Alter the Image

Inside Graphic Image Editing

Let's begin Part 2 (ASas) and "Alter the Image." This is where the fun is! It's also where the time pit resides. Be careful!

We're going to look at commonly done tasks in preparing an image for the Web. These include:

Orientation: Orientation is used if the image is slightly crooked, or you want to flip it around to a new position.
Cropping: Cropping is used to remove unwanted parts of a picture by selecting the part of the picture you wish to keep.
Color/Brightness/Contrast: Color/Brightness/Contrast adjustment is used to balance your image. A picture that may look unusable often can be adjusted so it looks acceptable or better. Automatic and manual adjustments are available.
Resizing: Resizing is used primarily to make an image physically smaller in viewable size so it fits with the text on a page. If the image is made smaller, it also has the benefit of making the file smaller (shorter download time).
Reducing: Reducing is used to change the dpi (dots per inch) to a lower number. If you scanned your image at 300 dpi, you would use reducing to take your image down to 96 dpi for use on the Web. Currently, many monitors don't display beyond 96 dpi so anything larger is just increased filesize (and download time). This is not true for print output.

Choose one of the following links for the software you'll be using.