“A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words!”
Words have their place, however, technology over time has provided us with easier, cheaper and better tools for producing pictures and images to support our messages. Consequently, we now live in a society that expects our communication to include more and more media in our communication pieces, be that photos, videos or other. This should be a good thing. However, as is the case with many things in life, something that should be an easy way to make an improvement to how we tell our stories can easily become a major detractor to our message if we don’t think about how we take and use images.
So, a little context to start with so the rest of this article makes sense. Most Digital images are created by creating an array of dots. (This article focuses on digital images although photographic images need to consider similar issues because to reproduce them, they get scanned into a digital image.) Each dot is created with a specific colour and placed in the overall array so that when you view all the dots at once, you see the picture. But as a consequence of the image being composed of dots, there are limitations to what can be done with it because if you get too close to it, your eyes start seeing the individual dots instead of the overall picture. Also, the specific way your camera produces an image will impact on the final product. Cameras process a lot of different settings automatically to balance the final result according to some general criteria. Most automatic cameras make decisions to determine a trade-off on the following criteria.
- The more dots (higher resolution), the less granularity in the image, but the larger the image file size.
- The more colour options for each dot (colour depth), the more realistic and saturated the colour of the image, but the larger the image file size.
- The larger the image file size gets, the more likely it is that the camera will use a file format that compresses the image (makes it smaller). However, the compression process usually removes fine details from the image leading to a slightly smudgy looking image. (This is particularly an issue with jpeg files).
As a photographer taking photos for publication needs to understand what the images they take are intended to be used for and set up their equipment to deliver what is required. Often though, images are required to be used for more than one purpose, so the image should meet the highest requirements of the intended purposes. There is a range of converters available that can reformat images, but you need to remember that it is easy to make things smaller, but you can’t make things bigger and retain any quality. The table below summarises the important characteristics for different purposes and what the image should be like.
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Intended Use | Requirements | Suggested image types/settings |
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Printing technology is good at reproducing fine detail at high resolution. Compared to other digital uses, the printed size of the image is very large. Print needs images with very high resolution (lots of dots) so that the image can be stretched out without the dots becoming obvious. This is even more important where the printed image is only part of the digital image, as there are fewer dots to start with. The paper type for the publication is also important – newsprint is more forgiving than glossy art paper so images need to get bigger again (in resolution and file size) if you are doing something like a calendar. Colour depth is less important than resolution, but don’t make it too small. |
File type: png or jpg. If you use jpg, try to turn off or minimise the inbuilt compression if you can. High-end publishers may require specialised image formats. Resolution should be a minimum of 1920 x 1200. Printers are wanting to achieve 600 dots per inch or better. For Touchstone, the rule of thumb is that the smallest acceptable file should be more than 1MB. Be aware that when you embed images in Word or PowerPoint or similar programs, it changes the format of the pictures and usually compresses them. Put the pictures in your document to show where you think they should go, but send the original image files as well. |
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Websites (including social media) are generally about getting the biggest impact in the smallest file size. (The larger the file, the longer it takes to transfer from the webserver to the viewer and no one likes twiddling their thumbs waiting for images to load.)
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File type: jpg. For jpg, you might want to leave some compression turned on (if you don’t want to use the same image for print), but don’t max it out. Standard web colour depth is 24-bit. Resolution for the web is usually either 72 dots per inch or 96dpi. This matches the dots per inch of the pixels on most display devices. Png files are good for graphic material, logos etc, especially if transparency is required. |
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Powerpoint images need to be of good resolution so they can be projected or displayed at large sizes without the dots becoming noticeable to people in the audience. Where images are to be projected, good colour depth and saturation are useful to compensate for the inherent washed-out tendency of projectors. |
File type: png. png files offer better colour saturation and can tolerate being “zoomed” better than jpg. Resolution should be a minimum of 1920 x 1200 fullscreen, but generally the bigger, the better. |
Now you know what you need to do from a technical standpoint; now you just need to take stunning images. This is getting outside the realm of a technology column, but the basic principles would be “Get Close” to the subject and communicate a sense of action in your picture.