In the world of photos online, there are several rules you can learn to make your photos better, provide a better visual experience for your viewers, and save time/money/bandwidth. All you need are the most basic of editing tools, and a few minutes. These tips are not meant for pros or veteran Photoshop users. Although many times these tricks work for higher-end images, I'm posting these as "quick" fixes that any novice can successfully use. These work in Elements, Photoshop or basically any layers-based editing programs. They also apply to the free, downloadable open source editors that work with and support PSD files. The top three things to do to photos before uploading or emailing are
Ruthless Cropping: For many photos taken with digital cameras, the focus, impact and intention can be improved many times over by simple cropping. It's the least used, most misunderstood technique known -- in fact most people just skip it.
For those of you who take photos then upload them to MySpace, FaceBook, or any of the other picture hosting web sites out there -- DO NOT simply drag a folder of images in for upload. Not only will it gobble up tons and tons of bandwidth (that you may have to pay for) but it just doesn't do your photos any justice.
In such situations, the photos require the receiving server to perform operations on the image -- they sometimes do this "on-the-fly" meaning, you are cooking bandwidth while the server does its work -- which you could have done locally before initiating the upload. Additionally, their server optimization operations may not do the job quite as nicely as you can using Photoshop Elements or other image editing software.
CROPPING helps you focus on the subject, allowing the subject to be larger in the image, requiring less 'processing' while cutting out unnecessary image.
In the "Crop" examples below, you've eliminated over a third of the unnecessary pixels -- which take bandwidth.
See:
Example #1: cropping for focus, and
Example #2: cropping for drama
Scale Photos to size
Online photo sites: Take a look at the way photos are displayed in the site where you plan to upload the images. Obviously if the image is displayed at 600 pixels on Face Book, with no "enlarge" tab, then sending a folder full of 3200 pixel shots is a total waste. And remember that all online images should be 72 pixels per inch. In many situations people think if they upload higher resolution photos, they'll be better. That's almost never the case. For people who have to pay for through-put, or bandwidth, these photos cost nearly 4-times as much to upload for no appreciable improvement in image quality.
Email: If you are attaching images to email, they shouldn't be much larger than 700 pixels wide. Any more than this is not useful for the end user. I have a friend who can't seem to understand this concept -- and simply drags digital images directly into email without regards to the size. When they arrive, they are so big you can only see a portion of the image in the window and you're forced to scroll around just to find a face.
Easy Utilities: Here's just one example of a simple utility you can employ to take the guess-work out of scaling photos. This one is called "Drop Pic" which is a Mac product -- but there are many for both Mac and Windows that you can download. There are also online services where you upload the large photo, and download the scaled photo and get a good job. Mac users should check out DroPic! (DroPic.sit)
Now, lets see some image exposure tricks...
In this Photoshop Tutorial we've talked about:
Cropping | Exposure | Levels Masks | Digital Step Wedge
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Who invented "Photoshop Tips & Tricks"
from the Editor:
I was delighted that day back in 1989 when Peggy Killburn called to ask if I could handle one more speaker in my "Great Graphics Tips & Tricks" session scheduled for the 1990 Macworld Expo. "Yes" was my response to her request to add Russell Brown to my panel. After all, we loved Adobe's young "Illustrator" program, and were quite anxious to try out their upcoming new product called "Photoshop." After seeing his demo, I was convinced Photoshop would be big. So the next month we added "Photoshop Tips & Tricks" to our regular DTG Magazine uploads to Compuserve, GEnie and AOL. The rest is history.
I only regret that I didn't trademark the name.
Editor / Publisher: Photoshop Tips & Tricks, DTG Magazine.
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