Revive the ghosts of Halloweens past. Create a PhotoShow of your family's best costumes, scariest pumpkins and spookiest decorations for an eye-popping treat that will be the highlight of any holiday party. You can create a dynamic multimedia show with music, special effects and animation in minutes. Watch the kids grow, costume by costume!
Better yet, involve the whole family in making it. Everyone can have fun gathering photos, choosing music, and adding captions and special effects. You'll create new memories while you relive the old ones.
Play your spooky show on your big-screen TV as a backdrop to your Halloween celebrations, even use it in a haunted house! Or put it on your Web site or blog (including Facebook and MySpace), email it to friends and relatives, or burn a DVD. The sharing options are endless. Your show can also be as private or as public as you like. You control who you invite to view it.
Basic PhotoShows are free to create and share. However, a Premium PhotoShow account brings many benefits like video support, hundreds more custom styles and artwork, the ability to adding your own music tracks, and offline PhotoShow creation using the matching desktop software.
So how does it all work? The best way to learn is simply to create a PhotoShow! Here, we'll go through the process of creating a Halloween PhotoShow on PhotoShow.com.
Getting Started with Roxio PhotoShow
To begin your PhotoShow, go toPhotoShow.com and click the Sign In button at upper right, if you aren't signed in already. Or click Sign Up to create a new account. Now click the button labeled "Start Your PhotoShow Now," which brings you to the first step: adding your photos.
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Now click the Add Photos button so you can upload pictures from your hard disk. You can select as many files as you like at one time; just hold down the Control key (or Command key on the Mac) to select additional photos in the same folder. Click the Add more... button to add more photos from different locations. You can import photos from Facebook, Flickr, Picasa and Shutterfly, too (choose the account first from the list on the right). If you have a Premium account, you can also select video clips from your camcorder to upload. Once you've added all the photos for your show, your screen should look like this:
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Finally, click the Upload button to send all your photos and videos to PhotoShow.com. You'll see a progress bar as each file uploads.
Customizing Your PhotoShow
Now the fun begins! You'll be asked to enter a title for your PhotoShow, as well as a creator and "star(s)." These credits will be shown at both the beginning and end of your show. Be as whimsical or serious as you like, depending on the subject matter.
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Next, pick the overall Style, or theme, for your PhotoShow. There are dozens to choose from, such as Father's Day, Graduation, Summer, and more. Click the More button to view additional styles available to Premium members.
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Here, we've picked Halloween, of course! You can quickly preview your show with any number of styles to see what is best for you. You can also customize the timing for each slide, if desired, letting some slides stay onscreen longer than others.
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With the Halloween Style picked, it's time to arrange our photos and add some background music (notice that we're simply following the tabs at the top from left to right -- although you can select tabs in any order). Under the Music & Photos tab, you can drag your photos around into any order, rotate them (using the popup icon at the lower left corner of each photo), delete photos, and add additional music tracks. Premium users can also upload their own MP3s.
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First, we'll arrange the photos and videos in the order that we want them to appear by dragging them around. Next, we want to add a new music track for the trick-or-treating portion of the show, called "Dancing in the Streets," so we'll slide over the blue handle at the beginning to the next to last photo. The blue handles define the start and end of each music track.
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Now we'll select the first photo and click the popup music icon to choose the song. It will be applied to all the photos up to the start of the next track. You can add even more tracks if you like, and Premium subscribers can upload their own MP3s to use as background music.
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Now you can see how the show looks with two songs. Each is represented by a different color. You can drag the blue handle in the middle to change the crossover point of the two tracks. You can also add and remove photos at any time.
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Moving on down the line, we come to the Captions tab. Captions can be added in any size or width of text, in several different styles, and dragged into position anywhere on your image. This makes it easy to customize captions for each slide. Captions are where you can get really funny and creative, bringing your photos alive for your viewers. Simply click the Next button to add captions to each slide in your show.
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The fun doesn't stop there: you can also add speech bubbles, more titles, stickers, and borders. Premium subscribers get more options for all of these. Here we've added a bubble to one of our slides.
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And here we've added a couple stickers to another slide. Stickers are basically animated graphics, in tons of fun shapes and themes. You'll find everything from flying ghosts and witches to hopping Easter bunnies in the sticker library.
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Finally, borders are great for adding interest to your entire show. We've selected the Halloween border style here. There are many other themes to choose from, as well as plain picture-frame styles.
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Sharing Your Show
You can continue to play with your show and add or change elements. But we're finished, so we'll click the Preview button to check out the complete show.
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Assuming everything is okay, click the Done button to start sharing! There are four basic sharing options: you can email a link to view your show to friends and family; post the show to your Web page or blog; or purchase your show on DVD. With a Premium account, you can also save your show to your hard drive in MP4 format, for viewing on your iPod or other portable player.
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And here's the finished PhotoShow! Now, wasn't that fun and easy?