Note: This tutorial assumes that you have successfully taken a digital photo or scanned a print photo and saved it to you computer.
Before you ad a digital photo to your ad you may want to make a few adjustments to the original photo. Some common tasks are rotating, cropping, resizing and converting to a different format like jpeg or gif. Each of these tasks will be described below. However, before we do this we will need a photo editing program which will lead us to our first topic, Image Editing Programs.
There are many photo editing programs available. Some are expensive and some are free. They all offer different levels of functionality and features. For our example we will be using a free software package called Paint.NET that was originally developed at Washington State University. Below is the link to where you can download the software package as well as some additional links to free and not free photo editing software.
Paint.NET (FREE) This is the one we are using in our examples.:
http://www.getpaint.net/
PhotoPlus (FREE):
http://www.freeserifsoftware.com/software/PhotoPlus/default.asp
Corel Paint Shop Pro ($):
http://www.corel.com/
Microsoft Digital Image ($):
http://www.microsoft.com/products/imaging/default.mspx
Adobe Photoshop ($$$):
http://www.adobe.com/
The first thing you want to do is make sure you have your photo orientated correctly. In our example we need to rotate the image 90° counter clockwise.
To rotate the photo with
Paint.NET do the following:
| 1. |
Click Image in the menu bar |
| 2. |
Select Rotate and click 90° CCW. This will rotate the image as shown below. |
| 3. |
To save your work select File from the menu bar and click Save. |
| Before |
After |
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View Video
"Rotating a Photo" in one of the following formats:
Cropping allows you to remove unwanted parts of the photo. In our example there are 3 horses in the photo. If we wanted to focus in on the mare and her foal we will need to remove portions of the photo to the left, top and bottom.
To rotate the photo with
Paint.NET do the following:
| 1. |
Select the Rectangle Select tool |
| 2. |
Right click you mouse and drag it from one corner of the photo to the opposite corner selecting the portion of the photo you would like to crop and then release the right mouse click. |
| 3. |
In the menu bar select Image and click Crop to Selection. |
| 4. |
To save your work select File from the menu bar and click Save. |
| Before |
After |
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View Video
"Cropping" in one of the following formats:
Digital cameras have the ability to take high resolution picture. While the picture will be of high quality they can also be very large. Large images will take a considerable amount of time to upload when posting an ad. HorseOnSale.com will allow you to upload an image of 1.5 MB (~1500 KB) or less. Digital editing program will allow you resize the image so they are smaller and quicker to post.
To resize the photo with
Paint.NET do the following:
| 1. |
From the menu bar select Image and click Resize |
| 2. |
In the Resize window select By percentage |
| 3. |
Decrease the percentage until the size of the photo is less that 1.5 MB. The size of the resized image is displayed at the top of the Resize window. |
| 4. |
To save your work select File from the menu bar and click Save. |
View Video
"Resizing" in one of the following formats:
| Converting to another Format |
There are quite a few formats for digital photos. HorseOnSale.com supports uploading of the most common formats. These are jpg, jpeg, gif, png and jpe. For a description of these formations please see the reference section below. If your digital photo is already in one of these formats you are ready to upload it to HorseOnSale.com and include it with your ad. If not it is a simple procedure to save your photo as one of the formats listed above. In this example we will open the picture file Horses.tga and save it as a jpg.
To save a photo in a different format with
Paint.NET do the following:
| 1. |
Open your photo file by selecting File from the menu bar and clicking Open... Select the photo file. |
| 2. |
Resave the photo in a new format by selecting File from the menu bar and clicking Save as. |
| 3. |
In the Save dialog box select one of the support files types from the Save as type: dropdown list and click Save. |
View Video
"Converting to another Format" in one of the following formats:
GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) is a bitmap image format for pictures with up to 256 distinct colors. The format was introduced by CompuServe in 1987 and has since come into widespread usage on the World Wide Web. GIFs are compressed files, and were adopted to reduce the amount of time it takes to transfer images over a network connection.
JPG/JPEG/JPE (Joint Photographic Experts Group) is used extensively for photos and other continuous tone images on the web. Uses "lossy data compression" by trying to equalize eight by eight pixel blocks; the quality can vary greatly depending on the compression settings.
PNG (Portable Network Graphics) was created to both improve upon and replace the GIF.
