Picture Tutorial

Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2008 8:52 pm

What is this?

- This is a quick tutorial of how to clean your pictures so they are suitable for submission.

Vocab.
- This is a quick rundown to various terms I’ll probably use.

Noise - Any unwanted marks in a picture, such as, pencil marks, eraser marks, and various other marks on paper that are tough to see.

PS - Short for “Photoshop”

Cleaning - Removing noise, marks, and other various things in a picture, this is sometimes parts of the picture itself.

Cleaning Process

(For easier directions, I am including a “index” type thing here, if you already know something, just look for the appropriate section, I used PS for this)

1.2 - starting levels
1.3 - seeing noise
1.4 - ok, I see it, know what?
1.5 - tips for hiding small amounts
2.1 - compansation

1.1 First step, upload your picture.

1.2 After that, go to “Layer -> New Adjustment Layer (in some cases, this may be "New Layer") -> Levels” Click OK

1.3 Next a box with two sliders will appear, move the left one over to the right, you will then see marks that may have been invisible at first.

1.4 Once you see all the noise, click Cancel, go to where the noise was and clean, or erase the noise. Repeat the previous steps to locate the noise.

1.5 When you’ve erased most of it, you can go back to levels and adjust the black and white slider to hide noise that is barely visible.

2.1 Ok, so, we cleared the noise, but its too big. Now what? There are many ways to make the pictures file size smaller, here are a few ways.

- Reduce the quality (2.2.1)
- Make the picture smaller in pixels (2.2.2)
- Use less colors (2.2.3)

2.2.1 Reducing the quality may sound bad, but it actually doesn’t have much of an effect, if its not reduced drastically. Simply go to “Save for Web” (its under “File”) If its JPG a section with quality will be available, this ranges from 0 - 100 and is usually at 70, but can be reduced to 60 and still look good, and reduces the size drastically. This is not available for GIF (see 2.2.3 for GIF files)

2.2.2 This is very easy and probably the best. Enter “Save for Web” and a section that lists the width and length will appear. Just reduce the size, and whalla smaller file size. An example, a picture that has 500x by 556x is 77.4k, but when reduced to 400x by 445x its reduced to 53.1k, much smaller now.

2.2.3 This is usually for GIF, while not the best way around large file sizes, it does work. Enter “Save for Web” and, if it’s a GIF file, you will see a colors option. The colors range from 2 - 256 (the more colors, the better the picture, but the larger the file size will be). A usual picture will probably use only 64 - 128 colors. You can reduce this a little, and be OK, but I suggest trying another method first.

Thank you for reading this, I hope it helped. I will update this as people make more requests.