I work with many artists in things like setting up websites, sending images to publishers and perhaps to enter a competition or show. Some things that come up quite often are some of the following questions.
- “How do I send an image in an e-mail?”
- “How do I send my image to enter in a competition?”
- “How do I send a very large file to my publisher for printing?”
- “How do I share an image with facebook, MySpace, online community, or Flickr?”
- “How do I send my art to my webmaster for my web?’
- “Someone is interested in seeing my work for licensing. How do I show my portfolio?”
Have you ever received an attachment in an email that took forever to open and when it did it was so big you could not see it without scrolling? The file was too big for the internet.
If you are using the image for print then they need to be large files. If you are using for the internet they need to be smaller. The two outputs are very different. Just ask yourself is this for web or printing?
The first thing to realize when you share images online they should be made smaller. There are several reasons for this.
- Courtesy to the e-mail receiver.
- It is very easy to copy your art and print it if it is a larger file.
- Images that are too large take too much time to open and many people will not wait around for your masterpiece.
We now know images for the internet (including sending by email, website uploading etc.) must be a smaller size. The following is how to do this.
Scan your image as a jpg.
1.First you must somehow get your image into your computer and saved in a folder where you can find it in the future. Let’s say that is a folder called “My Art” saved in a “My Documents”
There are many ways to get your art into your computer. I will discuss that in another blog. Let’s just say you got a cd from Costco and loaded it in your folder called “My Art”
Reducing the file size or resolution is called optimizing images for web. For P.C users here is a nifty program to do that and it is free! It is called PIXresizer CLICK HERE for download.
You can take all your images in one folder and make them web ready (optimize) or you can do one at a time.
Click on image to enlarge.
PIXresizer
