[MacDV] Photos lighten when processed by iDVD

[Nick Scalise]

On Aug 26, 2006, at 9:59 AM, Russell Banks wrote:

> Does anyone have an idea why my photos lighten considerably in  
> iDVD? Here's what I'm doing:
>
> I create good-looking photos in Photoshop, and save to highest  
> quality jpegs, about 1500 px wide.
>
> I place those jpegs in Photo to Movie, add music, and apply some  
> gentle pans and zooms to a few of the shots.
>
> I export from Photo to Movie as DV (NTSC): DV/DVCPRO - NTSC,  
> 720x480, 29.97 fps, Uncompressed.
>
> This makes a 2.5 GB file for a 13 minute movie. When I play it in  
> Quicktime player, it looks very much like the originals in Photoshop.
>
> I start an iDVD project, place this DV file into it, and burn a DVD.
> Everywhere I play this DVD: in Mac DVD player, on my wife's Dell  
> laptop, and on several TV set-top players, the images are much too  
> light. Highlights burned out, and shadows a muddy gray.
> It seems clear that iDVD is lightening the images, but I don't know  
> why. I'm pushing my old G4 to the limit, (1 GHz, 640MB RAM, old  
> video card), and it takes a long time to process the video, but I  
> wouldn't think that it would lighten the images due to a lack of  
> resources.

Here's my guess:

Check your Colorsync settings in Photoshop. You may be creating  
images to a certain ColorSync profile or something that iDVD is not  
respecting (or maybe cannot achieve due to NTSC constraints).

If you are working on pictures in Photoshop for TV, you probably  
should be aiming for an NTSC like profile.

--
Nick Scalise
nickscalise at cox.net