Flying Lessons
On this page you will learn about how to navigate around a Gallery and how to take the best pictures of your artwork. Further down we tell you how to optomise your pictures.
Photographic Requirements
Use good quality, well lit digital photographs. Take the photograph straight on (not on an angle) and completely fill the frame with the image.
Crop off any excess in an editing program like Photoshop or other photo editing package.
We prefer to have images no larger than 2048 pixels in the largest dimension and you will find that images around 1000 pixels are usually fine.
File sizes between 200k and 500k are optimum and in the following formats: .jpg .gif .bmp .png
If the artwork is framed, you can include the frame in the photograph but remove glass as this will cause glare.
Images must be in sharp focus and taken in good lighting conditions.
if you do not have access to a good studio with proper lighting, we recommend photographing them outside on an overcast day,
Make sure that all photographs for the artwork in your exhibition are taken in the same lighting conditions.
We highly recommend that you use a tripod, or alternatively get them taken by a professional photographer.
For large works we recommend you use a camera that will allow you to take a flat picture.
Lens distortion can make the sides curve. There is free software called Gimp that can undistort images.
Artwork Optimization
After you have got that great shot you'll need to crop anything extraneous to the artwork. For this Photoshop is hard to surpass.
If you have Photoshop or a similar program then you most likely know how to crop an image.
If your image is larger than 2048 pixels then you should re-size the image to that size.
The next thing to do is compress the image.
Check out this Compression Comparison exhibition it will give you a good idea of how much you can compress images by.
You can do this by "Saving for Web & Devices". A window with two or more version of your image will pop up.
Click the 4 up button top left and choose the top right image. In the right hand area make sure that jpg is picked.
Then click in the quality box and type 55%. Then look in the bottom left of the image with the blue line around it. This is the picked one.
The size should be between 200 and 400k. You will see that the image compares favorably with the far left image which has a much bigger file size.
There are two icons in the bottom left - & +. These are magnification tools. Click on the + icon and then click in the image window with the blue line around it. This will magnify it. Get in close to see at what point it starts to break up and go pixelated.
Do this whilst reducing the file size by lowering the quality to 50% then 45%. Just look. You see it start to get blocky around 35%. When this happens will depend on the original image quality. Experiment until you get the smallest file size with the best look.
IDEAL file size will be between 150k to 350k.
Just remember the smaller the better, as long as it still looks good close up!
Then hit the SAVE button at the bottom of this box in the middle. DONE!
This is the one to load into the "Exhibition Creator". You will be able to get all your art in this way and still fly around with the grace of an angel.
If you don't have access to Photoshop then PICASA by Google is a good application for re-sizing and compressing, and it's free. If you have any other questions or concerns then please look at our FAQ page or email us at help@gallerycentric.com