Tips for Using Photos

Before publishing photos to the web, you need to use a photo editor to prepare the photos.

            If you are designing a Web site, sending digital photographs as e-mail attachments or trying to pack as many images on a floppy disk as possible, the size of each image is important. What you want to do is shrink the file size to as few bytes as possible without hurting the image quality.  This will help save space and also save time for the viewer when the web site is uploaded to a browser.  Following are some things that will help:

·        Crop the image to eliminate parts you don’t need

·        Resize the image to fit on the web browser screen

o       Unit of measurement--Set this to pixels because every image on the Web is measured in pixels, not inches or gallons).   

·        Preference settings:

o       Size:  640 W X 480 H is usually a maximum; 500 X 375 is good; 167 X 200 may also be large enough. 

o       Screen Resolution should match that of a computer monitor, which is 72 for Macs and 96 for Windows. So type 72 in the Resolution field.

o       Print Resolution 300 is recommended.

o       Quality 80 % works well.

·        Compress the image

o       40-50% compression will usually work with out harming the quality of the image.

·        Always save photos to .jpg (JPEG) format.

·        Choose “Save for Web” option, if available.  This will also help with the size of the file.

Helpful web sites:

www.edigitalphoto.com/tips_techniques/0205edp_howto/

Photo editors:

Irfanview – www.irfanview.com – free download.

Picasa2 – www.picasa.com – free download.

The Gimp – www.gimp.org – free download – Mac & Windows

Photoimpact – www.ulead.com – approx. $90; educational pricing available

Your digital camera software may also include an editor that will work.