Blog week#2

Before taking this course I really didn’t give much thought beyond the fundamental action of taking a digital picture and sending it off to my friend or family. We all know how fun it is to take digital pictures. Many of us pick up a digital camera and suddenly we think we are an expert in digital photography. I realized that there is much more that goes into posting or sending a picture online to a friend than first meets the eye. I have learned through this weeks reading of the book and the web material that you should be courteous and conscious of certain techniques when emailing pictures to friends and family by first considering some important adjustments and qualities.
One such consideration should be that of size. You should try to make the picture not too big but not too small. It is important to find that balance. You should consider reducing the size of the file and not necessarily the size of the image. A good size seems to be approximately 200-300 pixels. Reducing the size of the file allows the picture to load faster when your friend is trying to view it. One way to reduce the file size is to save it as JPEG file.
Another consideration you should make before sending your picture is the image quality. You may choose to use the JPEG compression and keep the size of the picture which uses less disk space but you will have a lesser quality image. You don’t want your picture to be sent pixilated by making the print too big. JPEG is a good way to send photographs because they can contain 16.7 million colors or 24 bits. You could also choose to send the picture in GIF format where all computers can view them. GIF files are compressed and the image does not lose the quality. However there is a trade off in using GIF in that they can have a maximum of 256 colors and so you are limited in that respect. The one benefit that GIF offers is that you can choose a color that is transparent so that the background color of the page will show through part of an image. GIF works well with simple illustrations, graphics, cartoons and logos.
It is essential to consider monitor resolution and how your picture will be viewed by the recipient in addition to the file format you are using to send. The resolution of a picture depends on the bit depth of the image and the monitor’s settings. If you change the number of pixels and the number of colors you change the resolution. For instance if the pixels are smaller everything on the screen looks smaller but the images can appear to have better resolution.
It is also important to take into consideration whether or not the person you are sending it to will just be viewing it online or if they will be printing it. Therefore it is key to consider and choose the amount of compression and size of the image to meet what the viewer will need. It should be kept in mind that the viewer may not have a big monitor or high speed internet. If the image resolution is higher than the monitor resolution then the print size is so large that the viewer must scroll.
This week I also learned some interesting facts about color and that it is important to consider these fundamentals when sending pictures and graphics. If the person is printing then it is important to consider that color is reflective and uses CMYK color. This stands for cyan, magenta, yellow and black. Color that is viewed on the monitor is not reflective but rather is coming from the source and into our eyes. It comes through the screen and uses what is called RGB color which stands for red, green and blue. This gives an overall different perception of the color on the monitor vs color in print. Therefore it is an important concept to keep this in mind when sending pictures for viewing on the computer vs those that will be printed or both.
Another interesting term related to web graphics that I learned this week is anti aliasing. This is the smoothness of the edge of a graphic. If you are really creative and sending text along with your photograph to your friend you can decide if you want to use this technique. Extra colors are necessary to create the blend and the file sizes of anti alias GIFS are larger. Because of this you would need to decide if it is important for you to use this feature in graphics. I think anti aliasing has its place but overall I am not extremely fond of it for most graphics. I think it is cleaner and sharper to send text that is not anti aliased.
Some last bits of information, no pun intended that I learned about is about an image map. If you are sending a photograph and want to put a link or a hotspot on the photo you can link back to another page. This is fancy designing over and above just sending a friend a photo but it can be lots of fun. Imagine putting a link near a person’s picture and having it link when you click on it to that person’s personal web page if they have one or to their face book page. This can be a fun alternative to just a plain picture. Another way to send photographs is to include thumbnail versions of the image. These are just smaller views of the image where you then jump to another page of the larger image if you want to take the time to do so. This helps the recipient with perhaps a slower computer to pick and choose what they want to take the time to open instead of being bogged down by large images.
Overall this week the one part of our photoshop class that I was most amazed by was that you could take an image, cut it out, and clean it up in a precise way to include it with or overtop of another image. I knew that this could be done but I just didn’t realize the time and precision with which a person could take the time to perfect. Graphic design really is a fine art and one to be respected. There is a lot of work, planning, and decision making that goes into professional pictures, web design, and graphics not to be taken lightly. I am curious about the weeks to come and what else I will learn about this field that I was otherwise unfamiliar with.