Aug 22, 2010

Photo retouching is much more easier than ever before with the use of computer. In earlier days photographers needed a lot of time to convert a photo to quality one. No matter whatever modern camera you use, most photos will be needing some retouching to bring out the quality. Photo retouching with latest tools requires you to learn them properly and to utilize when necessary. Anyone can start doing the job but to get a good quality picture, you must know the tricks properly.

Image Enhancement Technique

Image enhancement will add edge to the picture and prolong the life of pictures. You just need some creativity to do the photo enhancement properly. Also changing the orientation of photos and straightening crooked photos are required. Without the creativity part, you may not come up with the perfect picture. These techniques can bring out a good quality picture out of normally taken photos, if used properly.

Image Stitching Technique

When you need to highlight a few images, for example, to promote your products and services, you need to overlap them into one image. Image stitching will help you to do this job. This can be a very good technique for showing all your products in one big picture. You have to arrange the pictures nicely so that they don’t look bad to the viewers. Also be careful that you are not losing image quality while putting them together and make sure to retain the final image quality after image stitching.

Raster to Vector Image Conversion Technique

With this technique you can save your images to any file format you need and will be able to modify the images in future according to your need. Vector is essential for resizing the images without losing quality and to modify the texts or images. You can very easily stretch or twist a vector image without losing the quality and this images can also be enlarged to be used in large billboards.

Try to learn all these techniques and utilize them properly when needed. With some practice, you will sure be able to modify or utilize your photos as needed without compromising with the quality.

Aug 21, 2010

Regardless of the image or file type, there are a few basic strategies to keep in mind for limiting file size. In the broadest of terms, they are:

Limit dimensions

Although fairly obvious, the easiest way to keep file size down is to limit the dimensions of the image itself. There aren’t any magic numbers; just don’t make images any larger than they need to be. By simply eliminating extra space in the graphic in Figure 19-1, I was able to reduce the file size by 3K (23%).

Reuse and recycle

If you use the same image repeatedly in a site, it is best to create only one image file and point to it repeatedly wherever it is needed. This allows the browser to take advantage of the cached image and avoid additional downloads.

Design for compression

One of the best strategies for making files as small as possible is to design for efficient compression. For example, because you know that GIF compression likes flat colors, don’t design GIF images with gradient color blends when a flat color will suffice. Similarly, because JPEG likes soft transitions and no hard edges, you can try strategically blurring images that will be saved in JPEG format.

Use web graphics tools

If you know you will be doing a lot of web production work, it is worth investing in image editing software such as Adobe Photoshop or Adobe (Macromedia) Fireworks. Figure 19-2 shows the Save for Web & Devices dialog box in Photoshop CS3 and the Optimize and Preview panels in Fireworks 8. We used the Save for Web function in Chapter 18, Web Graphics Basics to resize an image and to make transparency settings. In this chapter, we’ll explore the settings that pertain to keeping file sizes as small as possible.

Both tools allow you to preview the final image and its respective file size as you make your optimization settings, so you can tweak settings and see the results instantly. The set of options varies by file type, so I’ll explain them one format at a time, starting with that old favorite, GIF.