Recording your story - Narration and advanced effects:

After I finished arranging my pictures, I had the ability to add narration or to set advanced options for each photo. I played with the narration but decided that a music track would be better suited for Morgan's Photo Story.

I recommend previewing your story now. Photo Story 2 auto generated the pan and zoom effects for each of the pictures but I wanted to control some of the panning manually.

With a microphone, you can add narration to each of the pictures or control the pan zoom effects by selecting the advanced features.

Advanced Panning and Zooming Effects

When you select the advanced setting for an individual picture you're able to manually control the pan and zoom effect. The green square represents the starting position and the red square is the ending. The Preview Motion button is a great feature that allows you to do just that. This option comes in handy if you are mixing horizontal/vertical photos and would like to control the viewable regions. However, to my surprise, I only changed the advanced setting on three of my pictures. Photo Story 2 did a pretty good job with the default panning and zooming.

 
Using the advanced setting you are able to manually control the pans and zooming effect.

Adding a title page:

Adding the title page is simple and you have the ability to choose the font face, color, and size. I liked that I was able to add a background image to my title. I didn't want to repeat images, so I decided to choose an image that wasn't previously included in my series of pictures. I also decided to choose a darker picture so that my light text would display better.

The only option that I felt was missing is the ability to position your text manually but by increasing the font size and adding some spaces I was able to position the title pretty close to the area where I wanted it to appear. I think I've been spoiled by the many Windows Movie Maker 2 title effects.

Adding the title page is simple and you have the ability to choose the font face, color, and size.

Adding Music and previewing the final story:

Since I decided not to narrate this Photo Story, you can thank me later, I added my favorite Windows default media file, Like Humans Do (radio edit).wma. It's an almost 3.5mb file so it will be a good test to see how Photo Story compresses the overall file when it's complete. You can also change the time duration for each of the pictures displayed and set the movies music volume. Once you are finished, I recommend previewing your Photo Story and making any final changes.

Adding Music and previewing the final story.

 

Next More Photo Story 2: Selecting the quality settings for your story