Quick post today – I wanted to link  our new Pinterest page to our Facebook page and found out that you cannot connect Pinterest to Facebook business pages directly, only to your personal page.

So, figuring there would be someone out there a little smarter than me who had thought about this before, I came across this site - https://woobox.com/.

They offer a wide range of apps that allow you to link your Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram and You Tube pages to your Facebook business page!

If you need some help then there is a very helpful video here – Pinnable Business.

Have you ever wondered why some of your images look great on one monitor and lousy on another?

Did you know that viewing images in different browsers like Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Internet Explorer, may cause the same image to look different colours on the same computer?

Do you know about monitor calibration, colour spaces and ICC profiles?  No?

This is the reason why prints of your photos or your reproductions may look different in real life to the images you see on your screen. I’ve tried to keep this really simple for the average person – if you are a pro photographer you should already be well aware of this information and have spent the appropriate dollars to calibrate your monitor properly.

There are many factors that can affect how you see your images but here’s a couple of the main ones.

YOUR MONITOR – All monitors come ‘calibrated’ out of the box but that calibration is not always correct for you and the work you do. Every monitor used to view images for correct colour should be calibrated using special tools like the Xrite i1Display Pro or the Datacolor Spyder4Pro. Without tools like these you can only guess at calibration your monitor and that can only end badly. We calibrate our monitors at least every month to ensure that what we see on our screens is what we end up with in print but there’s more to it than that.

There are three aspects to monitor calibration – Brightness, Gamma and White Balance (Colour Temperature). The amount of light in the room around you can also have an effect on what you see.

COLOUR SPACES - Don’t you just love graphs? All those pretty colours? But what do they all mean? Usually when I start talking about colour spaces I can see the eyes glaze over and blah,blah,blah, blah, blah, blah blah. Hey! WAKE UP THIS IS IMPORTANT!

Actually all you really need to know, unless you want to make a study of colour, is that we work in (and prefer) AdobeRGB but the files you view on the web are typically in sRGB. Why? As the graph suggests, you get a better range of colours in AdobeRGB than in sRGB. Most digital cameras capture images in sRGB but if yours gives you the choice, take AdobeRGB.

ICC PROFILES – I’ll keep this one short and sweet. In digital terms, all the colours you see are made up of a set of three colour values – Red, Green and Blue, ranging from 0 (black) to 255 (White). For example, here are some typical numbers…

You can see that Black is 0,0,0, and White is 255 and every colour in between is a combination of red (0-255), green (0-255) and blue (0-255) – that’s a lot of possible colours.

While these are the exact numbers for these colours, each paper we print on reacts differently to the way the ink goes down so we need to write an adjustment (an ICC Profile) for each paper that we apply before we print your image.

I thought about spending ages writing a really long article to help you calibrate your monitor but figured there would be someone out there who had already done it for me and I was right – check out these guys at

http://www.imaging-resource.com/ARTS/MONCAL/CALIBRATE.HTM to read more about calibrating a monitor.

You need to remember also that your monitor and a print will never look exactly the same because one has light shining out of it, the other reflects light but with the right calibration, and great printing like you get here, they will be pretty darn close!

As always, if you have any questions, leave a comment – somebody else is probably thinking the same thing!

Ever had a hard drive fail on you. If not, then you’ve probably never owned a computer! Most of my blog posts are inspired by questions clients ask me or problems they’ve had. This one is no different, two clients in three days with hard drive failures and no backups means that there are many of you out there getting close to being in the same boat!

Death, taxes and hard drive failures – they get us all. You need to be prepared for all of them but today I want to show you how easy it is to save your sanity in the event of a hard drive failure. I’ll leave the other two up to you to sort out.

There are a few things everyone needs to do right now if you don’t already have a backup plan in motion.

1. Go out and buy TWO 2tb portable hard drives from Harvey Norman (more if you have lots of disks being used now) or similar for less that $150 for each computer you own.
2. If you own a PC, download some free software for cloning your main operating system hard drive (like XXCLONE)  and make a backup copy to one of the new drives. If you own a Mac, use this new drive as your “Time Machine” backup.
3. Sign up for Dropbox either the free account or as much storage as you can afford or need.
4. Save all your important documents and files into your new Dropbox account.
5. Make a separate copy of all these documents and files onto the other external drive and disconnect it from power and put it in a safe place – perhaps even a different address! This protects your data from power spikes, fire and flood!
6. MAKE A DIARY ENTRY TO REMIND YOURSELF TO DO THIS AT LEAST ONCE A WEEK!

OK, that’s the bare basics and if you don’t do this right now then when you experience your next hard drive failure, you can’t complain about it.

Worried about the cost of those hard drives? Think about the cost of losing all the hard work and time you’ve spent creating all those files and what losing that information could cost you!

There are so many ways now that you can protect your data, having only one copy on one hard drive is just plain silly and dangerous. You need a system that backs up automatically so you don’t need to think about it. Here’s how I protect your images…

• Master copy on a NAS (Network accessed Storage) Device which has two pairs of 3TB drives – that’s four hard drives – each pair is mirrored meaning that two hard drives have identical information on them.
• Each pair of 3tb hard drives is backed up each night to a portable 3tb drive. Each week, this drive is swapped with another drive that is kept off site in the event of fire, flood or some other disaster.
• Copies of all images are also saved to DVD in the case of a lightning strike, power surge, EMP attack by foreign country or act of God that takes out everything electrical.

So at any one time I have a minimum of four copies of your files in two locations. I think that’s safe enough. I even do this for my personal family photos in fact I go one step further and have them uploaded to www.flickr.com so they are stored in the cloud and accessible to anyone who has permission. Due to the shear volume of art files, they are not stored online – the costs are still a bit prohibitive but as soon as that changes then that will happen too. The more copies I have the happier I am – I’m just too cautious.

P.S. I was just about finished writing this post and another artist came in and told me how they were setting up a new backup drive, formatting it first as you should but THEY FORMATTED THE WRONG DRIVE – 15 years, thousands of family photos deleted!!!! No Backup! Fortunately, they were able to recover most of the files using special recovery software but now they have to go through every image and rename it because when recovery software saves the file, it gives each recovered file a new file name, with no reference to what the original name was.

How often have you been asked to supply a “High Resolution File” for an art competition or a publication or web site and to send it via email?

I have artists ask me all the time to supply them with files for this and that and I find myself asking the same questions each time and getting confused responses most of the time. So this article will try to arm you with a few simple questions to ask those who ask you for files.

There are some complex things to talk about here and the technical stuff may not be your bag but bear with me, read it through and if you have questions, email me, please.

PPI and DPI – they sound the same but are they??? The short answer is NO!
PPI stands for “Pixels Per Inch” and DPI for “Dots Per Inch”. A pixel is not a dot. Pixels relate to digital images as seen on your monitor and captured in your camera – the more pixels per inch, the sharper, more detailed image you have. Dots relate to the droplets of ink your printer spits out of the print head and its ability to print those images in detail – the smaller, finer and higher number of dots per inch, the cleaner, sharper, better quality print you will get IF the image is of sufficient quality to begin with.

You can read more about this topic here – Pixels and Dots

FILE SIZE – How big is a high resolution file?
As you know, when we copy artwork with our 1200megapixel camera, we end up with files anywhere from 500megabytes to 1.2 Gigabytes! Now that’s simply the space they take up on our hard drive. Until we look more closely at the details, we really don’t know what size print these files will make. We need to know the size of the image in PIXELS, then choose our optimum PPI (typically 300 for quality).

Let’s say you just lashed out and bought the new Canon 650D, 18megapixel camera. The thing to note here for this discussion is the number of pixels making up the sensor for this camera – its 5184 x 3456. If we divide each of these numbers by 300 – we will get our printable image size at 300ppi – 17.28″ x 11.52″ (51.3megabytes) – a whisker larger than A3. This means that if you use this camera to copy a 20″ x 30″ original, the file will need to be enlarged considerably to produce the same size.

So let’s use a typical sized original artwork as an example and list all the options…

Let’s say your original painting is 20″ x 30″. When we photograph an original that size, our camera will capture it at 12,000 x 18,000 pixels. Because we always save everything at 300PPI, we can then determine that the actual print size will be 40″ x 60″ (12,000 divided by 300 = 40, 18,000 divided by 300 = 60). The space taken up on the hard drive is 618megabytes. This is not a file you could send by email – way too big!

Even if we reduce your image to it’s original size of 20″ x 30″ (6000 x 9000 pixels) – the file size is 154.5megabytes. So, do you see how the pixels relate to the image size here?

Let’s make things a little more interesting – let’s say we lock in the number of pixels at 6000 x 9000 but we change the PPI to 100 instead of 300…

6000 / 100 = 60
9000 / 100 = 90

Remember our image is still locked in at 6000 x 9000 but we’ve spread those pixels out to only 100 in every inch instead of 300. Now our image has jumped in size to 60″ x 90″. That’s great right, we’ve got a really big image! Not quite – you see, the human eye can see up to almost 200pixels per inch, that means that (if you have good eyes) you will see the pixels when you look closely at a 100PPI image – you won’t see pixels at 300PPI.

Let’s try something else – let’s lock in those pixels again and make the image 600PPI…

6000 / 600 – 10
9000 / 600 – 15

Now the huge image we had before with the pixels spread out to 100PPI is crammed up into 600 pixels every inch and now only measures 10″ x 15″. Is this a good thing? Not really – if 300PPI is enough to get the quality we need then we don’t need any more. You simply will not see any difference between a print made at 300PPI or one at 600PPI. But you will see a difference with one made at 100PPI or more typically 72PPI.

Check out this diagram showing all the sizes we’ve discussed here…
- GREEN – Original Image size – 20″ x 30″ – 6000 x 9000pixels – 300ppi
- RED – Our scan – 40″ x 60″ -12,000 x 18,000pixels – 300ppi
- GREY – 60″ x 90″ image – still 6000 x 9000pixels – 100ppi
- BLUE – 10″ x 15″ image – still 6000 x 9000pixels – 600ppi

 
Next Topic – FILE TYPES and how do they affect your image.

There are a few common file types that you will come across when dealing with images. I’ve posted about these before so here’s a link to that post…. Raw, Tiff or Jpeg – What is Best?

Bottom line – the ONLY time you should use JPEG is when you are saving a copy of the image for web or email use, or as the last step to sending a file to us for printing. Always save your files in the TIFF format where possible or PSD if you use Photoshop to preserve the quality of your original file.

I will add one more explanation here comparing JPEG to TIFF or PSD. We save all your files as either TIFF or PSD – this gives us the ultimate quality. If you purchase the full file from us, we will supply you with a full file in Tiff Format, usually a smaller file, around A3 in Tiff format and a much smaller, JPEG file for web use. We only ever use JPEG when supplying images for web use. Why? Because you only need small files for them, they need to load fast on the screen otherwise people get bored and won’t look at them.

When we email you a JPEG file around 1megabyte – it will actually open in Photoshop at around 3-5megabytes depending on the range of colours in the image. Remember JPEG compresses the image and throws data away to make it smaller, then tries to regenerate what it thinks is right when you open the file again.

Often people ask us for a 300ppi image but what they don’t tell us is the size of the image. Ideally we need to know either the physical dimensions of the finished print OR the required Pixel dimensions if the image is for web use only.

So now we finally get to the point of this post -

What questions should you ask when a third party has asked you to send them a file for competition, publication etc.? If you can get the answers to these three questions, then you will know exactly what size and type of file to provide.

Question 1 – What file type do you want – JPEG, TIFF  or other?

Question 2 – What PPI do you want?

Question 3 – What physical size do you want to print the image or what pixel dimensions do you want?

Question 4 – What Colourspace do you want – sRGB, AdobeRGB or CMYK?

OK, I lied, there are four questions there – the wrong colourspace will change the colour of your image in print mainly. Colourspace issues are something for another post so I won’t go into it this time. Suffice to say, if you ask these questions, and they can actually give you intelligent answers, you’ll be on the right track to supplying the perfect file for the job.