Adding the button highlight areas
A button’s highlight is what identifies the button to a DVD player. Buttons that you create by dragging button images onto a menu (as described in Adding menu objects) do not have highlight areas until you link the buttons to other menus or titles. When you create menus using layered Photoshop files, you must create each button’s highlight area manually before you can link the button to anything.
To add button highlights to a menu:
- Double-click the menu’s icon in the Project window. The menu appears in the Preview window.
- Choose DVD Menus > View Selected Subpictures or View Activated Subpictures. This ensures that you can see the button subpicture images.
- If the subpictures are hard to see against the menu background, choose View > View Background Layer to hide the background.
- Choose DVD Menus > Tools > Highlight Tool. DVDit Pro switches to the highlight tool (a cross-hair cursor).
- To create a button highlight area, draw a rectangle around the button’s subpicture. This creates a button; DVDit Pro automatically fills the highlight area with a block of color.
- In Button Display section of the Attributes window’s General tab, choose Image’s Subpicture Layer from the Subpicture Style list. This ensures that DVDit Pro uses the subpicture image from the Photoshop file.
To link the new button to the project contents, see Linking content to menu buttons.
Notes on creating button highlights
Button highlight rectangles are invisible on the finished DVD.
A button’s highlight rectangle must completely enclose the button’s subpicture image. Any subpicture image that is outside a highlight rectangle will not change color when the button is selected or activated.
Highlight rectangles must not overlap. It’s best to have at least a few pixels of space between highlight rectangles.
DVDit Pro gives each highlight rectangle a button number, seen in the top left corner of the rectangle. For more information, see Notes on button links.