How To Compress Commercial Photographs For Use On Websites

Taking professional photographs isnt just about pictures for printing. In the digital age many people want photos for use on the Internet on websites, and altering your pictures for use on the Internet can be tricky and requires the correct software.

When you have selected the photographs that you want from your commercial photographer, you should get them on a CD so that you can load them onto a computer for editing.

One of the best pieces of software for editing creative photography is Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop allows you to alter, touch up, repair or even completely recompose your photos as you wish.

Your first step should be to open Photoshop and load your first photograph. When youre saving pictures for use on the Internet they should be in RGB mode, whereas photographs for print are CMYK. You can change the mode of your pictures by selecting image and then mode.

You also need to make sure that your photo is the correct size for the Internet as most print quality photographs youll receive on CD from commercial photographers are print quality, and as such are too big for the Internet. You should select image and then size from the menu in Photoshop and change the resolution of your image to 72dpi, or pixels per inch. This means dots per inch. 72dpi is too low quality for print, but for the Internet it is perfect as browsers wont show images at a higher resolution, so any print quality images uploaded to the Internet will be too big and the quality will be wasted anyway.

When you have selected 72dpi, check that the image width and height arent too big in pixels. Most screen resolutions are no bigger than 1024 pixels wide, so if your photo is bigger than that it will be too large. If youre uploading a photograph to a website, then a size closer to 800x600 pixels will be suitable. This will ensure that your photo is still of a high quality, yet is small enough to upload quickly and be viewed by other people.

Next you can check that your photograph doesnt need any corrections to remove the imperfections, such as spots, red-eye or other blemishes that professional models always have attended to with their photos from commercial photographers. You can remove any blemishes by using the magnifying glass and zooming in on any imperfect area, before taking the clone tool from your tools menu and selecting a sample of perfect skin. You can then seamlessly copy this perfect sample over the imperfect area.

This technique could also be used to repair old photographs that have been torn, by scanning them into your computer and cloning the perfect parts over the tears.

Once you are happy with your picture you can export it for use on the Internet. Choose the save for web option to save your photograph. Here you will be presented with options such as reducing the quality to reduce the file size. Use the slider bar until you are satisfied that your photo looks good but the file is nice and small. Select JPG as the file format and save your picture.

You are now ready to upload your photograph to a website and have an example of creative photography at its finest.