I was asked about this and thought it would made a good addendum to the last two posts. How to you take a shot of what is on a computer screen and how do you edit it? I answered this question a while ago in this post, but you can also edit the screen shot in MS Picture Manager.

Here's how:

Make sure the screen image is as you want it to appear and press the Print Screen (Prt Scr) on your keyboard - usually to the right of the main keyboard and above the insert key.

Go in to MS Picture Manager and choose Paste from the Edit menu. The image will be pasted into whichever location is selected in the Shortcuts panel on the left hand side. To find the pasted image click on the selected folder under Shortcuts and search though the contents to find your screen shot. When you have found it, double-click and the image will come up in the central pane. Now you can edit it as described in this post. Make sure you click on Save to make the edits permanent.

I was asked a question recently that I thought would be helpful to answer here.  The question is, how do you repair or rejuvenate an image that is pixilated when you put it into Word.

We, sadly, the answer is that there is not a lot you can do. I have written about this here in more detail, bu this is a summary.  Images come in varying degrees of quality, some (lower quality) look wonderful on screen but print badly, others look great until you enlarge them, when you start to see jagged edges or pixilation.  The only way to reduce pixilation in an image is to reduce the size of it so that the pixel edges are no longer visible to the naked eye.  Unfortunately, for images downloaded from the internet, these images are often very small to start with.  Web designers deliberately make them small so that web pages load more quickly.

To get a better quality image you need to get hold of the image at higher resolution.  This means that it must have more dpi (dots per inch) for images that you want to print.  Note that dpi and ppi (pixels per inch) are not the same thing, but they are near enough to simplify my explanation.

You could contact the company/individual that owns the website you got it from and ask if they have a high resolution copy.  This is quite reasonable, especially if you are working with them on a project or you are promoting their products/services.  If the site is  your own company site, then someone within the company should have print quality images.  Try the IT department, the press office or marketing department.  I managed to get some lovely professional images, free to use, from our own press office.

However,  you may not wish to contact the owner of the website that you are taking downloading images from.  Other alternatives for getting images are buying stock images which I wrote about here and here, and taking your own photos.  Sometimes it's just easier to get the camera and go down and take the photo yourself!!  Maybe you can talk the boss into paying for a photography course.  Worked for me!

Happy snapping.

As promised, today I am going to sign up for an image hosting provider.  These are the steps for signing up to Photobucket:

Go to http://photobucket.com

On the top right you will see the words "Sign Up".  Click on these words

Complete the form on the next screen.

On the next screen click on Upload Now to upload images.

At the following screen the default settings are Upload from My computer.  To do this click on the green button which says 'Select photos and videos'.

Find your image file and click on Open in the dialogue box.  You will be given an opportunity to add a title and description.

The image is automatically put into an album labelled with your user name.  You can add further albums if you wish.

Experiment with the buttons in the blue bar at the top.

Note that with this hoster you cannot download the images once they are uploaded, so this would not be a good vehicle for sharing image files.  Google's Picassa would be a better choice if you require this service.

I have checked, and Photobucket do allow you to link to a site to sell items, unlike Flikr.

I came across a list of photo sharing websites I thought I would share with you (see link at the end).  This came about because I was wanting to use Flikr to host some photos that I was linking to from our staff intranet to sell a couple of household items.  Flikr said that this was 'commercial' and not allowed, so I went in search of alternatives. This is a list of things you might want to consider before you sign up to a site:

Anyway, here is the link to a list of photo sharing sites and their features and limitations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_photo_sharing_websites

I am using Picassa for my family photos and am happy with it.  It has a smooth uploading system with iPhoto on my Apple Mac too, which makes it even easier.  You can download the image editing software for free as well.

In my next post I will pick one service and take you through the joining and uploading process.

Following on from my post last week about finding clip art images, here are a couple of sites I have used that I felt offered reasonable commercial licence fees:

Cool Clip Art
Clipart.com

And some I haven't tried but look good at first glance (check the licence though):
Free Digital Photos
Istock Photos
Cker.com

I think images and diagrams enhance the production of text documents, such as reports, web articles or blog posts like this one.  If you find an image on the internet that you would like to use you need to make sure that the terms of use, or licence, is appropriate for what you intend to use it for.

If you are using it to improve your homework, or make a poster for your wall you are probably pretty safe using most clip art you find.  However if you are using it for work and on business documents and sales materials you need to be more careful.  Non-profit making organisations are usually allowed to use someone's art or photographs, but check first.  I had an occasion recently where I was very glad I did.  We used a photo, and I emailed the newspaper to get express permission to do so.  Someone questioned our use of the photo and I was able to produce evidence that we did indeed have permission.  It would be a shame to have to reprint lots of material because you didn't have permission to use an image.

I posted yesteday about image resolution and image size, referring to pixel images (known as raster images).  I said that you cannot increase the size of the image without decreasing the image quality.  However there is one type of image that you can increase without loss of quality.  This is the vector image, and I will talk about these today.

The reason why vector images are so flexible when you resize them is that the resizing calculations are based on mathematical calculations for redrawing the image, rather than pixels.  For simple drawings and logos this means that file size can be restrained while producing very large images, with no loss of quality.  To produce large pixel based high quality images you end up producing extremely large file sizes.  It is possible to convert vector images into raster images, but the results are often less pleasing when you try to convert raster images into vector images with a loss of flexibility that you get with the original.  Therefore it is best to get the original artwork or logo as a vector image.  In fact it is probably a good idea to get both versions of the image because many programmes are not able to read or open vector images.  If you want to produce vector images you will need a specific drawing programme such as Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw.  If you are looking at developing illustration skills developing your skills in one of these packages is essential.

Here is a very easy to follow article on the suject for those who want more detail.

A colleague was printing out an image that she received and noticed it was pixelatted.  By this I mean that you could see zigzag edges where there should have been smooth ones.  The subject of image quality can be quite complicated because when you see an image on the screen it looks perfect, but you print it out and you get lots of rough edges and generally poor quality.  So here's an explanation for this.

The issue here is one of image resolution.  This is the quality of the image which is measured as pixels per inch or PPI.  Pixels are tiny squares that are usually not visible to the eye, and most images (except vector images which I will talk about some other time) are made up of a number pixels.  An image that has 100 pixels across the top and 100 has a total of 10000 pixels.  If this particular image measures 5 inches than it has 20 ppi.  If it measures 10 inches then it has 10 ppi because it has the same number of pixels in a bigger space.  Most computer screens reproduce an image at 72ppi, so any image that has that resolution or higher will be viewed perfectly.  A home printer may print out at 150 or 200ppi.  If your image is that resolution or higher it should print out well.  If your image is only 72ppi it will not print out well and you will probably get pixelation.  A high end printer needs 300ppi, so if your image is only 72ppi it will look very poor.

You can use an image editing program such as Photoshop to squeeze the pixels together to make a higher resolution image, so for the example above to achieve a 72ppi image your image would come down to 1.38 inches.  To make your resolution higher for printing you would have to reduce the size even further, which is this case is not worth while.  Here is a more likley example  (note that it is still common to use the phrase ppi even though we are metric now - don't know why).  Say you receive an image that measures 10cm square at 72ppi.  If you use an image editing programme to change the resolution this is what you would get:

72ppi = 10 x 10
150ppi = 4.8 x 4.8
300ppi = 2.4 x 2.4

When you increase the quality of the image by increasing the resolution you reduce the dimensions.  It is technically possible to resample the image in an editing imaging programme.  Resampling means removing pixels, or adding them in, to an image while keeping it the same dimensions.  This works fine when removing pixels, but if you try to add them in the programme has to make up pixels and guess where to put them.  It is unlikely you will get a good quality result if you try this.  My recommendation is that if you need to print an image at a higher resolution than you have been given, go back to your source and ask for a copy with a higher resolution.  Unfortunately this is a much misunderstood area and people will often send you images that look lovely on screen, but awful when you print them.  You will get the best results if you get good quality images to begin with.

Here is a link to a much more indepth explanation of the relationship between resolution, screen size and printing if  you are interested.

A tool available in all Office packages that I feel is rather under used is the alignment feature for images and objects.  If you have several objects in a document/presention you can line them up so they are evenly spaced or align to the top or bottom of the objects.  Here's how you do it.

Select all the of objects you want to align.  To do this click on one object, hold you finger down on the shift key on the keyboard, and click on the remaining objects.  They should all be selected.  If you are having trouble achieving this, select each object, right click and turn text wrapping on.  You should then be able to select them all.

In Office 2007, when you select the pictures you get the picture formatting ribbon.  You will see the align button on the right.

In Publisher if you go to the Arrange tool at the top and choose align, you will get a very similar dialogue box (left).

Then you have to simply select the desired option.  As you can see you can align all of the selected objects across the top or bottom, or down the page to the left or right.  If you have more than two objects you can also distribute them equidistant from each other across or down the page.

So, a very useful tool to improve the look of your documents and presentations.

I did promise last week a post on improving your selections in Photoshop, as a round up on this topic.  I am using Photoshop Elements 6 so the techniques might be slightly different in other versions, but the principles are the same.

When you make a basic selection using one of the techniques mentioned in previous posts, if you make a change to the selected area the outline can seem a bit sharp, a bit like someone has taken a pair of scissors to the image and just plonked the newly edited section down on top.  The way around that is to 'feather' the selection.  This is an image editing term which really just means to soften the edges a bit to blend in with the unedited parts of the image.

When you have made the desired selection, go to the Select menu and choose Feather.  Most selections will benefit from 1 or 2 pixels, but if an image is really big you might need to make it 5 or 6.  Click on OK and you selection will be softened.  Continue with your editing.  If the result is not as smooth as desired, use your Undo History palette to step back and redo the feathering with different settings.

For more flexibility go to the selections menu and choose Refine Edge.  If you wish click on the custom overlay button at the bottom left which will put a red mask over the unselected area allowing you to see more clearly how your edges are affected by your adjustments in the window.  You can now experiment with the sliders to get the desired results (when you hover your mouse over each slider a description is provided at the bottom of the dialogue box. 

Feathering has already been covered, but you can use the contract/expand slider to remove edges, sometimes referred to as 'fringing' where you get a white edge around your image.  When you have made your adjustments, click on OK and make your changes.  Again, use you Undo History if necessary to fine tune the process.

It really is worth taking some extra time to get this part right.  The results will be much more realistic (if that is what you are looking for!)