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Benfleet Camera Club Digital Projection

Guidance notes for preparing images for Digital Projected Image competitions (by Mike Fuller)

These notes are designed to assist and clarify the requirements for preparing and submitting images for the forthcoming seasons digital projected image competitions. It is important that the image size, image type and labelling requirements are followed exactly so that your images will be accepted and also projected correctly. We have bought a new digital projector and laptop with approved software with which to run the competitions. The projector has been specially selected and calibrated to give the most accurate representation of your images colour and tone as well as fine detail and original image sharpness.
By taking care to correctly prepare and present your images you will ensure that your images are viewed as you would wish them to be.

Summary of requirements:

Image size:  Images must be sized to have a maximum pixel dimension as follows:
 

 

 

Portrait oriented images are always projected within the above frame size so they must therefore be no more than 768 pixels high.
Similarly landscape oriented images must be no larger than 1024 pixels at the base and 768 pixels high.
The output resolution of the image is irrelevant as the only important size is the actual pixel dimensions.
If one of the dimensions is less than as given above, this is unimportant although you may wish to fill the resulting blank space with a black mask using Photoshop or the free software described at the end of this document. You may even create some sort of frame or background within the frame size to show off your image more artistically. The choice is yours.
Image Format:   Images must be in JPEG format (.jpg) and should be saved in the highest quality setting (in Photoshop this is using quality setting 12)

Image File names:  What name you give your files really doesn’t matter as each file will contain the data required for the competition using the method which I have described below using the Windows “File Properties” function. However it is always wise to use filenames which mean something to you, such as Fred Smith-Large White Flower-Entry1.jpg
Projection Colour Space:  The projection software will be utilising the Adobe RGB (1998) colour space to present the images. This should be the default colour space in which you edit and save your files in Photoshop. This colour space can be assigned to your images either by making sure that your Photoshop “ Colour settings” are set to Adobe RGB (1998) when you use Photoshop or by using the assign profile function in Photoshop. If you are using software other than Photoshop or are unsure, please contact me on 01268 680060 and I will give you advice.
Bit Depth: All JPEG images are by default are 8 bit. What this means is that each pixel in the image can have one of 256 levels of each of the 3 colour channels available (Red, Green and Blue). Confusingly this is sometimes referred to as 24bit colour (3x8bits=24bits) which equates to approximately 16 million colours available to represent the image data. For monochrome images this equates to only 256 shades of grey.  An 8 bit image properly prepared and projected will have all the quality necessary to represent your image data accurately. During the editing process, however, as various adjustments are applied such as to colour, brightness, contrast, sharpening etc. there is a danger that the image data can be degraded and the resulting image may lack smoothness of tone and suffer from pixel artefacts and tonal blocking (Posterisation). There are various ways to minimise these effects depending on how you normally take and process your images.
Firstly wherever possible take your images in “RAW” format and keep the image in 16 Bit format up to the time you create your JPEG image for the competition. This means saving the image during the editing stages in an uncompressed format such as PSD or TIFF.
If you prefer to use JPEG as your camera file format, ensure that the camera is set to the largest file size possible and with the least compression. This is usually something like “Large-Fine” on your camera “Quality” menu.  Also make sure that the camera is not applying its own excessive sharpening and colour adjustments. When editing JPEG files always use layers wherever you can for the adjustments, avoid excessive sharpening, tone and contrast adjustments and always save your images for the first time in either PSD or TIFF format.  Each time a file is saved in JPEG format the quality is reduced due to the JPEG compression process, rather like photocopying a photocopy.
Once all your editing processes are complete, including any cropping, addition of artistic borders etc, save it first as a TIFF or PSD file and only then flatten any layers and save it again at the appropriate pixel dimension and JPEG quality setting for our competitions. This means that if you subsequently wish to make further edits you have the unflattened TIFF or PSD file to work with.
All judges agree that over sharpening and loss of tone detail due to excessive editing of JPEG files is the biggest problem experienced when judging projected image competitions.

Addition of “File Properties” information: This is VERY IMPORTANT as without this information being added to your files they will not be accepted for competition.

Each file can have certain information applied to it and recorded by Windows and other operating systems within the header data of the file. This information is used by our projection software to identify the Author, the Title of the image and its entry number.
After creating and saving your competition images in their final form, either onto your local hard disk on your machine (C: Drive) or USB memory stick, for each file carry out the following procedure.

Addition of ”Properties”  Data:

1. Navigate to the file using the Windows file browser or Explorer.
2. Right Mouse Click on the file to bring up the file menu. Choose “Properties” (the last menu item).
3. Choose the “Summary” Tab in XP or  “Details” Tab in Vista and you should see one of these  screens. If you see a more complex screen in XP, click the “Simple” button.
4. In the “Title” field enter the title for your image (maximum 40 characters)
5. In the “Subject” field enter firstly the date of the actual competition as dd-mm-yy  followed by a space then the entry number in the form of either Entry-1 or Entry-2 or Entry-3. Up to 3 images are allowed for entry, Entry-3 will be considered a reserve and only entered into the competition if numbers allow.
6. In the “Author(s)” field enter your full name
7. Finish the entry by clicking the “Apply” button then “OK”
8. The resulting screens should look something like this:

    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Once this data is entered you can copy the files from your hard disk to the USB memory stick and hand in the stick one week before the competition. Please make sure your stick has your name attached to it so it can be returned on the night of the competition. It is important to check that the data entered above is still present in the file after copying to the memory stick as sometimes the data can be lost on copying especially if copying from a network shared drive. Simply check the properties to make sure it is still correct.
In exceptional circumstances, if you have been unable to hand in your entry the previous week I will accept images attached to an email sent to my email address:   mf@pipsara.com  please ensure that the message subject is the single word BCC-ENTRY   These entries must be received by the Saturday before the competition.
Image resizing:     Most people will be content to use some version of Photoshop to prepare their images. There is however an excellent free software package which can be downloaded from this internet link:    http://www.faststone.org/DN/FSResizerSetup25.exe
The software allows direct image resizing from a number of file formats and allows many effects including borders, fills etc, to be applied during the resizing process.
I will be demonstrating this software in the Summer Tutorials but to get you started these few screens show the basic settings required to resize your images…
Select the images                                                                                               Set the quality