Apple DVD Studio Pro 4 - Manual (Page 102)

About the Overlay Colors
Overlays can contain up to four colors. A peculiar feature of overlays is that the colors
used to create them are not the colors that are displayed when viewers see the menu.
The overlay only identifies the areas on the screen where highlights are to be applied—not
the color or transparency of the highlights. You define the actual colors viewers see when
you create the menu.
When you use the simple overlay method, everything in the overlay graphic must be one
of two colors: the white background that is set to be transparent and the black highlight
graphic to which you assign a color and transparency. If you add an element to the overlay
that has a soft glow around it or has been anti-aliased, the areas of the element that are
not white or black will appear with additional highlight colors (controlled by the advanced
overlay color mapping settings). In this case, you should either correct the graphic or use
the advanced overlay method which allows you to control all of the highlight colors.
The elements in an advanced overlay use up to four different colors. This gives you the
ability to use multiple highlight colors for a button or create pseudo-soft edges and to
take advantage of anti-aliased edges. See
Creating Advanced Overlays for more
information.
About Overlay Files
Whether you create simple or advanced overlays, the overlay must be a single flattened
layer, either as part of a Photoshop (PSD) format file or as a separate file.
It is common to have a single PSD file supply both the menu’s background and overlay.
The DVD Studio Pro Menu Editor allows you to select as many layers as you want to use
as the background, but you can only select a single layer as the overlay.
Note: Don’t confuse a PSD file with layers (used to supply the background and overlay)
with the type of PSD file used when creating layered menus. Standard menus contain all
buttons’ selected and activated states within a single layer of the file; layered menus
contain a separate layer in the PSD file for each button’s state (normal, selected, and
activated). These layers are not overlays that you assign colors to—they are full-color
images of the button in one of the three states. See
Creating a Layered Menu for more
information.
Creating Simple Overlays
With simple overlays, you must use only white and black to create the graphics.
To create a simple overlay
1 Create a full-screen white background.
See Square Pixels in Graphics for information on the frame size to use.
2 Choose black and add the highlight elements to the background.
102 Chapter 6 Preparing Menu Assets