I am prompted to do this article for a couple or reasons. Mainly this is to make life easier for Ken. But also to give you a better chance to gain a merit or honour from your digital projected image.
THE RULES
These are important and I was amazed to see how many, even experienced A graders, who were ignoring the Rules. Ken has put these out on numerous occasions to the point where he is probably embarassed to do it again.
So here they are again, as I interpret them
Rule No. 1 Please obey the Rules
Rule No. 2 Get the sizing right. That is no bigger than 1024pixels on the long side and 768 pixels on the short side (for horizontal compositions). Smaller on either is fine. BUT, they must be at 72 pixels per inch. They should be saved as jpegs yielding a size of less than 1 Megabyte AND in the sRGB colour space.
For vertical compositions 768pixels is the long side maximum with no short side maximum (the 3:2 camera ratio would give 512pixels)
Why do we have this rule... to optimise your image for digital projection with our Sony projector. (and to keep the file size to a reasonably usuable amount).
Ken gave me a CD of Jan 2009 entries to put on the website. I had to resize them all down for web use but could not believe how many were at 240dpi, 300dpi even 360dpi. Others were in the Adobe 1998 colour space and some in the RGB space. Neither of these spaces will look at their best on the projector.
New members have an excuse, but many of these were from experienced members.
Your resizing box in Photoshop should look something like this
The image options panel in the Save AS Dialog box should look something like this
And finally the Jpeg Quality Dialog will show the approximate file size when the file is compressed,
in this case down from 2.25Mb to 966k. I might consider quality 11 to bring it down a little more.
Please be diligent about this. I know we sometimes leave it to the last minute to fire off our entries but take one more minute to check each file. Even in Bridge we can check the dimensions of all four images in a matter of seconds using the metadata panel. Here is one from a vertical image I entered in Jan. This is from a Bridge CS4 panel. Yours may vary depending on your Bridge version. The bottom left is the colour space and the right the colour mode (as opposed to CMYK for example)
And to give yourself a better opportunity to do well with your image, as least do an Auto Levels or Auto Curves adjustment to balance the tonal range of the image. There are more sophisticated ways. If you don’t know them then join Jeff Hutchison for one of his Photoshop courses and clinch some more awards for the 2009 season of competitions.
by
David Magahy