Photoshop

I see that some people over on the 2010 BJP are asking questions about how to resize photos for their blogs. Now I confess that I'm no expert on this, but I thought I'd take a moment to talk about how I do photos. I use an old digital camera which still takes fabulous pictures. It is a Nikon CoolPix 950. I also use Photoshop & a MacIntosh computer so some of what I'm saying might now convert well to the PC world & I know many use PhotoElements, but Photoshop is the tops for photo manipulation. Chris is an expert on Photoshop so his work looks so much better than mine & he actually teaches Photoshop.

So working with Photoshop, you have to get your image into a decent shape before even thinking about posting it on the internet. When you download your photos from the camera it will be huge with pixels in the thousands & depending on the camera with a resolution of 300 dpi or more. So first after downloading your photos to a file on your computer (and remember to organize, organize, organize for success!), open your image in Photoshop. It will be a large image & here is where you want to manipulate it. DO NOT resize the image until you happy with how it looks. This is the time to do things like rotate the image as most of mine always need to be rotated, then I crop the image using the cropping tool. Next I always like to sharpen my image using the filter tools (unshapen mask is my favorite) & yes, it does make a different. Then I adjust the levels of contrast/brightness by using levels or curves, but sometimes just letting Photoshop do it automatically is acceptable.

Now you can resize the photo for internet/blog usage. When you go to image size first thing to look for is the resolution. Mine always comes up at 300 dpi, but you can adjust it here. I usually keep my resolution at 300, but you can change it to anything all the way down to 72 dpi which is a very low resolution that will look okay on the screen but will be very pixelated, but that might be okay if you keep your image size large. I don't. Like I said, I like a 300 resolution. I change the dimension size which is at the top & has a large pixel number (usually over 1000). It is also gives you numbers in width & height with pixel numbers, but you can change that to inches, but I don't. Here is where I change my pixel number usually from 600 or 800. Your average screen is 800 (width) by 600 (height). This where you adjust it so that when people click on your image on the blog it will open up into a bigger photo. So I like to keep it around 400 to 600 depending on the detail of the photo. Remember to save as a .jpg for the internet & do this AFTER you've done all your image resizing as this compresses the photo & once you've saved it as a .jpg you will not be able to see the detail in working with the image as with the original. Oh, did I mention to save that original photo in a file? I think so, and remember if you really want to be anal about this, save different versions of that same image multiple times so in case you do something & it screws it up, you have the worked on image to go back to. I usually save my images at least 2-3 times in a new folder!

Now we go to blogger in this case. You will download the image in blogger using the picture tool.
Above is my original image that I downloaded. I can move it by clicking on my image & moving it with the mouse. NOW you can also reduce the size of the image here. Click on the image & take your mouse/finger to the corner of the image. You'll see a line come up on the screen. While you are holding down the shift key & the mouse, going in a diagonal motion, you can reduce the photo. See how I've taken my original image from above & reduced it here on blogger?? Publish your post & then go to view your blog. It you do not like how the image has published, you can edit it until you are happy with the results. Sometimes I have to do this multiple times until it looks the way I like it. Remember to experiment!

Oh & yes...these are the jars I'm using for my 2010 BJP...and yes! I haven't started beading yet. I'm still trying to get my MUSE to tell me how to start. Meanwhile I'm working on other projects.