Picture Perfect. How the get the best of your photos for marketing and printing

Do you know what  the most common mistake I see when everyday people make up their own marketing material for us to print is?  Poor quality photos. Photos are a brilliant tool in your marketing toolbox. People are visual animals so we often make snap judgments about a flyer or packaging on the quality of the images they have. How do you avoid bad images? By following a few simple rules which I’ll outline here with examples and suggestions.

Resolution Too Low

While we’ve written about this before [link to resolution article] it is still a very common problem.  It is usually found when someone copies an image from a web site and tried to use it in printed material.  Your monitor is designed for about 72dpi while printing is 300 or 600 dpi (for more on DPI read here link to DPI.  Scaling the image just makes it blurry or chunky.  There is not much we can do to fix this other than get a better quality image.  However – there is one trick that can help (but it is not a “silver bullet”):. Instead of scaling up to the final size open the image in photo editing software and scale/enlarge it in steps of 2-5% using best or bi-cubic scaling. Keep repeating until the image is the size you want to use it at. The reason why you should do it this way is because the computer finds it easier to guess the missing pixels when it’s 1 in 20, not 1 in 3 (for a more detailed explanation see our DPI article . The final image is slightly soft/fuzzy but it looks better than the standard way.

Everything looks foggy/dull or harsh/over bright

This is a problem with the image’s contrast and brightness. Contrast is the range of brightness and colours over the whole image. With a low contrast, in the images look muddy. With too much contrast the image loses the fine shades of colours. When you use photo image software to adjust the contrast, you will find a matching slider for brightness too. When you adjust an image’s contrast you are adjusting it’s luminance, or how you strongly you see the colours in the image, so when adjust contrast you have to adjust the brightness too to keep it clear to see.

The background looks good but the people in the front are dark

This happens most often when people take photos looking into a source of light. Unless you tell the camera right things it will try to get best range which means you will have people in the front darkened to compensate for their relative over-brightness. You should always shoot images with the main source of light behind or to the side of you, but if you can’t or you are given an image like that here’s how to make the best of the bad situation. The first way to fix it is to adjust the contrast and brightness so that the detail of the subject is clear and accept that the background is over bright and washed out. The second more advanced way is to use the Magic Wand . The Magic Wand is a special type of select which only selects part of an image by it’s colour. Adjusting how sensitive the wand is you can carefully pick out the area of the foreground you want to fix, then apply the adjustments to that highlighted area only.

Colours don’t look like they should

The human mind is an amazing thing, it will correct what the eye receives to match what it thinks it should see. Often when we look at something we think is certain colour but when a camera records it it’s actually different. The most common reason is to do with the type of lighting the camera is working with and the colour it casts. Colour cast is the ‘base colour’ of what we think is white light. Old style light bulbs have a yellow cast, modern energy efficient ones have a blue or green cast. Light reflected off snow or sea is blue tinted, street lights make things green or orange. The light from the sun changes depending on the time of day and the weather conditions. Fixing the problem is often very simple. Most image editing software come with an Auto Balance or Auto Level function. Most modern cameras will store all the information about the lighting conditions it was working with inside their images and the Auto Balance will read that and correct the image to what we accept as normal. You can also find a White Point option with some software, where you point to a part of the image you know is white and the computer will adjust the rest. If you want to get hands on, you can manually adjust each of the red, green, and blue channels of the image, but that’s outside the scope of this article.

The image has lots of fine dots all over it

The three most common sources of noise , as it is known, can come from a poor quality camera, digital zooming, or poor lighting. Cheaper cameras often have electronics which are limited, so shots which are too busy or where there is too much movement cause the process to ‘stutter’ causing the dots. Digital zooming is where the camera enlarges part of the image it sees and uses that to make the photo. Even the best quality camera has problems in low light conditions, having to work hard to grab every bit of light it can. The solutions to the problem of noise is to use the Noise Reduction tools. This function looks at each pixel of an image and all its neighbours and adjust them to be closer together in look. You adjust the number of pixels it looks at with each check and how much it can adjust them to set the amount of reduction over all. It is a trade off as the more you average each pixel the more blurred (overly smooth) it becomes.

The image is blurry

Blurring has several sources in a photo: when there is movement, the camera is focusing on the wrong part of the scene, there has been too much noise reduction. To counteract this problem there is the Sharpen tool. Sharpening an image works by looking at the changes of colour and brightness on the image and adjusting the edges where it changes to make it clearer. This process ‘sharpens’ the image but it can only do so much. If the image is too blurry there is no tool that can fix it.

Now what are the tools to use to fix the problems. There are countless numbers of photo/image editing tools out there. If you have a digital camera or good quality smart phone, then you’ll have been given photo editing software that can handle all the problems I’ve talked about. However if you to try some other options you can try are:

• Microsoft Office Picture Manager Part of Microsoft Office and found in the tools folder. Basic but can handle the solutions above.   
• Paint dot net ( www.getpaint.net ) Think of it as the power users Windows Paint. It’s not Photoshop and it doesn’t try to be. What you get is an easy use tool that free to use     but support it with a donation if you like it.
• Picasa ( www.picasa.google.com ) Picasa has mutated from it’s original photo cataloguing and sharing design into part of Google’s social media system. It’s still a     standalone program that has all the  useful functions need to do the job and is designed to be as newbie friendly as possible
• Pixlr.com ( www.pixlr.com ) Pixlr is one of the new cloud based applications that run     real time and can be install on any system including smart phones     and tablets. It meets all your photo editing needs and all you need a broadband connection.
• The Gimp ( www.gimp.org ) The Gnu Image Manipulation Program is the open source world’s answer to Photoshop. It does suffer the problem of having a steep learning curve (though no worse than Photoshop) and there is a huge amount of add ons and help to let you do just about anything with it.