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Title: Shooting and optimizing your internet images
Author: Steve Nichols
Article:
For corporate communicators brought up on printed publications,
the immediacy of on-line communications is a breath of fresh
air. But just as we have had to adopt our writing style for the
net, we should also be thinking differently about how we take
and edit photographs.
Why? Internet and intranet images are used very small - often no
bigger than about 250 pixels wide. This immediately throws up a
problem. On printed pages where we had a whole page to play with
we could afford to be clumsy with our cropping and composition.
Not any more.
Photographers should adopt a different shooting style for
intranet, one that involves much tighter composition and
adherence to the common shapes that are used.
Take a look at your on-line news service and you will see that
most imagery tends to be landscape shaped. The more enlightened
will have adopted portrait-shaped images too, which seem to give
the viewer more to look at when placed alongside copy, while
still leaving space for a decent column width for text.
But, with a few exceptions, I bet you don't use cut-outs, or
full-screen shots that whack the reader right between the eyes.
And you don't have too much room for picture stories that tell
the tale across about 10 images either.
So what we need is a single image that has impact, even when
only two inches wide.
The answer then is to brief your photographer carefully about
the space you wish them to fill. If possible, show them a
typical page or send a print-out. If you don't brief your
photographer carefully how can you expect to get the results you
require?
If you're taking the pictures yourself then try to a) get a lot
closer to the action and b) compose your shots to maximize the
area you have. I have one consultancy client who nicknamed me
"Phil the Frame" as apparently that's all I kept saying to them!
I don't care - the message seems to have struck home!
But how can you compose your shots better?
The first trick involves heads. If you are shooting a group of
three or four people don't just line them up, stagger them so
that their heads are closer together. The same with a shot of a
couple. OK, it may feel a little strange for them to be so close
to their neighbor, but you can lose that irritating space
between their heads and so come up with a tighter image.
You can use the same technique if photographing someone with an
object, such as an award. Get them to hold it up against their
face, not on their chest.
When using the viewfinder or preview screen really work hard to
fill every pixel, moving people around if need be.
Once you have the shot there is a lot you can do to improve it.
I have yet to see any image straight out of a digital camera
that couldn't be enhanced.
First, make sure you are viewing the image on the type of
monitor that everyone else in the organisation is going to use.
If using a Macintosh, change the gamma setting from 1.8 to 2.2
(the Windows standard). Images displayed on a PC are inherently
more contrasty than they look on a Mac if you don't.
In Photoshop, adjust the levels using the histogram as a guide.
This is better than using the brightness and contrast controls.
Sometimes it can help to boost the saturation by +10 too,
depending upon what camera you use.
Then crop the image to show what you want, bearing in mind how
it will be used on the screen. Once cropped, resize the image
down to 250 pixels or whatever you normally use. If you resize
and then crop you will end up with something totally the wrong
size!
The final step is to apply some Unsharp Masking to the image to
put back some of the definition lost through resizing. It is
amazing how many people don't do this. Typical settings in
Photoshop are Amount: 30-100%, Radius 1.5 pixels and Threshold
5-7 levels.
Don't overdo the sharpening. If it looks too gritty, cut the
Amount down by half.
Finally, save as a JPEG file (not a GIF, which only uses 256
colors, instead of the JPEG's 16.7 million), choosing an
appropriate level of compression. When all internet connections
were via a modem it was important to get the file size
incredibly small, but with most intranets you can afford to make
them a little bigger.
Using the "Save for Web option" you can play with the "Quality"
control to get a good balance between file size and image
quality. You should be able to get a 250 x 200 pixel image down
to around 10k with no sign of degradation or artefacts - these
are the strange squiggles you see in over-compressed images.
Voila! You now have an image that is well composed, tightly
cropped, optimized, sharpened and ready for use.
About the author:
Steve Nichols TechNotes blog is at
http://infotechcomms.blogspot.com/ and is described as a regular
ramble that tries to demystify technology and help people get to
grips with new-fangled gizmos, such as the internet, streaming
audio/video, DTP and digital imaging. You can get it via RSS at
http://infotechcomms.blogspot.com/atom.xml
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