How to send
photos for the website
Photos for the lamar58.org website should be
sent to our webmaster
Louise.
If you have digital
images, just send them along. Please make sure the
photos have good, descriptive file names before sending them
(see 6 and 8 below).
If you have printed
photos, you’ll need to scan them so they can be
sent as e-mail attachments. Without being too technical, here
are some basic directions. If scanning is beyond your
technical capacity, feel free to sent the photos by classic
mail to Louise. She will scan and post them then return the
originals to you.
1 Choose the best photos. It takes
time to scan, adjust, and then send each photo to the
webmaster. You should save time by only working on the photos
you will want to share.
2 Start your Scanning Software. Your
scanner should have come with software to capture scans. If
you can't find the software, many graphics packages can
capture scans, packages including Photoshop, GraphicConverter,
or PaintShop. You should look for a command to Scan, Import
(or Import TWAIN), or Acquire (or Acquire TWAIN). TWAIN is the
language which most scanners speak, and this is independent of
the type of connection between the scanner and your computer
(USB, SCSI, etc). For more help, consult the documentation
that came with your scanner or software.
3 Put a photo on/in your scanner bed.
4 Set-up and Start your scan. When
scanning pictures for the web, it's important to keep quality
good and file sizes small. Before you start the scan, you
should make sure that your scanning software is set for the
following:
a) File Type: JPG or JPEG (the same thing).
JPEG files are the best file type for storing photographs
with reasonable quality and small size. Depending on your
software, you may have to choose this after your photo is
scanned.
b) If you are going to do editing, save raw
scans as either TIFF files or Photoshop files. Once edited,
save as JPEG or JPG files
c) Resolution: 300-500 dpi.
The resolution of a scan describes how many dots per inch
(dpi) the scanner will make in the digital version of your
picture. 300-500 dpi keeps detail quite good and allows for
editing – especially cropping.
d) Colors: at least Thousands, or at least
32,656. You should be scanning in color, with
as much color detail as you can to share the beauty of your
pictures. If your photos are black & white, scan in the full
color mode. Never user the predefined 'black/white' or
‘clipart’ profiles that come with some scan program packages!
Bad results happen.
e) Size: about 640x480 but not larger than
1024x768 pixels. If you have the option of
saying how large the photo should be, try not to make any one
dimension of the digital photo larger than 640 pixels. Large
photos take a long time to upload and very large photographs.
Most computer screens are only about 500-700 pixels wide at
their widest point. There are, of course exceptions to this.
The quite large senior class photo is a good example of too
large to fit on the screen but large enough to see details.
5 Touch up the image (OPTIONAL).
Image editing applications such as Adobe Elements or Adobe
Photoshop have hundreds of features that allow you to crop and
touch up photographs to make them look better, such as playing
with brightness and contrast or removing 'dust and scratches'
from the images. Look for all-in-one photo enhancement
commands such as 'Auto Color' or 'Auto Enhance'.
6 Save your digital photo as a JPG.
After you have scanned your photo and cropped or otherwise
manipulated the photo, save the photo as a JPG file. Your
software may ask about the quality or compression to use when
saving the file. You should save the digital photo at
medium-high quality (5-7 or 50% to 75%). As you increase the
quality of the photo compression, the file size also
increases. For Web images, file size equals time, so having a
small (fast) file is MUCH more important than losing a little
image quality, so choose "medium" quality. In Photoshop, use
setting "3" out of 10. It is tempting to save as "100%
quality," instead, but that's an expensive mistake in terms of
download time. 66% quality is usually good enough and it makes
for a much smaller file.
Be sure to save your digital photo with a
descriptive name to help yourself later, and don't use spaces
or punctuation in the name. mt_everest_basecamp_1.jpg instead
of photo1 or everest 1.jpg. Be sure your filename has no
spaces or funny punctuation in it. Use only numbers, letters
and . - _ (period, hyphen, underscore), and be sure to end the
filename with ".jpg". Filenames should be no more than 31
characters long, including the .jpg part, for cross-platform
best results. Generally, do not use capital letters in the
file name.|
7 Repeat steps 3 through 5 until you have all your
photos saved as JPG files.
Remember where you put the pictures because you will
need to find them later to send them along for the website.
8 NOW Send your images along to Louise. Type a
message to Louise describing what
you're sending, attach the carefully saved and aptly named JPG
files containing the pictures, and hit 'send.'
