So you have a website, blog or some other way of getting stuff out to the entire world, you added a few images and it looks a bit ho-hum. How come other people’s pictures seem to be well balanced, positioned well on the page and nice and crisp? Well, there are few tips and techniques you can use that will really help with publishing your images on to the Internet.
- First things first. If you are writing a blog about your favourite pet, then an image of your pet is probably appropriate. If you are writing about cars, the a picture of should probably be about, well, cars! That is, select an image that is relevant to your article otherwise you will confuse the reader. The image is there to reinforce, summarise or expand on the copy.
Subject matter too small in the frame
- Concentrate on the subject matter. Most people shoot a picture and have far too much background in the image. That might work well on a big print to go on the wall, but we talking about publishing images for a website here. And websites are published on things that are low resolution (computer monitors) and that means you have to crop out all the extraneous information.
Subject cropped and positioned
- Clean the image up. If you have access to an image editing or manipulation program such as Adobe Photoshop, then take a moment to sharpen the image (I use smart sharpen and set the Amount to 80-90% and the radius to 0.6 for an image of 300 pixels wide). I probably over sharpen my images, but that is what looks good on a website. I also use the Image > Adjust > Shadow/Highlight function and clean up the blacks. Most people have their monitors set with the contract far to high and that will make an image with lots of black detail look blocked-up. So I lighten the shadows a little which pumps in a bit more detail.
Image sharpened and shadows cleaned-up.
There are a lot more sophisticated things you can do to an image, but those are the basics. Then, if your website, blog or whatever will allow, make sure you leave a little space around the image, particularly if you have the image embedded in the body copy. Don’t let your text run up hard against the edge of the image. On an image of this size, white space of roughly 10 pixels is often sufficient.
And that’s about it for starters. I will talk in more detail about imaging, colour and colour space…
