The following pages show how to create DVD menus from one of these available menu templates or from your own menu background images using Adobe Photoshop. Combining with Sonic Scenarist authoring package, you can create menus with stunning professional quality by observing the following steps.

Step 1. Image Resizing. To preserve the 4:3 pixel aspect ratio (so that circles look round on standard television screen), the images for DVD menus should be prepared at either 720x540 resolution (recommended for NTSC video standard) or 768x576 resolution (recommended for PAL video standard). Therefore, the final images have to be resized to 720x480 resolution for DVD NTSC and 720x576 resolution for DVD PAL. The menu option Image Size... from the Photoshop's menu bar scales the prepared image to its appropriate dimensions before importing to Scenarist.

Here we prepare the menu for a NTSC DVD so the image dimension is set at 720x480 pixels. We type in 720 and 480 as the width and height of the image, respectively. We should note that the check mark for "Constrain Proportions" needs to be off so that Photoshop will accept the specified width and height dimension as is without recomputing to maintain the original width to height ratio. The default resample image method is bicubic interpolation works well with photographic images (24-bit color depth).