This post is a follow-on to How to eliminate black spaces in Movie Maker, and concerns images that are obviously the wrong dimensions to fill a full-screen. When you make a slide show movie of your art for youtube or other video hosting site, you want artwork to be presented at its best. Well here's a workaround as first promised in the Animal Loving Artists on Youtube post.
What we are doing here is improving the presentation of the image by adding a drop shaddow, then increasing the canvas size with a background colour of choice, and lastly, cropping to the correct aspect ratio for full-screen in Movie Maker.Some of the techniques shown here can useful in the presentation of images generally.
This is going to be achievable in other image editing software, but I have chosen to use Faststone, because it is simple to use and has a very handy crop tool for achieving the desired 4:3 aspect ratio.
To do this tutorial you will need the Faststone Image Viewer. This is an open source project, free to download, free to use non-commercially and there's no spyware/adware...obviously they would appreciate a donation!
This tutorial assumes there is no excess to crop from around the edges of your image.
Open Faststone, locate, then select your image, by clicking on it so it appears in the preview window.
For adding the drop shadow: in the main menu bar click edit>drop shadow. You now have the drop shadow window open and there are various options. For simplicity, I am going to keep with the default grey background colour and shadow, but if you click on either background or shadow you will see you can change the colours. There's also options to change the radius and depth of the drop shadow. Take note of the background colour you have used.
Click the preview button, if required, then click okay.
For increasing the canvas size: in the main menu bar click edit>canvas size. You will now have the canvas size window open and, again, there are various options available.
Firstly, make sure you set the background colour to the same colour as the background for the drop shadow. Click background>select your colour>okay.
Next the image canvas size needs increasing so it looks like it will fit a full screen, i.e. 4:3 ratio. How this can be done may vary depending on the image. A rough and ready way is to increase the percentage of the width or height, or both.
In the example here I increased the width by 200% by clicking on the percentage option and altering the width to 200% then clicking okay.
For cropping to the correct aspect ratio: follow the instuctions given under To crop an image to 4:3 ratio using Fastone Image Viewer, and you should have an image with the correct aspect ratio for full-screen, ready for use with Movie Maker.
(The artwork featured in this tutorial is "Red, Red Roses" a mixed media ACEO by Naj.)
Also see:
How to Get Full Screen Images in Windows Movie Maker
Make a Slide Show Video of your Art for Youtube
And We have Youtube Sound
Add Youtube Videos to your Blog, Website or Ebay
Original Art by Naj on Youtube
Animal Loving Artists on Youtube
2 comments:
I feel as if I am being particularly thick today. Are you simply replacing black space by a colour of your choice.
In which case, you could insert the original image into a properly sized (4:3) canvas in any 'paintshop' type application.
John
Hi John..I wasn't that clear, have now amended.
Yes, in short you are right - this has an extra effect of a drop shadow around the image. This demo is only very basic presentation...there's lots of possibilities.
Faststone has a crop to "4:3 ratio" option in the cropping tool, which is why I find it particularly good for this job. Seems it can be used to crop any size image to the correct ratio.
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