Calendar Home Contacts Pictures Sponsors

DIGITAL IMAGE REQUIREMENTS

October 2006

Burn a CD with a few JPG files. Don't use any slide show programs, memory cards or anything else. Prefix each file with your name, like ROCKY_0569.JPG. We project them in alphabetical order. Naming them will let them stay together and not mix in among everyone else's.

Some people have tried getting fancy with special software that probably looked great at their house, but made 80 people wait while we rebooted our projector in the middle of a live show. If you need to do something special by all means bring your own computer and projection system, otherwise please follow these rules if you intend to share your images on our equipment.

We're a volunteer group. We have no AV squad hired to run this while we try to enjoy the social parts of our meetings. Please do your CD homework work before you arrive. We have a different computer and projector every time. We never even know if we'll have a MAC or a PC, so don't expect to load any slide show programs on our computer.

Ask Ken Rockwell if you have any questions.

Come early with a CD with some JPGs on it and you'll be fine. If you don't collect your CD at the end we presume you want it thrown away.

Please bring up to 12 images. Your images will look much better if you only show the best one out of any similar images. Please avoid showing several versions of the same shot. Editing is half of photography. Six great shots look much better than 13 shots of one subject.

See the tricks below if you're more advanced.

TRICK ONE: The projector probably is squarer than your photos. If you bring your images directly from your camera you won't fill the screen; the shots will bee too short vertically.

Aspect ratio is the ratio of width to height. Compact cameras, computers and projectors have a 4:3 ratio, while SLRs have a wider, shorter 3:2 ratio. SLR images are wider and shorter than computer screens. If you project an image from an SLR camera it will be squeezed to fit:

Uncropped from SLR camera (3:2 ratio)	Cropped to 4:3 ratio to fill screen

If you crop off a little from the sides it will fill the screen. Use Photoshop's Marquee tool, select FIXED ASPECT RATIO, set it to 4:3, drag the Marquee tool to select your crop, go to IMAGE > CROP, and now your image is the shape that will fill the screen. Resize to 1,024 x 768, sharpen at 150%, 0.3 pixel radius, 0 threshold, save as JPG, and you're done.

Compact, non-SLR cameras often shoot in 4:3 ratio. Use these as-is.

TRICK TWO: Skip vertical shots. They look like this when projected:

Vertical shot as projected	Choose a horizontal shot instead

For our Engineers

You can ignore this, but since some members ask, here are more details:

MEDIA: CD-ROM ONLY. This means no CD-RW, no cameras, no memory cards, no USB drives, no compact flash, no smart media, no memory sticks, no floppies, no xD, no ZIP disks, no Bernoulli drives and no nothing except ordinary burnt and closed out CDs. You must close the session on the disk, even though you're just putting no more than 12 images on the CD. Why? Simply because we can't guarantee we'll have any way to read those other memory devices at the meeting. Open-session CDs and CD-RWs don't always read properly on other people's computers. We have enough problems with 35mm slides not dropping that we don't want to be asking for more trouble with the digital show.

IMAGE FILE FORMAT AND SUFFIX: .JPG ONLY. All file names must end in ".jpg." They may NOT end in ".jpeg," since our system may not read them. (Mac users: you must ensure that your file names include this .jpg suffix and no spaces or anything. Even though JPG images will look fine on your Mac and indicate JPG format, the windows PC we sometimes use for the show will not recognize images unless they end in ".JPG" and have fairly simple file names without spaces and punctuation.) Likewise, no TIFFs, no EPS, no PSDs, no BMPs, no HDR, no SWF, no DPX, no Cineon, no HTML, absolutely, positively NO RAW, NEF, CR2 or CRW and no nothing other than JPG. Why? Simply because other file formats may or may not play in whatever system we scrounge up for a given meeting, and the larger ones like TIFF and RAW slow down the system if even it could read them.

IMAGE SIZE: Your image should fit within a rectangle 1,024 pixels wide and 768 pixels tall. That's the highest resolution of any projector we use. Jamming more pixels into the image won't make it look any better, but could slow down reading the files. In most cases you'll have images that are a little less than this on one side unless they are are an exact 4:3 ratio from a point-and-shoot digital camera. For instance, from a DSLR or 35mm film scan with a 3:2 ratio you'll probably get 1,024 x 683 pixels, or for a vertical you might have 512 x 768 pixels. To see size in pixels in Photoshop go to IMAGE > SIZE and then look at the size in pixels, not inches. There is no maximum or minimum size, however we suggest not bigger than about 3,000 pixels on a side since a.) the system resamples them back down to 1,024 x 768 or 800 x 600 anyway, and b.) bigger images make bigger files and slow everything down. They won't look any better. Feel free to bring smaller images, just beware that they probably won't fill the screen. Therefore please resize files from a digital camera since the original files are larger and may slow things down reading from the CD.

NO COPYRIGHT NOTICES: Images branded with copyright notices are the best way to brand yourself as an amateur. We pros know they aren't required anymore for copyright. No one wants to see them in our slide show. I only drop my © on the images above because they're on the Sierra Club's website, where the whole world goes to steal images. This way people know where to go to steal more of my images once they've stolen these. I don't do this for slide shows.

PIXEL ASPECT RATIO: Square pixels. Honestly if you're smart enough to ask then you should know better. I only listed this for the few wiseguys who have to ask this stuff. Don't worry about it.

DPI: Don't care. Since we have nothing to print out on paper and we aren't scanning, inches are not involved and thus DPI (dots per inch) means nothing. Set it anyplace you want; it's the size in pixels that matters.

FILE SIZE: No specific requirement, although when you follow all these directions you should wind up with files of a couple of hundred kB and certainly less than 1MB. Some folks bring files of many megabytes, like JPGs straight from a camera, and then everyone has to wait for these to read from the CD. Remember we don't have the time and manpower to load these all into our system beforehand to play from a hard drive. A meg or two isn't bad, but 10 or 20 MB is way too big.

ROTATION: Vertical images must be rotated correctly and not simply flagged by a digital camera. Flags usually read OK, but there's always the possibility they won't. If you copy images directly from a digital camera you probably will not be able to share them, since few if any cameras do the rotation automatically even if they're flagged. You will have to open the images in a program like iView, Photo Mechanic, Photoshop or BreezeBrowser and rotate them manually. Why? Because otherwise vertical shots may be flipped 90 degrees, whoops!

FILE STRUCTURE: All images must lie in the root of the CD. No folders are permitted. Why? Because if the images are in a folder the system won't see them unless digital projectionist goes and finds them while everyone waits. No mystery navigation or expecting us to search for the one folder which is for the club presentation please.

SHARPENING: Whatever looks good at 100% on your screen if you're fitting files to 1,024. If you have bigger images then it doesn't matter since they're resampled back to 1024 or 800 and then sharpened by the projection system. I prefer 150%, 0.3 pixel radius, 0 threshold (or 3 threshold from scanned film).

COLOR PROFILE: (optional) sRGB only. Ignore this if you have no idea what this is. Most cameras and everything do this anyway. Our system usually ignores profiles and presumes sRGB unless we have iView on a Mac, in which case it converts everything back to sRGB anyway, usually. If you used something else like Adobe RGB the colors will usually be duller or worse. If you tried to get smart and used some other color profile please convert in PhotoShop using IMAGE > MODE > CONVERT TO PROFILE > sRGB.

COLORSPACE: RGB. Forget about this if you don't understand it. You really have to work hard to get an image in a different space so you'd probably know it if it wasn't RGB. Just don't try to bring any CMYK or Hexachrome or spot color files. If you do have some oddball colorspace then you can return it to RGB in Photoshop by doing IMAGE > MODE > RGB Color.

BIT DEPTH: 8 Bits/Channel. Again, ignore this if you don't understand it since this is how your images will default. If you understand this you'll know we of course need 8 bit per channel (24 bit per color), since that's the only way you can save as a JPG anyway. If for some reason you insist on using 16-bit files, first convert to 8-bit in Photoshop by doing IMAGE > MODE > 8 Bits/Channel.

NO OTHER FILES OR SOFTWARE OR PROGRAMS ARE ALLOWED ON YOUR CD. You may only have up to a dozen .jpgs and that's it. No slide show programs, no page turn programs, no HTML, no album programs, no music and sound programs, no quicktime movies, and absolutely no .exe, .ini or autoexec.bats or anything else. Why? Any of these other slick programs often will hang our computer, making it very difficult to present the next member's images. Also it's a coin flip if we have a Mac or PC each meeting, so Murphy's law says if you have a program to play on a Mac that we'll be presenting on a PC that night or vice versa. Even if these run flawlessly they still take time to open and close at best, and at worst won't run, hang our system and require a full reboot while 100 members have to wait. Music is absolutely prohibited since our system does not play it, and unless you personally have written, performed and recorded the music or have purchased performance rights to it it's usually illegal to play commercially purchased music for any other use other than private enjoyment. Showing at the club is not private. If you do want to show something really slick you've created by all means please bring your own computer, projector, speakers and laser light system.

Questions or additions? email the friendly webphotomeister.
see our webmeister's own photography website here