and not reflected off of it as with a print. Keep the room dark to obtain more accurate colors and reduce unwanted reflections on your screen. This is especially true if you plan to shoot the monitor for a title slide. You may want to consider doing this only at night in a totally dark room.

Creating The Text

Select the Text Tool (Type Tool) and then select the font, style, size, anti-aliasing, and color. If you are choosing white text, pick an off white; pure white can be too white. I make each line of text separate so that I may position each line individually. Once you create your text, you can then add a drop shadow by selecting from the top menu layers, layer style, then drop shadow. This will bring up the layer style box, which lists several text effects and drop shadow is one of them. Opacity affects the darkness of the shadow and you may want to set this between 50 to 75 percent. Set the angle of the light source to 135 degrees, distance to 10 px, with the spread to 50, and the size to 4. None of these numbers are cast in stone and may be adjusted to suit your own taste. As a matter of fact, all the items on the styles pallet can be adjusted to obtain the desired effect that you want. Close the styles palette. If you have more than one text layer, you can merge these layers to a single text layer, but remember in doing so you will lose the ability to move each line of text separately without having to do a cut and paste. Also you do not have to generate the drop shadow for each line of text. You can copy the drop shadow effect by dragging it to the other text layers in the layer palette.

Save the image as a Photoshop file. This is done so that you can go back and make changes to any layer or you can have this as your master text generator and change the image and text as you need or want to.

Getting the Image Out of the Computer

For an electronic theater presentation on a newer Multimedia Projector or just a screen presentation using PowerPoint, change the image size to slightly under 1024 (horizontal) x 768 (vertical) pixels and the resolution to 72 dpi and save the image in a JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) format. You will need the image to be slightly under size, because PowerPoint will not display the full width. Remember vertical images can only be 768 pixels high and 512 pixels wide (3 x 2 format). The Projector is displaying what is being shown on your monitor (pixel and resolution). So make sure you set your computer screen to match the projector.

Another way is to place the image file on a portable storage media and take/send it to a service bureau with a film recorder and they can generate a slide for you. Photoshop files made directly into slides should be at least 3,000 by 2,000 pixels for a high quality slide. Thus a 6 x 9 inch image at 300 dpi falls into the high end of this range of pixels. The image should also be saved in landscape format so that the service bureau will not have to rotate it. Some service bureaus will charge for this.