Preparing your pictures for the web
| Topic: Preparing
your pictures for the web |
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There are
3 basic steps to properly prepare your pictures for the Internet or
for sending to friends and relatives with your email program. All of
them require that you have picture editing software. Most digital
cameras or scanners (the two common methods for getting a picture on
to your computer) come bundled with picture editing software of some
kind. Adobe PhotoDelux is an example. We use the more costly Adobe
Photoshop for our work on the SUV One web site. All of these picture
editing programs have the tools to do these 4 basic steps. We will
review these 4 steps here and then go over each in detail on the
following web pages. Note: in the comments
that follow, we have used bold type to refer to terms you
will find in your picture editing software.
First, you need to crop and then size the picture.
Notice the difference between the top and second photographs on the
left. The second photograph has been cropped so that only the center
portion of the original is shown. This starts us down the path to
making the picture size smaller ,which is our goal.
Second, you need to adjust the brightness, contrast,
and perhaps the saturation (vividness of colors) in your
picture. The third picture shown at the left is what we have after
we used these tools on our picture. You can add any special
effects to the picture at this step (see the bottom photograph
where we have faded out the edges.)
Finally, you need to save your picture, and during that process,
save it with a lower quality than the original. This is the
step that makes most dramatic difference in the byte or charactor
size of your photograph.
Warning: Before you begin working on your
picture, set the attributes of your original picture to read only
and when you save the edited version, save it as a different name.
We set the original to a read only file so that it cannot be
overwritten by changes. If you edit a picture and then save it as
the same name, you will never be able to get back to the orginal
picture.
Now press the right arrow button for a detailed look at each of
these three steps. |
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