Are your quilt photos showing your artwork in the best possible way?
Here is what you will need to create better quilt art photos for your blog or website:
1. A digital camera (at least 2 megapixels)
2. A computer with a good monitor (laptops are not the best display for photo work)
3. Software to edit your photos (such as Photoshop Elements, check the price on Amazon in our right sidebar)
In placing quilt photos on your website there are two main considerations:
* Are the photos displaying the quilts “professionally”?
* Are the photos files optimized for the website?
Let’s start by preparing your photos for the website:
- When a photo is taken the lighting can create color shifts that result in incorrect colors in your photos. A flash can help, but even with a flash you can get color shifts. It can be difficult to adjust color with software such as Photoshop. If you are experiencing this problem, purchase a “grey card” used by photographers. A grey card, about 10×10 inches is neutral grey in color. When you take your quilt picture include the grey card in the photo. Now when you are making adjustments in Photoshop, you will have a neutral grey area to use as a reference. The grey area on the card in your photo should not have any color casts (red, green, blue & orange). It should be neutral grey.
- The next step is to do a rough crop leaving some room around the quilt. Make sure the the sides of the quilt are parallel to the edge of the crop. If they are not you may have to use the rotate and transform features to get the quilt square and parallel. Once this is complete do another crop tight against the edges of your quilt. You now have a master image. Save this file for future use.
Now you should optimize the file for the website. You want a file that shows your quilt in the best way possible. You also do not want a file that will slow down loading the website page. This is especially important when you have multiple photos on a website page. Here are the steps to follow:
- Determine the size that you will want for the photo on the website. When we refer to size for websites we are only concerned with the size of the image in pixels. The DPI settings are not relevant. A thumbnail image will be about 100-150 pixels wide. A medium size image will be about 200-300 pixels. A large image about 600 pixels wide. Keep in mind the bigger the image the fewer images you should have on a page.
- Once you know the size you want, load your master file and re-size it in Photoshop by selecting the pixel width you want. Keep the aspect ratio fixed.
- Next it is a good idea to perform some sharpening on the image. You do this in Photoshop. Don’t over sharpen or it will look unrealistic. Some experimentation here will help you.
- Now you are ready to save you final image file. You want to keep your master for other uses. You will use jpg file format. With jpg you can vary the file compression to reduce the overall size of the file. Smaller files will not need as much compression. You should strive for a file size of about 20KB for your thumbnails. Try to keep larger pictures no more than 80-100KB in size.
With these steps you will have an image that shows off your quilt while balancing the web user’s experience on your website. Take some photos and run through the process a few times.
This article is part of a series about building Internet skills, which happens to be the goal for this blog.
