HollyGraphicArt

Process 2. Preparing Photos

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If you have photos that are prints, you can mail them to me in the post or scan them into your computer and upload them from the order form. If you have photos that were taken with a digital camera, then you have the advantage of already having them in the computer and ready for easy uploading. It is best not to do any color correction, levels adjustments or anything else to the images. Just get the best starting images you can and then, if I need to, I'll adjust them here before I draw. It is helpful if you indicate any special cropping that you want. For prints, just make a quick sketch, or tell me in words, if you would like me to crop the image in a particular way. For digital photos and scans, crop the image down to show just what you want to have appear in the final portrait. Please indicate clearly which photo you want to have as the primary pose. And, if you want me to expand beyond the boundries of the picture, for example adding hair that was cut out of the pose, be sure to let me know that as well.

I have Adobe Photoshop 6 and Graphic Converter 4.7 so I can read most file formats. My big limitation is that I live in the mountains and have a very slow rural phone modem connection so the image files need to be kept down in size as much as possible, preferably below 1MB per file. JPEG is ideal with a compression setting of medium to high quality (8 to 12 in Photoshop, 70% to 100% quality in other programs). For example, a 1000 x 1200 8-bit RGB flat file at a high quality setting (10) came out to be about 450KB (0.45MB) when it was just tested. That is a good file size. It has enough detail for me to work with and is small enough that I'll be able to pick it up with my slow modem. If this is all geek to you, call or email me. Or, just send prints and I'll take care of the rest! (To be honest, it's geek to me too, my son and husband speak computereeze!) The big point is that the scan's don't need to be super high resolution.

Cheers! -Holly

Hollyj@hollygraphicart.com Portraits by Holly
252 Riddle Pond Road, West Topsham, Vermont 05086 USA
(802) 439-6462 M-Th 11a-4p Eastern Time

 

Six Easy Steps to a Beautiful Portrait...

Scanning Photos
Photos
Photos		 Scan
Scan		 Options
Options		 Send
Send		 Draw
Draw		 Hang!
Hang!

Some more tips for good scans...

  1. Scan the largest sized original possible to get the best results.
  2. Don't scan higher than the native resolution of the scanner.
  3. Color photos and scans are best as they let me see more detail.
  4. The dpi of the image once in the computer doesn't matter, so don't worry about it.
  5. A final pixel width and height of between 640x480 to 2048x3,000 is good.
  6. Compress the image using JPEG (JPG) if possible
  7. Use a compression quality factor of 8 (medium) to 12 (highest)
  8. Keep file sizes to less than 1MB each (~1,000KB).
  9. Don't use the GIF file format because it doesn't display a full range of colors.
  10. JPEG (JPG), TIFF (TIF), PNG, Photoshop and PICT are all good file format choices.
  11. I try hard to return all original print photos but please, don't send irreplaceable originals. I can't be responsible if something happens to them. Best to either make a copy at good photo shop, or to have them scanned and send the digital copy. This way we avoid any possibility of having heirloom originals lost.

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