Week #2 Blog

I would like to start out by saying, "Confusing." I felt like the more I read, the more confused I became because there was so much information and depending on the article, would depend on the information given about what is the best. Overall, I understand the concept of resolution, the size of the pictures and how one picture can look completely different on different monitors. I did enjoy the fact that I now have a better understanding of CMYK and RGB. I wondered why I had four color toner cartridges. Now I know that printing uses CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black) in order to make up other colors. CMYK or reflective color is different than the colors that we see on a monitor or on TV. The colors that are used for a monitor is RGB (Red, Green, Blue). Again, this makes sense. Think about when you first purchase and TV and you are running through the menu options. You usually have a choice of adjusting your screen to show more red or more green. Each RGB color has an value that is given to it, otherwise known as RGB values.

Enough about colors, lets talk about screen resolution. The larger resolution screen setting that you have, the smaller the information will appear on the screen. For instance, if you have the resolution on your monitor set to 1280x800 the icons, the print, and anything being viewed will appear smaller than if the resolution was set to 1024x768. Therefore, you want to consider the size of a picture that you post on a website and send to a friend. If someone has to scroll over or scroll down to view a picture, they may loose interest.

When emailing pictures, you do not need to send a large image size picture if they are not going to be printing it. A smaller image photo will do just fine for someone viewing a picture on their screen. What can you do to make sure that your picture is small enough? In class we did a lot with Photo shop which is a great tool for editing pictures and editing the image size of the picture. Therefore, that is one way. Edit the image size of the picture. This will make your picture smaller, but that might be alright depending on what you are sending them.

Another thought might be to crop the picture. If there is some extra background in the picture, crop out what you want and save it as another file. That way you still have your original picture, but you also have a smaller image to send. You can also save the picture as a jpg file and lower the number of bits. For instance, it might look OK at 16 bits versus 24 bits. Changing the size of the bits will lower the size of the file. If you save the file as a gif file, the file size of the file will be even smaller. However, when you use a gif file, the colors may not appear to be the same as there are only 256 colors versus a 24 bit jpeg file that could contain 16.7 million colors. Another difference between a jpeg and gif is that a gif file is transparent and it can be animated. So there are a few trade offs, but a few perks as well. Finally another way to send a smaller file is take two separate pictures and possibly put them together onto on file. You can do this by cropping the pictures. Take what you like from both pictures and add them together to create one file.

Overall, there is a lot of information to keep in mind when either emailing a picture or when preparing a picture for a web site. Remember to keep resolution, file size and file type in mind.