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IN THE BEST LIGHT Photographing YOUR ARTWORK Affordable tips and techniques for better quality photos Many contests and shows require you to send in photographs of your project along with your application. But not everyone can afford to hire a photographer to take professional photos of their project. A poor-quality photograph can make an excellent project look poorly done. To get a good photo of a project, you need to take several things into account. The most important four are image resolution, lighting, focus, and background. We’ve taken some excellent scrolled projects by experts in their field and photographed them properly—and poorly—to show how a few little tricks can really improve your photographs. Resolution Resolution is the most common problem we run into when someone submits a photo for publication. Resolution relates more to digital photography than to traditional prints or slides. Resolution is measured in two ways— by the number of pixels, or dots of color, in an image, or by the actual size of an image and the number of dots per inch (DPI). For example, a photo downloaded from a standard web page may measure 5" x 7" on the screen, but may only be 72 DPI. In order to print something in a magazine, we need at least 300 DPI. When it is printed, a 72 DPI photo looks grainy and out of focus at 5" x 7". In order to get the resolution we need, the photo must be shrunk down to the size of a postage stamp. If your project is tall and thin, take a vertical photo. Both these photos are 5 x 7s, but the horizontal orientation sacrifices the size of the subject because much of the image is wasted on the background. Most computers show the size of a photo in pixels. For most publications, your photo needs to be at least 1200 x 1500 pixels. For a 5" x 7" photo to be reproduced properly in the magazine, you need at least a 3 mega-pixel camera, but a 4 mega pixel to 5 mega pixel camera is IN THE BEST LIGHT Photographing YOUR ARTWORK Affordable tips and techniques for better quality photos preferred. While many people have camera phones, the resolution of these cameras is too low to reproduce in the magazine. If you do use a 3 mega pixel camera, do not use the camera’s zoom function. Just get closer to the project. Without getting into the technical details, the zoom function on these cameras will usually give you a lower-resolution image. When you have a digital camera, look up how to shoot the highest quality photos. You will not be able to store as many photos on your memory card, but we need to have large fi les in order to reproduce them in the magazine. TIFF files should be close to 5 megabytes in size, and JPEGs should be about 1 megabyte—at the minimum! Also take the orientation of the photo into account. If you have a short, wide project, take a horizontal photo. If your project is long and thin, take a vertical photo. You want to try to fill as much of your view finder with the project as possible, and still get the entire project in. Most cameras convert the photos to JPEG format (.jpg). JPEG fi les are a standard file that most computers can read. At Scroll Saw Workshop, we can also read TIFF (.tif) and Kodak files (.dcs). Unfortunately, bitmap (.bmp) and EPS (.eps) files usually will not work on our system.

72 dpi			300 dpi
Image	Size	File Size	Image	Size	File Size
4 x 5	288 x 360	303.8k	4 x 5	1200 x 1500	5.15M
5 x 7	360 x 504	531.6k	5 x 7	1500 x 2100	9.01M
8 x 10	576 x 720	1.19M	8 x 10	2400 x 3000	20.6M
The chart above shows how different sized photos convert to pixels. All measurements based on RGB file in TIFF format.

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