Notes to accompany Tutorial given 1 st October 2007
Members may like to refer to the policy document recently published by the Photographic Alliance of Great Britain, at http://www.pagb-photography-uk.co.uk/ and click on… PAGB - Projected Digital Images Standards for Events
These are the Standards set down as guidelines for all Digital Competitions and which we will follow.
Some expressions below which will become common-place:
Pixels =picture elements which contain all the data in each one, the whole of which, when combined, make up a high quality image.
Image Size Capability (or Native Resolution) of Projectors =how many pixels can be projected by the equipment.
XGA =a size commonly used by clubs, which is 1024 pixels wide by 768 pixels high.
SXGA+ =the better picture size used by our equipment, which is 1400 by 1050 pixels.
Aspect Ratio =the ratio of width to height of a picture.
Most of club members digital cameras will take pictures with between 2million and 10 million pixels and probably at an aspect ratio 0f 3:2. These pictures will have to be edited, of course and then reduced in size to fit the Native Resolution of our projector, i.e. 1400 x 1050, which is called “Resampling”.
All editing software is capable of resampling the finished edited picture, but will follow the following method:
Go to “Image/Image Size” (or whatever your software has in it's menu to resize pictures.
Ensure “ Pixels ” is the chosen dimension and “Constrain Image Ratio” or “Maintain Aspect Ratio”, or similar is ticked.
If the width of the image is greater than 1400, change this value to 1400. Click “Tab” on your keyboard to go to the height box. This will now alter the value originally seen in here after the width has been changed. If this is now less than 1050, leave it and click OK. If the height is still greater than 1050, enter 1050, (which will alter further the width) and then click OK. (Note: Portrait mode images will be smaller when projected than landscapes).
This should result in an image, which is within the maximum permitted size of 1400 x 1050 PIXELS . These finished images, when projected using the club software and equipment, will automatically have any space surrounding the image made black, to further enhance the image.
Do not worry about the other settings in the box as these have no effect on projected image creation.
And now you should resave your reduced image as a quality 12 JPEG and add the title which will be in the following format, PICTURE TITLE (in capital letters) followed by a “space”, then “by”, (lower case, then another “space”, then the Author's Name or number, according to competition rules.
e.g. THE SKY AT NIGHT by Patrick Moore This format MUST be followed for our club competitions.