Quick, easy photo tips...

In the world of photos online, there are several rules you can learn to make your photos better, provide a better visual experience for your viewers, and save time/money/bandwidth. All you need are the most basic of editing tools, and a few minutes. These tips are not meant for pros or veteran Photoshop users. Although many times these tricks work for higher-end images, I'm posting these as "quick" fixes that any novice can successfully use. These work in Elements, Photoshop or basically any layers-based editing programs. They also apply to the free, downloadable open source editors that work with and support PSD files. The top three things to do to photos before uploading or emailing are

Crop
Scale
Adjust

Ruthless Cropping: For many photos taken with digital cameras, the focus, impact and intention can be improved many times over by simple cropping. It's the least used, most misunderstood technique known -- in fact most people just skip it.

For those of you who take photos then upload them to MySpace, FaceBook, or any of the other picture hosting web sites out there -- DO NOT simply drag a folder of images in for upload. Not only will it gobble up tons and tons of bandwidth (that you may have to pay for) but it just doesn't do your photos any justice.

In such situations, the photos require the receiving server to perform operations on the image -- they sometimes do this "on-the-fly" meaning, you are cooking bandwidth while the server does its work -- which you could have done locally before initiating the upload. Additionally, their server optimization operations may not do the job quite as nicely as you can using Photoshop Elements or other image editing software.



CROPPING helps you focus on the subject, allowing the subject to be larger in the image, requiring less 'processing' while cutting out unnecessary image.

In the "Crop" examples below, you've eliminated over a third of the unnecessary pixels -- which take bandwidth.
See:
Example #1: cropping for focus, and
Example #2: cropping for drama