Preparing
Photos for your Web Site.By Eleanor T.
Culling
www.eleanorstravels.com
It is my opinion that FrontPage
should not be thought of or used as an image editor.
Even though the program has various options for
inserting images, it is best that you not use them.
When you click on this first
thumbnail you'll see that you could choose to insert
an image from a file outside of FrontPage or from a
scanner or digital camera. For best image results,
you don't want to do this!
There are a few considerations that I wish you
would think about. "Best practices" tells us that we
need to know how to use an image editing program if
we are going to add more than the banners and
buttons that FrontPage can generate with its themes.
As soon as you want to add photographs and/or make
our own graphics, you need to fully acquaint
yourself with a separate image editing program.
Yes, FrontPage does offer you a Pictures
Toolbar from which many changes can be
made. You will be tempted to use it! I'm going out
on a limb here and telling you NOT to use it! The
FrontPage program is not an image editing program
and the results that occur when you allow FP to
alter your images are often not very good.
All images need to be totally
finished before you IMPORT them
into FrontPage. To do this first click on the folder
where you want your images to reside and then open
the import dialog box and browse to the folder where
you have stored your finished
images. Again, you can click on all the thumbnails
in this tutorial for larger, clearer views
Four programs that you might choose
are Jasc's Paint Shop Pro, Ulead's PhotoImpact,
Adobe's Photoshop Elements v.2 or Macromedia's
Fireworks.
I'm not going to touch on gifs in
this tutorial. The rule is: use jpgs for photos, and
gifs for buttons etc. My program of choice is Paint
Shop Pro v.8. The thing I like best about Paint Shop
Pro is that you can set up a 'custom' Photo Tool bar
with all the tools you need, all lined up ready to
use in a logical order.
Don't be overwhelmed! Look at the bottom row.
There's the setup I like to use to be able to
acquire a photo from a scanner, rotate it if
necessary, resize it, see a full view size, magnify,
make histogram adjustments, brightness and contrast
adjustments, use automatic color balance, use
automatic saturation enhancement, clarify, unsharp
mask, and the JPEG optimizer.
Let's look at a few of the basics. After you
acquire your photo, crop and resiz it to the exact
dimensions you want for your web page. Again, don't
be tempted to use the crop and resize/resample tools
that FrontPage offers!! Trust me, the results won't
be as good.
Next comes using the histogram
adjustment to make sure the darkest areas, the
highlight areas and mid tones are set correctly. It
isn't my purpose here to show you how to use all
these tools, rather just to introduce you to the
possibilities.
Now let's look at the
Brightness/Contrast dialog box.
If you need to, you can use this
tool to adjust the color balance.
One of my favorite image enhancement
tools in Paint Shop Pro is Clarify. (I could go on
and on about what this has done to save many
otherwise lifeless photos. It is
the finest 'tool' PSP has to offer!!) Here's the
dialog box.
Finally, you'll probably also want
to use some unsharp masking if your image isn't
quite sharp enough. This is especially so for photos
that you have scanned from prints, slides or
negatives. Here again, I'm not going to go into all
the details ... just remember that you should use an
unsharp mask rather than any other 'sharpen' tools.
Hopefully you should have your photo
looking great and now you need to optimize and save
it for the web so that it will load quickly enough.
Let's look at the Save Options. Once you understand
about compressing photos to make the file size much
smaller, you may be able to just set the compression
ratio (here it's 30) and have a good idea of how
large the file size will be.
But I would suggest that you first
learn to Run Optimizer. By clicking the button in
the lower right corner of the dialog box (above)
this JPEG Optimizer controil will appear. By
experimenting you can learn to find a balance
between the quality of your photo and the amount of
time it takes to load.
Paint Shop Pro isn't the only good
program on the market to accomplish the making of
good photos for the web. Let's look at some of the
possibilities that you can use with Ulead's
PhotoImpact. Here again I won't go into all
the details.
Here's their optimization dialog
box.
Let's glance at two examples from
PhotoShop Elements v.2.
Yes, there are many more image editing programs
on the market. Not everyone will agree on which
program to use or on the order you ought to use the
tools for improving the photos. I haven't found one
program that does everything I want, so I start with
Paint Shop Pro, often add text with Fireworks,
special effects with Photoshop Elements etc. You can
go to their sites and download trial versions to see
which one works for you.
By Eleanor T. Culling
www.eleanorstravels.com
