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Part 3 – Process your image

Sun, 4 May 2008 — BAS Admin
  1. Edit your image if necessary in your favourite image editing programme, using the following guidelines. Professionals use Adobe Photoshop. Many cameras and scanners come with a perfectly good version of this called Photoshop Elements or a similar programme. You can buy this sort of software for about £60 and older versions are sometimes much cheaper. You can even get free programs, such as Picasa from Google
  2. Important: every time you save a JPEG file it loses some quality, so always keep the original file and make your adjustments on a copy.
  3. First, crop and straighten your image. Many of these programs can correct images that are skewed.
  4. Adjust the light levels and colours – but remember that all computer monitors are slightly different and that what you see on screen may look different on other screens. This also applies to cameras and scanners. You can calibrate your own screen and camera at great expense, but people viewing your images are unlikely to have done this.
  5. The gallery will take most picture formats, but JPEG makes the best use of the space you have.
  6. Most colour inkjet printers print at 300 dots per inch (dpi) or more – so a 10 inch square picture has 3000 dots across and 3000 dots down. 9 million dots in total. This would make a huge file. Most standard computer screens are only 1024 pixels / dots across and 768 down. When you allow for the menu etc., there is little benefit from having a picture on-line that is bigger than about 800 by 600 – less than half a million dots in total.
  7. When you save a file in JPEG format you can choose the “quality” of the image. This is expressed either as “low” to “medium” to “high” or as a number from 3 to 15. This affects how much the file is compressed to save space and “low” or “medium” is usually good enough for on-line use.
  8. Reducing the pixels and the JPEG quality makes the image unattractive to print, so it is unlikely that your pictures will be stolen. If this still worries you, add a watermark using your image software at this stage, or using the gallery itself later. The society's website is not at present intended as a direct sales facility, just as a showcase for your work.
  9. Pictures of this size take up 40 – 400 Kb as a rough guide. You have an allowance of 2Mb, that is 2000Kb, of space so you should have room for about 8 pictures.