Are You Well Presented?

Practical Matters – let’s just do it!

Are you Well presented Enough theory, let’s look how you might go about preparing a file or set of files
for web use or even to meet a competition size standard. We will assume that
you have a standardised area of 800 pixels by 600 pixels into which you must fit
your images and that you wish to crop your images for optimum composition so that
they are of variable aspect ratio. We will also assume that you wish to improve your
image presentation with coloured backgrounds, borders and a drop shadow.

Make a new file in Photoshop in RGB at 72ppi, with a white background and
sized at 800x600 pixels and set your RGB colour space to sRGB if you are aimed
for web presentation or perhaps to a DVD for television viewing.
Turn on your Rulers (View>Show Rulers) then right click in the ruler bar itself
and set your units to pixels. You should now confirm that you have an 800x600
pixel file.
Decide if you wish to have a wide, coloured border around each image and if so
drag Photoshop Guides to the correct position – we chose 50 pixels. This told
us that our images needed to be 700 pixels maximum for landscape format and
500 pixels maximum for portrait format. Save your file as a template by saving it
as normal then right clicking on the file icon and making it a Read-Only file.
You now have a choice. You can process all your images using the Image
Processor facility in Adobe Bridge or drag already-opened images around in
Photoshop and scale them manually. As a very rough guide if you have more
than five images it is better to do the job from Bridge. Also from Bridge you
can highlight just the images you wish to include in your presentation [4A]. Set
your size up to 700 wide by 500 high, set your image quality, select sRGB and
save with profile and, if you wish, add your copyright note. Set up or choose a
destination folder for the processed images.
Open your folder of processed in Bridge, then open, in turn, your sized images.
Drag each onto a new version of your template file and position the image
against the guides. If you hold down the shift key as you drag, the incoming
image will automatically be centred [5A].
With the dragged image layer focused in the Layers Palette, click on
the Layer Effects icon at the bottom and set up both the Stroke and
the Drop Shadow.
Review your handiwork and if you like it, save the file to a new folder
called processed images with a new name (or something of your own
choosing).
If you wish to change the background colour, focus the background
layer and fill it with a pre-chosen colour.
If you wish to be more adventurous, add noise to the background
(Filter>Noise>Add Noise), then Motion Blur or Radial blur
(Filter>Blur>Motion Blur or Zoom Blur) and fizz things up a bit.
Once you have firmed up on a design, it would be well worthwhile to
write a Photoshop Action to further automate the process. This can be
run directly from the Bridge Image Processor dialogue box. You might
also set up different actions with different themes (eg one for colour
shots, one for monochrome, one for sepia). The process is so quick
once you have sorted it out, that you could also theme each wedding
set of your website to its own colour scheme. Just remember in all this
not to get too fussy, simple is often better, but at least it stamps a style
on your website which is hopefully unique.

Notes
a) With this method you will never have ugly white spaces around your images regardless of their aspect ratio.
b) If you have a specific colour as your web background, you can make that the background of your processed images, they will then seamlessly fit onto your web backdrop. Note down the web hexadecimal colour then pick it off in the Photoshop Color Picker.
c) Far too many images, presented at lower resolution are oversharpened.
The final sharpening of an image for web, or slide show use, should be carried out at the finished size and with the Photoshop magnification set to 100% (double click the Magnifier at the bottom of the Tool Bar). Now what you see is what you get and you will find that you have to go very gently – there are not too many pixels about at interfaces and it is easy to get fringes.

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Photo Quote: I work from awkwardness. By that I mean I don't like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself. Diane Arbus