PICTURE THIS PART 2...

 

© 2007 Terry Lane

www.dpexpert.com.au 

Download PDF of Part 2 (Acrobat 514k)

 

SEXING UP THE IMAGE

 

So far so good – the pictures of the precious collection are on the memory card. Now to turn them into brilliant pictures for display on the Internet.

 

All cameras come with some form of image editing program, but generally speaking they are not much good. From this point on we will assume that everyone is using Photoshop Elements. Photoshop, as you no doubt know, is the industry standard photo editing program, but it is very expensive and is over-kill for preparing pictures for the Web. Photoshop Elements is a cut-down version of the program that retails for around $150. It is an excellent compromise between simplicity and competence.

 

Even if you decide not to buy Photoshop Elements there is still much in what follows that can be applied to pictures using either the free software with the camera or a free viewing and editing program like Xnview that can be downloaded from www.xnview.com.

 

Let’s assume Photoshop Elements.

 

The first thing to do is to transfer the image files from the camera memory card to a folder on the computer desktop. Once they are all together in a folder with a useful name, like Matchbox Cars or Antique Cameras or whatever, they are ready to be opened in Photoshop.

 

At this stage, just to be safe, you might create a second folder and backup all the image files. It is a bad mistake to simply save edited images back to the folder from which they are opened because that overwrites the original. And the original is, in effect, the digital negative to which you might want to return at some time in the future.

 

Set the folder display to show image files as thumbnails. Click on View [all this information assumes Windows Vista or XP] and choose Large Icons. A thumbnail of the picture will be displayed. Choose one that looks about right for editing and click on it with the right mouse button. Choose Open With and select Photoshop Elements.

 

Now your photo is open and ready for editing. Here are the essential steps, but they don’t necessarily need to be done in this order.

 

1. Crop the image so that the subject is centre screen and any distracting background is excluded. If you are intending the picture for www.collectZing.com then the crop should be square because that is the display format on the web site.

 

2. Set the white point by adjusting Levels. The Levels dialog is opened by pressing Ctrl-L [Windows]. See the three eyedroppers? The one on the right sets the white level. Find a spot in the photo that should be perfect white and click on the spot with the eyedropper. Too much correction? Then click on Alt and the Reset button and adjust the slider from the right hand end of the Histogram [that’s the black graph]. As you push the right slider closer the centre the image becomes lighter. On the other end the black slider makes the image darker and the slider point in the middle controls mid tones. Play around with them for a while and see what they do. You can always get back to the original by pressing Alt and Reset.

You can also let Photoshop adjust Levels by clicking on Auto in the Levels dialogue or pressing Ctrl-Alt-L. That will often, but not always, give a reasonable result for starting the color correction.

 

If the white areas are still too blue or too yellow than try Enhance/Adjust Color/Adjust Color Curves. There are other tools under Enhance that are worth experimenting with to see what effects can be achieved.

 

If color is not important then the image can be converted to black and white under Enhance/Convert to Black and White. There are options in the conversion process to try and select one that suits the subject.

 

Remember, if you have used a white background for your shot then you want that to be pure white. And if there are areas of pure black in the picture you do not want a color cast in them.

 

At this stage you should also adjust the image brightness and contrast. Levels does this by moving the midtone slider in relation to the black and the white sliders, but contrast can also be adjusted directly under Enhance/Auto Contrast and Enhance/Adjust Lighting.

 

3. When you are satisfied with color, exposure and contrast the time has come to resize the image for the Web. [Preparing pictures for printing is another matter which we will deal with later.]

 

Images straight from a camera are too large for polite transmission by email or for the Web. Sending pictures that have not been resized is as rude as farting in a lift. It is simply not done. A couple of untreated pictures can overload a recipient’s mail box and cause subsequent emails to be bounced until the box is cleared. Do not do it!

 

Resizing is easy. When the picture is looking good press CTR-ALT-I and the Image Size dialogue box comes up. With Scale Styles, Constrain Proportions and Resample Image all ticked you are ready to scale down the picture.

 

In the top dialogue lines there are values, in pixels, for the height and width of the picture. Most people have computer monitors that will display 1024 by 768 pixels, so you certainly don’t want the image bigger than that. And, of course, there are toolbars at the top of the screen and start bars at the bottom which must be taken into account. That means that the vertical height of the image should be no more than 600 pixels.

 

So, to get started, change the Height dimension to 600 and the width will take care of itself. Then go to the bottom of the dialogue box and, where it says Bicubic in a selectable line, click on the down arrow. Choose Bicubic Sharper, which is Adobe’s recommended resampling method for images that are being reduced in size. It keeps them nice and crisp.

 

[The largest display on www.collectZing.com is about 530 pixels by 530 pixels. There is no point in making your picture bigger than that.]

 

Once the image has been resized click on the Magnifying glass tool and then click on Actual Pixels in the toolbar at the top of the screen. Now you are seeing the picture exactly as it will be seen by the recipient.

At this very last stage you can apply a touch of sharpening if it is needed. Go to Enhance/Unsharp Mask and select an Amount. You see the effect immediately in the preview panel. Do not over-sharpen, it looks horrible.

 

4. Save the picture for Internet transmission by clicking on File/Save for Web. On the right hand side of the screen there are some drop down format selectors. You want the format JPEG. JPEG compresses the file so that it is much better suited for internet transmission.

 

See the Quality box? Start by setting that to 60 and check the file size under the processed image on the right. Then compare the processed file size with the original – there will be a big difference.

 

In the process of compressing the image there is some loss of information in the picture but it is near enough to imperceptible if the Quality setting is kept above 60. Even Quality at 50 is acceptable.

 

What you are aiming for is the best compromise between small size [compression] and maximum picture quality. Generally speaking a file size under 200K for one file is acceptable, but if you are sending multiple files then you should aim for <100K. It is only good manners!

 

 

 

 

 

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