How To Prepare Your Digital Images for Emailing.

The picture or image file that comes out of your digital camera will be too large to send by email or display on a web page. That is especially true if you used a high or large quality setting to record your picture.

In addition to being too large to send by email, it will take a long time to load in the recipient’s browser or email program. Patience may not be his or her virtue and they may not wait for your photograph to load.

So, you need to make the image’s pixel size smaller.

For example a picture that I took was stored at 3504 x 2336 pixels, that’s 8 megapixels. Your camera may store up to 4, 6, 8, or even more megapixel per image.

That’s a lot bigger than most people’s monitor. Many people have larger monitors these days, but probably not larger than 1280 x 1024. So, using that as a guide and desiring to keep some degree of quality in the final picture, we will reduce our 3502 x 2336 pixel image to 800 x ?.

You’ll see what the ? means shortly. The 800 pixels on the longest side will give the recipient a reasonably good quality picture and it will be large enough to display quite a bit of detail. If you don’t want to allow too much detail, you could use a smaller value.

Well, how do you make the image smaller? You will need some sort of photo image editing software. There are many programs that will accomplish the task, and many are free. I happen to use Photoshop CS and so, I will go over how you make the image email ready in that program.

The first step is to open the file that contains your image into your editing program. Follow the instructions for your image editing program.

In Photoshop you would select File, then Open. Then you would navigate to the directory on your computer that contains the image that you want to email. Once in that directory, left click on the file and select Open in the dialog box. The image will open into Photoshop.

Once the image is open in Photoshop, select Image and then Image Size. In the dialog box that pops up make sure that the “Resample Image” checkbox and the “Constrain Proportions” checkbox are both checked.

Now in the box called “Pixel Dimensions”, change the longest dimension to 800 pixels. In my case the shortest dimension automatically changed to 533. That’s the ?, I referred to above.

Now click on “OK” to accept the changes that you made. Photoshop will resize the image. It will now appear a lot smaller on you screen. If it is too small, you can use the magnify or zoom tool to enlarge it. This only changes what you are viewing not the actual image file.

If you zoom out until the top bar reaches 100%, that is the size that the image now is and how it will appear in the recipients monitor.

At this point. you want to save the file. Select File, Save for Web. At the top on the bar you will see: “Original”, “Optimized”, “2-Up” and “4-Up”. You can view the quality and file size for each of the various options.

Choose the one that gives you the quality and file size that gives you the compromise that you want. The general idea is to select a file size that will not degrade quality too much. Yet you want a small file size so that the image will load reasonably fast in the recipients email or browser.

Look for a file size of approximately 30K. In my case a file size of 33.1K with a load time of 13 seconds at 28.8 Kbps was available. So, I chose that one.

Select, left click, the image that you want to use and click the save button. In the dialog box that pops up, select the directory in which you want to store the new image file.

If you want to save the image into the same directory, make sure that you give the file a different name or you will overwrite your original image. You might not want to do that, if you have future uses for the image. Click the save button.

Also, when you get back to the Photoshop window and try to close the image file, you may get a dialog box that says “Save Changes to …”. Make sure that you click NO, if you do not want to overwrite your original image file.

Your image file is now ready to attach to your email and forward to your recipient.

Take Better Pictures With Your Digital Camera. Here are a few tips to help you take better photographs.

Modern digital cameras automate the picture taking process. It you want it to do so, you can make everything automatic. This makes taking pictures a lot easier than it was with the cameras of the past.

If your camera only has automatic capability, then you should learn to use it to its fullest capabilities.

However, I would never recommend that you purchase a totally automatic digital camera. Well, one exception.

If you want a small carry in your pocket digital camera that you can have with you all the time, then you might choose a totally automatic compact digital camera. But do that only if you have no other reasonably choice. If one with at least some manual control is available in you price range, get it.

These tips will apply to all of your photography. But they are especially helpful, if you have little or no control over your camera’s settings.

If you have control you can change things like depth of field (by changing aperture settings), ISO, white balance, etc. to improve your photographs.

However, you need to always consider the following:

1. Take note of the background.

What is behind and to the side of you subject? Does it distract from your subject? Will you have something like a light pole or a tree growing out of your child’s head? Is there something that draws attention away from your subject? Move around a bit and see if you can eliminate the distractions.

2. What light is available?

In low light situations you may need to add light. However, if there is enough light, consider using the available light instead of your flash.

Some totally automatic digital cameras determine when the flash is required and automatically use the flash. If you have the capability to do so, turn the flash off; try to see if you can create a better photograph using the available light.

3. Notice the angle of your camera with respect to your subject.

If you are taking a picture of a person, try to aim down toward the person’s face. Or maybe upward, a side view, a partial view, etc. Consider alternatives to just a direct face on view.

4. Check your focus point or points.

If you camera selects the focus points and you cannot change where it will focus, try changing your position. Sometimes this will change where the camera chooses to focus.

Try to focus on the person’s eye. Get close to your subject. Leave no doubt as to what your subject is.

5. Consider the position of your subject in your view finder/LCD monitor.

Seldom will you find that dead center is the best position for your subject. If it is, then center your subject. Just be sure that you like that position the best. Most of the time you will find that an off center composition is better.

The problem is with totally automatic digital cameras, they tend to select a focus point at the center. If you cannot change that you may have trouble with off center subject selection and focus.

Hopefully, your camera will allow you to focus, meter, etc, and then lock in the settings. After locking in the settings you can recompose so that the subject is off center and then snap the picture.

These are just a few simple tips that you can implement and improve you photography.

I hope that you will learn and use these tips on a regular bases in your photography.

Lonnie Minton