Getting a good photo onto the site

Post pics of your car in here
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Julian
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Joined: June 22nd, 2006, 6:45 pm
Location: Manchester, UK
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Getting a good photo onto the site

Post by Julian »

Almost everyone now has a digital camera instead of the old film reels that were prevalent up to about 3 years ago (how things change!). Digital camera technology is moving along at such a pace that it is hard to keep up with. The most common feature to see progress is the detail of the image. Early cameras offered a disappointing 1 mega pixel definition (literally 1 million pixels arranged in a square grid), current cameras with 1 mega pixel are generally only offered as cheap added features on mobile phones. A dedicated camera is likely to be at least four times that with the high quality (expensive) cameras offering twice as much again.

When it comes to printing these images off and getting the very best on paper the bigger the definition size the better as it means bigger printed images without a compromise in quality. A 1 mega pixel image printed from your average desktop printer resolves to something just over 3 square inches in area - a tiny size - unless you enlarge it and then you are reminded of the "blockiness" of digital imagery.

When it comes to displaying these images on your computer screen it is all a different ball game. Despite years of progress in monitors most people are still only using a screen resolution of 800x600 or 1024x768. Even the largest of these sizes equates to just 0.75 mega pixels. A cheap camera is going to generate images at four times that size - or four screenfuls if viewed at the native resolution.

The answer is one of the simple (and usually free) graphical tools for handling the job of reducing the image down to something more manageable. In real terms you only need an image to be about 600 pixels wide - this fits nicely on most screens with space to either side for text (such as this forum) and the file size drops down substantially. In raw format you are talking just 720000 bytes - still very large for use on websites where such large files are frowned upon. Thankfully the jpeg format (the .jpg at the end of the file) compresses the data nicely without too much loss of detail in the image. Typically your image size would drop to about 150000 bytes (still large but now manageable).

My personal choice of tool for this job is paintshop pro but I do a fair bit of graphical work and this fits in my budget for such tools. If you want to do serious work you probably already have something akin to photoshop. At the other end of the spectrum are free to download tools dedicated to resizing the image and doing little else. If you are looking for a general purpose graphic manipulation tool I suggest you look up a wonderful package called GIMP (http://www.gimp.org/) - this is free to download and use and comes with pretty much every kind of tool you are likely to need.

One last tip - when it comes to resizing an image there are often different methods and formulas that can be applied to the task. Some are very crude indeed and leave you with an image that looks as though it were part of a first-year art student's attempt at interpreting the word "blocky". Experiment with the settings and see which one works best in your particular package. The better methods tend to take a bit longer to process but the end results are much, much easier on the eye.
SirYun
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Joined: June 22nd, 2006, 9:42 pm
Location: Maastricht, the Netherlands & Zyfflich, Germany
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Post by SirYun »

oh and you can use something like propichosting to upload the photos to.

that way the data traffic/storage on the server itself will be smaller as you will link to those pics

thank you
JR
Joost M. Riphagen
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