Almost every client wants their digital image files nowadays, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they want the high-res originals to reprint.

In fact, most clients are simply looking for low res digital images to display online.

Instead of fighting this trend (and losing business), you can use this to your advantage by offering clients a CD of images “perfectly sized for Facebook, for cell phones, or for sharing with friends.” Then using Photoshop, follow the steps below to quickly build a folder of re-sized images you can email or burn to a CD.

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In a recent article about differentiating yourself as a photographer, I mentioned panorama prints, and how JD can print panoramas up to 30×72″ on regular or metallic paper.  What I didn’t mention was the process for creating panorama prints. Actually, the process is pretty easy, and you can create them for free.

So why should you create a panorama if you aren’t going to print it?

Although panorama-sized portraits can be an incredibly profitable sale, printing and framing a large studio sample is an investment. Instead of printing one to start, use the instructions below to create a panorama, then layer it on a wall image (like on the right) and feature it on your website and in your marketing materials. If you can show potential clients what you’re capable of producing, you’re more likely to make the sale.

How to Create a Panorama:

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Have you ever had an image that was cropped too tightly to print in two different formats? To help you out, Photoshop CS4 and CS5 have a tool called Content-Aware Scale.

Content-Aware Scale re-sizes an image by attempting to scale the background without changing the subject. While normal scaling affects all pixels uniformly when resizing an image, content-aware scaling mostly affects pixels in areas that don’t have important visual content. Using Content-Aware Scale, you can upscale or downscale images to improve a composition, fit a layout, or change the orientation.

In the example to the above, when I tried to apply a 5×7″ crop to the 8×10″ image, the crop lines were against the animal’s heads and feet. By using Content-Aware Scale instead, I was able to maintain a nice border around the image subject.

Here’s how I did it:

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If you create images with gradients, you’ve got to watch out for banding. Banding are stripes of colors that destroy the beauty of the gradient effect.

Typically, banding occurs in two cases: in natural gradients like a blue sky, or in large prints that have gradients added as a layer in Photoshop.

Banding has been a problem for printers for years — Short gradients are usually okay because they don’t cover long expanses of surface. Full page gradients present a challenge because from 0% to 100% of any given color generates fewer than 255 individual colors — banding can occur after the stretch goes over a few inches. If the two colors in the gradient are closer in spectrum (blue to light blue, for instance) then even fewer tones are generated.

Tips for avoiding banding:

1. Add noise. This is the standard solution printers have recommended for years. Create a new Gradient Layer in Photoshop, then select the layer, and from the Filter menu, choose “Add Noise.” Set the amount to 2%, select Gaussian Distribution, click the Monochromatic check box, then click OK. For non-rectangular areas like sky, select the sky only – not the entire image – create a new layer, then apply the Noise filter.

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I hate upgrading computers and software. It is expensive, time consuming, and it is never as easy as you expect it to be. So typically I’ll wait until something goes wrong. Once my computer isn’t working, the pain of upgrading becomes less than the pain of spending the time and money to fix it.

However, I’m ready to upgrade Photoshop. Content-Aware Fill will be worth it.

For those of you not familiar with this feature in CS5, Content-Aware fill lets Photoshop analyze an image, and try to figure out how to remove the damaged or unwanted area you’ve selected from the background.

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Give me a camera, and by the end of a day of shooting I’ll take several bad images. I mean really, really bad. Even after all the classes and time spent reading manuals I still, somehow, end up with a few real stinkers.

Unfortunately, some of these images mean a lot to me. I don’t want to throw them away, and I don’t want to send a single low-res image through ROES just for color correction. So I’ve spent years trying to figure out how to quickly get an image that looked bad on my monitor to look good on a print.

Then I discovered an easy Photoshop trick. Buried in the Curves window are three little eyedropper buttons that can fix the majority of density and color cast problems with an image. Here’s how to use them.

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Adding a vignette to an image is easy in Lightroom or Photoshop. In Lightroom, vignettes can be achieved in the Develop module. On the right column, there is a section for ‘lens correction’. In Photoshop, vignettes can be found in filter —-> correct camera distortion. Just like in Lightroom, there are sliders to adjust the lightening or darkening of your edges.

The problem with both these solutions is that if you crop your photos tightly, the vignette effect bleeds into your subject. To stop this from happening, you need to separate your subject from the background first.

Here’s what I do:

1. Make a copy of the background layer. Unlock it. Select it.

2. Use the lasso tool to outline the subject. You don’t have to be exact, just close.

3. While the “marching ants” are around your selected area, from the Select menu, pick “Feather” and set it to 3 pixels for low res images or 5 pixels for 300dpi images. This prevents hard edges.

4. Press Ctrl+J (CMD+J on Mac) to copy the selection to a new layer.

5. Click on the unlocked background layer. Apply your vignette (or any effect) to the background copy layer.

That’s it! Using this technique you don’t have to worry about your Photoshop effects bleeding into your subject.

Have you ever submitted a ROES order to JD, and the images didn’t come back cropped or rotated correctly?

We see this problem once or twice a month, so we know how frustrating it can be. Fortunately, we can recreate the problem at the lab, so we can tell you how to avoid it. Here’s what happens:

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We occasionally see images coming off the digital printing presses with cropping problems. If you grew up using film, you remember that everything was printed out to the edge.

However, images printed on digital presses (photo books, holiday cards, etc) are different. Friction rollers have to grab a bit of the edge of each piece of paper to pull it through the machine. To keep the rollers from gumming up, the edges don’t get printed. This means that every piece of paper that goes through the printer has a bit of white border on all four edges. To create a full-bleed print, we trim off these edges.

To account for trimming, here are three tips you should know:

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As much as I love Photoshop, I hate the fact that it has a million features I’ve paid for, but will never learn. That’s why I was excited to discover a quick and easy trick using the Feather Tool to create a soft focus around a person or an object in an image. This is especially cool if you’re starting with a totally sharp image, but want to soften the background.

Here’s how you do it.

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