Tips for Yoga Gallery Images
A few factors contribute to a good quality photograph for web viewing...
First the size: images should be as small as possible kilobyte wise so that image files will download and display quickly even over slow connections. The current limit for the Community Yoga Photo Gallery is 16,000 bytes - something just over 15kb.
An images resolution is the primary factor here but compression can contribute also. For web, a resolution of 72 pixels per inch is sufficient. If you are scanning photos, resist specifying a higher quality as this will contribute only minimally to an images display quality and anything higher will make the image size unnecessarily large. As well, for average scanned photos of 3x5 or 5x7 inches, scanning at a display or print size ratio of 100% is ideal. for larger prints you can go for 50% to 70%.
Next, a displayed image shouldn't have too much or too little 'white space', or extraneous content showing outside the primary subject. This is where the software supplied with your scanner or another program you are more familiar with such as PhotoShop or the Gimp come into play. When necessary, use your software's crop or select and cut features to reduce the images focus to the primary subject plus a bit of white space for contrast. Simply use your creative eye here.
For instance, there is good image manipulation software bundled with Widows™, and most scanners come with one or more tools as well.
If not beginning with scanned photos, perhaps you are using digital images supplied via web or CD from your photo developer, or you have a digital camera networked to your PC. In these cases you will likely find features along with the supplied software or on-line tools where you can resize and or crop images as necessary. Check the help facilities available with your software tools.
Finally...generally speaking, scanned photos typically render best over web when saved as a .jpg(good) or .png(best) image. While you can send us practically any other image format known to technology and we can work with them, these will take more time for us to process. Community Gallery infers shared work no?
One special note here. With .jpg images, it is possible to imbed "comments" in the image. Look closely when you save the image and somewhere on the form there will probably be a space to put such comments. This is not critical, but any comments imbeded in your images will be displayed along with the image in the gallery. It is possible for us to modify comments supplied by default by your image manipulation software, but I'll give no guarantee that we will ever take the chance to do so.
Beyond this, with the correct tools you can further process scanned or digital images. This is not always necessary but suggestions here include adjusting brightness and contrast, sharpening, correcting for red eye, adding borders and modifying backgrounds, etc. If you've got the time and inclination, go nuts! In the meantime, we would love to have your Yoga photos added to the gallery, no matter how picture perfect or imperfect they are."
Happy imaging, and thank you again for contributing