Recently I was asked to create a DVD "slide show" for a memorial service. The slide show was to be a series of photographs with music behind it. I had never created something like that before and I want to share what I learned; I thought I was going to have to spend a lot of time and money and this wasn't the case.

When this request was made of me I immediately had two thoughts. The first was I wanted to make everything perfect, of course. The second was a serious awareness of my own limitations. I'm not a design "type". I don't have any visual acuity or design sense; I can just about be trusted to draw a smiley face. I knew if I got a tool that offered lots of tiny adjustable parameters or huge numbers of special effects I'd be overwhelmed.

I wanted something really basic; something that would allow me to put several photographs in a row with a little bit of cropping capability, and then put music behind it. Too many features and I'd end up with something way overdone; I also didn't have time to learn a whole new piece of software.

As usual when I'm pretty much totally ignorant of a topic, I did a search engine query for it (dvd slideshow software). I looked at a few of the advertised software packages, checking the reviews. One of the reviews I read mentioned that the reviewed program was good, but not as easy to set up as Microsoft's Photo Story 3.

Since I needed something simple I went to check out Photo Story 3. The first thing I discovered when I visited the Web site is that the product is free. You'll have to authenticate your Windows installation, but you don't have to pay anything. (Yes, having to prove to Microsoft that I'm not a pirate is annoying, but equally annoying were the other software companies that wanted everything but a hair sample before I could download a trial version of their software.)

I downloaded and installed the software and started it up. Photo Story 3 is very simple and easy to use -- if you're looking for a lot of bells and whistles you won't like this software. It takes you through a multi-step process that goes from getting the pictures into the program to putting in some music. It is missing one possibly vital step, though, that we'll look at later. For the purposes of the screen shots I'm going to make a brief "Food at the State Fair" slide show.

The first thing you're asked to do is import pictures into your program. You can import a one at a time, or several at a time, or even entire directories. When the pictures are imported you'll see their thumbnails in a "film strip" at the bottom of the screen. Moving the pictures around in the order is as simple as clicking and dragging them. For each picture you'll also have the option of doing some basic cropping, automatic redeye removal or color balancing, or picture rotating. You'll also have the option of automatically removing the "black bars" -- bars that appear when a picture is odd-sized and can't be resized correctly to the screen. Photo Story 3 will try to resize the picture for you to get rid of the black bars. You can adjust its suggestion.

Next, for each slide you can add text or impose some special effect to the image (watercolor, black and white, sepia, etc.) The effects are pretty basic, and there aren't many of them, but there are still too many for my taste. While you can use any font you have and change the text color, you're very limited in where you can place the text vertically and horizontally. Try to find an area of one color to put the text as well, because I could not find a way to make the text more than one color (I couldn't make half a word black, say, and half a word white.) Click on each image to give it its own text and images effects.

Up next is the option to narrate your pictures and customize the transition motion. If you have a microphone, you can include a brief narration for each picture, and include notes for yourself. (This is separate from the music option.) You can also "customize motion" -- show where the picture will begin showing and end showing after a transition time determined by you. Photo Story 3 has a whole set of transition effects, but I stayed away from those and went with the default, where the photo is panned across the screen slightly. You can also set how many seconds you want the photo to display. Five seconds was the default but I thought that was too fast and went with ten seconds, with a fifteen second display for the "title" screen.

After that comes the music. You have the option to specify the music you want to use (MP3, WAV, or WMA) or to "Create Music" from within Photo Story 3. The created music allows you to choose a genre, a mood, and a speed. It's pretty bad. I messed with it for all of a minute before deciding that I was going to find music somewhere else. The problem is that I wanted some gentle music, preferably classical, that hadn't been played a million times or used in a commercial. I didn't want to play my slide show and have people thinking of perfume or laundry detergent or something.

I ended up going to Archive.org's Open Source Audio archive and poking around for music. I ended up with a piano piece, Sonata No. 1 in D Minor, by someone named Snu. The first movement was four minutes and 40 seconds, sweet and energetic, and fit perfectly with the slide show. And while I'm at the Open Source Audio Archive let me also mention Steven J Kukla's Parisian Bells, which was beautiful but too short for my purposes. You can add music for each slide, if you like, or to cover several slides. In my case the one musical item covered the entire presentation. When you're selecting the music you also have the option of selecting how loud the music can be; I suggest turning it all the way up if you're burning a CD. The music on my presentation turned out a bit too quiet.

After this you're done. You can go back and address different steps (the whole process is connected by simple forward/back buttons) or you can declare yourself finished. Be sure to save your project! The last step is to decide how you want to save your new slide show. There are several options, from saving it for display on a computer to saving it for burning on a DVD. Photo Story 3 will give you pointers for what will happen with each options, and helps you make a decision.

I needed to burn my presentation to a DVD, but I did not have DVD burning software available on my computer. This is where Photo Story 3 fell down. It doesn't have DVD burning built in. After some searching around though I found an add-in available from Roxio: Sonic DVD for Photo Story 3. It's $19.99. Once you purchase it, you'll have an option on the last step of Photo Story 3 to burn your new slide show to DVD. That worked perfectly well and I had a DVD that I tested in a regular DVD player, a Windows PC, and a Mac. It worked with no problem.

The lack of innate DVD burning is a problem, and graphic-savvy users are going to find it way too simple, but I really liked Photo Story 3. The learning curve was easy, there were enough features that I created something I thought looked good (but not so many that my eyes rolled back in my head), and the price was right. Even adding $19.99 for the plugin, it was far less than I thought I was going to have to spend. If you find yourself needing to create a slide show, but are afraid you're going to have to learn some giant new software package, give Photo Story 3 a try.