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Author: Scott_Burkett, Contributing Editor
| Consider these before, during, and after images (the red square indicates my cropping selection): |
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| Tip: You'll likely find that your artwork won't "square" off properly with your crop selection. That's okay, it happens to all of us! :-) This can happen when the camera wasn't perfectly parallel with the artwork, or if the camera or art was slightly tilted to the left or right. In other words, you *really* have to square off with your piece when you take the photo - and again, take as many as you can of the same piece to lessen the chances of having to reshoot.
Depending upon how out of alignment it is, you may want to consider reshooting the work (unless you have another image which came out better). Otherwise, you can keep playing with the cropping tool until you come up with something you like. You may find that you have to sacrifice a portion of your art to make a photo work for you. Again, this is a personal call. If the portion I am losing isn't part of the center of focus in my painting, I don't worry about it too much. For example, take the image below/left. This is likely not going to work for me. As you can clearly see, the painting isn't really "squared" off. I decide to give it a shot anyway, as I know that the lines in the brick wall may just be casting an optical illusion on my tired eyes. However, as you can see from the image below/right, my cropping selection just doesn't work well with this piece. The cropping selection just doesn't square off like I want it to. Now, I can choose to retry my cropping selection, although I will lose a few pixels on all sides. However, in this case, I decided to use another image - this one just won't cut it - again, a personal decision. |
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| Scaling an Image:
Scaling an image is basically just "resizing" the image to make it smaller or bigger. Why do we need scaling? Many digital cameras and scanners will create *huge* image files, especially if you are capturing scenes at maximum resolution. These image files can be several megabytes in size, and many thousands of pixels in height or width! Obviously, you don't want to just plop one of those monster images online, especially in a discussion forum, where they can screw up the way things are displayed. In addition, it takes a while for some folks to download images on the web - so we all need to be respectful of this when posting images. So, how do we scale an image? Well, in Polyview, it is really simple. In the "Operations" menu (on the menu bar at the top), you'll see an item listed called "Change Image Size". Select this, and simply enter the size you desire. For art images posted on the web for critique or general review, I'd recommend a custom setting of no more than say 400 or 500 pixels in width. In Photoshop, it is just as easy to scale an image. Under the "Image" option on the top menu bar, select the item called "Image Size". The mechanics work the same as they do in Polyview. Tip: Just as we pointed out when cropping, be sure to save any newly scaled-down images as a new file, with a different filename. You always want to keep your original photos around in case you need them later. Otherwise, you may find yourself reshooting your artwork. :-( |
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