We artists tend to be computer and technology adverse. Learning to use an e-mail program is about as much about computers as we ever want to know. We do better with pictures than we do with words! For those who would like a little more information about how to prepare your digital images for your web galleries, I’ve prepared some visual material.

The yellow rectangles pictured above is the size your image will appear in your gallery. This size allows visitors to see your images with some detail, but is small enough that a disreputable person will not be able to copy it or reprint it. If your image is wider than tall then 600 pixels is good. If your image is taller than it is wide then about 350 to 375 pixels is best. Most digital cameras create a photographic image with a width of around 1200 to 3600 pixels, or 3 to 6 times wider than the yellow rectangle above. This size is ideal for printing on your desktop printer or for commercial printing. However, on a computer screen with a display width of 1024 pixels, a 2400 pixel image will be a bit larger than twice the width of the screen, and much much larger than we need for the gallery. But if you are not able to resize your images I can do this for you. In many cases it is better if I do it. And if I think your image needs some correction, I will send you a before and after and you can tell me which is closer. Most digital camera come with some kind of image editing software that lets you resize an image. If you can give me your images a bit larger, say around 600- 800 pixels wide, I can reduce them to the correct size. Compression The defacto formats for display images on the web are GIF, JPEG and PNG. GIF images can contain no more than 256 colors and are better for flat graphics, areas of solid colors, and for text. JPEG images can display up to 16.7 million colors (give or take a few hundred). In addition, JPEG images can be compressed to make the file size smaller, often without noticeable loss of quality. Medium compression (around 30-50%) will usually produce a good image for viewing on the web at a considerable savings in file size than the same image with no compression. Images with large areas of solid and saturated colors will need less compression. These four JPEG images show the effects of compression on image quality and file size. You can see the most image degradation at 50%. The top two images are almost identical but vary vastly in file size. So experiment with the amount of compression, or let me do this for you if you are not sure. How to get your images from you to me Many of you have sent me full size digital photos which for 8 images can be tens of megabytes and take both you and me a long time to upload and download. If you can reduce the size of your images to around 600-800 pixels in width, and apply a small amount of compression, about 20%, I can resize and optimize the images for the web in Photoshop, which does an excellent job. You can send me your images as e-mail attachments which works fine. If your files are large, then send them to me in two or three e-mails about 3-6MB max. If you have any questions, need more explanation, or just want to chat, send e-mail to deborah@yogacrossroads.com RETURN TO THE REQUIREMENTS PAGE