photo stuff | part 2.

it's a good time for clarification of the photo philosophy of the site. after all, now that we have more pictures, it's time to make sure we adhere to some standards here.

first and foremost, shooters should read and know the 2 articles (here and here) on the site written about how to make pictures look better. at the very least, know the first article well (since most likely, someone else will know the second and do the work). especially remember to shoot heavily. 90% of what is shot can be considered crap, and it'll be acceptable.

photos for the site should be shot with the presumption of 800x600 final viewing. this means if you shoot with a good enough composition, you can shoot at that resolution. if you intend to crop later, you must shoot larger than that. however, for the galleries, assume that 800x600 will be used. 640x480 is acceptable, but only marginally.

photos shot for the site should be relatively family safe. if it's too fan-servicey, try to avoid posting it. if it contains any nudity, it won't be posted. period.

when added to a gallery, images should probably reach approximately 6 pixels to 1 byte of file size in jpeg compression, if possible (this is 80kb for an 800x600 image, and about 50kb for a 640x480 image). growing too much larger than that places a heavy burden on download. however, compression should not be so lossy as to induce an unnecessary amount of artifacting on areas of important detail. this rule does not necessarily apply to the thumbnails.

the photo editing tools of standard for the site shall be photoshop as primary, with fireworks as secondary for windows and macintosh platforms. for unix platforms, choice will vary with the user, though any software used should allow the capability to control export file sizes.

for touchup work, color correction, levels/contrast, and cropping shall be considered minimum standard operating procedure. procedure should generally be contrast, then color, then cropping. afterward follows resizing. sharpening (via an unsharp mask) should be done, though not extremely heavily, after all other edits are done.

beyond minimum touchup, a fair amount of touchup to remove items such as skin blemishes are optional (airbrushing). do not go out of the way to cover up everything (since having some defects are natural), but removal of excessive blemishing can be considered if it helps the picture. use of special effects should be minimalized, since they generally compromise the picture too heavily. use sparingly.

when photos are collected into a collection, they should be placed using the gallery application files if possible. while static pages can be maintained, it is an absurd amount of maintenance, and the templates for the gallery apps are easily maintained.

for any gallery, use real thumbnails! create the actual small thumbnail files, and don't rely on the browser internal resize functions on a large image. the small extra use of space on the server far outweighs forcing users to download an 80kb image to see a 160x120 thumbnail! load time is crucial.

photos should always be assigned a reasonable description if possible. for cosplayers, this should generally be at least a name of the character and a series.

for gallery load times, keep thumbnail pages down to a reasonable file size. 100-150kb per page should be fair (about 30-45 secs load time on 28.8). this means if your thumbnails are 10kb, limit your gallery pages to 10 thumbnails each. if your thumbnails are 4kb, you can push them to 20-25 per page, but keep design constraints in mind.

—jason