From Camera to Code
Preparing Digital Images for the Web
jennifer@drakehs.com

These days, as more and more people own digital cameras and scanners, electronic photographs are a common, familiar feature on the Internet. You can see them every day on busy websites; you send and receive them in e-mails from family and friends. Digital images may be such a part of your life that you see them as part of the daily landscape…until you attempt to download the photos from that new camera you got for Christmas.

Images fresh from the digital camera are not ready to be e-mailed or placed on a web page. As a rule, raw photograph files are too large for anything but printing - the file size alone makes them extremely slow to download and send. The recipient of your e-mail with a full-size digital photo attached may not be as happy as you intended, even less so if their Internet connection is 56k dialup. If you administer your own website, placing large image files right on the page may drive away that all-important web traffic because your site takes too long to download.

Photo editing can appear to be deep or intimidating waters, but there are many free and 'trial' versions of other software - such as StudioLine Photo Basic, Preclick Gold Photo Organizer and FxFoto that will allow you to do simple things like crop and resize existing photos. Bear in mind that free downloadable software of any kind can entail a risk and will most likely come 'as-is' without a warranty, should the install negatively affect your computer. If you plan to try it, make sure you create a save point on your computer before attempting to download and install the program, and only download software from the manufacturer's website, or (recommended) a reputable program download site like download.com that not only provides links to software but also provides user and site reviews to help you make the best decision.

Most free photo editing software relies on simple point-and-click tasks to crop and size a photograph for any purpose. Experience and experimentation is the best way to learn any new program, and many come with detailed help functions to walk you through how to use its features.

Important Things to Remember

• Image resolution on files for web use should not exceed 72dpi
• Images with a file size of over 200kb will be slow to download in an email or appear on the web for users on 56k dialup.
• Image file formats for web use should be limited to .jpg, .gif, or .png only. Browsers may not recognize any other file formats.
• Make sure the color on your photograph is set to RGB. Photographs with CMYK color values will probably not show up in most browsers.
• Some photo editing programs offer you a 'Save For Web' function. While quality differs from program to program, try this function and see if it works for you!

Make friends with your 'crop' tool. If the whole photograph isn't that great, and you only want to display a certain portion - crop out the unnecessary portion of the photograph and concentrate on what's really important. This way you'll immediately decrease your file size, plus get more detail in your subject and eliminate a large, awkward background.

Additionally - sometimes while editing a photograph, it's easy to forget to fully examine the background of your subject. By making sure that your subject is tight in the finished cropped photo, you can eliminate any potentially unwanted items that appear behind…just in case that otherwise 'serious' photograph of your sister features Uncle Lennie in the background sporting reindeer antlers.