DVD Studio Pro 3: In the Studio

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is absolutely essential for your DVDSP projects. You really, really need this application. Although PICT files certainly are supported for still images, menus are just a whole lot easier with Photoshop. This is primarily because DVDSP supports Photoshop layers. In fact, it not only supports layers, but also it expects them! Several parts of DVDSP enable you to choose which layers of a particular Photoshop document you want to use. We'll see more of that in Chapters 3 and 4.

Layer effects

Most Photoshop layer effects are not supported in DVDSP. But never fear; you can render the effects layer to its own standard layer as the last step in your menu preparation. That will make the effect available inside DVDSP. Note that having effects on a particular layer does not cause problems for DVDSP; it just can't reproduce the effects. Things such as drop shadows and outer glows are common effects that do not translate. See the example project in Chapter 3 for some examples and tips on effects rendering in Photoshop.

Menu overlays

You also can create 1- and 2-bit overlay masks for use with menus and special features on your DVD. DVDSP will accept a black-and-white image as a 1-bit overlay mask. You pick a color and transparency level for your mask. Anything that's black shows up in your selected color. Anything that's white is completely transparent.

For 2-bit-depth documents, your Photoshop file should contain only black, dark gray, light gray, and white. (See ...