Tutorial For Making Web Page Pictures

It's hard to take a perfect picture.  It's much easier to modify one that is basically want you want but is flawed in some aspects. Picture # 1 has a nice grouping but is, too dark, low contrast, has red eye and a distracting background. Click on any of the thumbnails to see a larger picture.

    The picture was taken with a digital camera at 1.3 meg. resolution and on-camera flash.  The original picture is cropped to remove the uninteresting parts.  The size is also reduced to 72 dpi and a physical size to fit the monitor.  Picture #2.

    Next the darkness is adjusted with the "Curves" tool in PhotoShop 5.5.  Then using the "Extract" tool, the undesired background is removed.  The eyes are retouched to remove the red, using the "Saturation" tool.  This results in Picture #3.

    Finally, a suitable background is added. This is accomplished by adding a layer and moving all of the picture information to it, leaving a blank background layer.  The background chosen is pasted into the background layer and moved around to get the proper composition.  The result can be seen in Picture #4, which has its layers flattened  and then can be saved as a jpeg file.  Usually a very low jpeg quality is chosen which still gives a picture with good detail but reduces the file size to 15-30K.

Revised 01/13/03 by RC Koestler, Saroko Cattery, Siamese and Oriental Kittens