Contributed PhotoGuidelines

I usually edit most photographsthat are submitted in order to fit their size in with the siteguidelines. I will also sometimes adjust color, contrast,brightness and sharpness of images to improve their displayquality. I have a pretty good graphics program that allows me todo this, but you all could help me out some if you could do someof this yourself before sending the photos. If you can't, that'sOK, I'll take care of it. Remember, it's always better to send animage that is too large, and have me reduce it, than to send animage that is too small, which I can do nothing about.

File Naming - Please follow these rules:

For Gallery entries, and Construction Review photos, please name the files in the followingformat:

• first letter of your first name, capitalized
• followed by your full last (family) name, with its first letter capitalized
• and then the name of the subject
• followed by a number or letter to differentiate photos in sequence. If the subject name ends in a letter, use individual numbers for each photo; if the subject name ends in a number, use a letter.

Examples:

• DChaltryM4A1a.jpg, DChaltryM4A1b.jpg, DChaltryM4A1c.jpg, etc.
• PBonnetLeclerc1.jpg, PBonnetLeclerc2.jpg, PBonnetLeclerc3.jpg, etc.
• SBrezinskiTiger1a.jpg, SBrezinskiTiger1b.jpg, SBrezinskiTiger1c.jpg, etc.

For in-box Preview photos, leave off your name, and onlyuse the name of the kit.

Examples:

• M4A1box.jpg, M4A1decals.jpg, M4A1sprue1.jpg, M4A1sprue2.jpg, M4A1tracks.jpg, etc.
• Achillesbox.jpg, Achillesbrass.jpg, Achillesresin.jpg, Achillesparts1.jpg, Achillesparts2.jpg, etc.

Picture format - Send color photographs as .jpg's. Linedrawings are best saved as .gif's. If you are unsure, try savingthe image as both, and see which one has the smaller file size.

Size - There are two types of size to discusshere: the size (in Kilobytes) of the .jpg file, and the size (inpixels) of the image on the screen. Try to keep the file size ofeach image to less than 100K. The best way to do this is to makethe photo size about 600 pixels wide. If you are sending manyphotos of the same kit, make each photo smaller, around 500pixels wide. Save the .jpg at 85% quality. You can send severalimages in a single email, but keep the total email size belowabout 1MB. For scans of kit parts, try scanning them in black andwhite for a smaller file size, unless it's important to see thetrue color of the parts.

Composition - In order to maximize the viewable areaof the subject, composition of the image is important. Note thatwe are not looking for artistic perfection here (unless the imageis of a diorama, perhaps), but rather the goal is to get the bestview of the subject in the smallest image size. This is done bycropping. The following image is 600 pixels wide, and it has afile size of 37K:

I want to reduce the file sizeto make it faster to download, so I want to reduce it to 400pixels wide:

But notice how the subject hasshrunk to the point where it is almost too small to see clearly.So instead of simply shrinking the original image, first crop theimage to isolate the subject, as seen here, in the original 600pixel-wide image:

The cropped image in only 450pixels wide, so that resizing it to 400 pixels has a very smalleffect on the size of the subject:

This photo is 400 pixels wide,just like the second image above, yet because of the cropping,the subject is much larger. The file size (25.7K) is slightlylarger than that second photo (21.1K) because this one has agreater height, but compared to the original, it is much moremanageable.

Because I was using 600 pixeland 400 pixel wide images in this demo, the file size differencesare not great. Also, these photos have a lot of solid blocks ofcolor in them, which makes for a smaller file size. For photosthat start at 800 pixels or larger, and for those with lots ofcolors, reducing them to 600, or 500 pixels, will reduce theirfile size significantly.

Contrast andBrightness - I often timesreceive photos that are very dark, so I adjust their brightnessand contrast to improve their visibility. The following photocould have been considered too dark to use:

But after adjusting the contrastand brightness, the photo is seen to be perfectly useable:

And the final touch I usuallyadd, is to increase the "Sharpness" of the image, whichis like focusing it:

Color - For those of you with graphicsprograms, you can also adjust the color balance and colorsaturation of your images to more closely match what the modellooks like in real life. I will often do this with contributedphotos if it is obvious that the colors are off, but most times,I'm not certain what the actual colors were, so I usually won'tmess with this.