Good practices for images - was Re: Wallpaper Extras

[Nicu Buculei]

Vara Prasad Pepakayala wrote:
> 
> I need to appen this section... this is my image... 
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Image:Pink_for_Pink.jpg ..

This is a good looking flower, but I think you can make it better 
following some "good practices" (I don't venture to call them "best 
practices"):

- even some people disagree, I think a bit of digital alteration is 
useful and will improve your image (we are not uber-experts, so our 
photos do not come perfect from the camera). Look as a comparison to 
your image: https://fedoraproject.org/w/uploads/8/8c/Pink_for_Pink.jpg 
and my slight alteration: http://nicubunu.ro/pictures/Pink_for_Pink-nicu.jpg
I adjusted color levels and curves a bit (see a couple of paragraphs 
about this in my portraits tutorial: 
http://howto.nicubunu.ro/portraits_touch-up_gimp/) and increased the 
sharpness (the original image had a larger resolution, you resized it 
and this made it a bit blurry, so sharpen to compensate for resize).

- your photo has a 1280x800 resolution, which is probably the screen 
size of your laptop (and is widely used on cheap-to middle priced 
laptops). However, a lot of other people have larger screens and for 
them a larger photo is more useful. You have a powerful camera, so you 
can produce photos with a large resolution (a wallpaper sized down looks 
better than one sized up). Of course it is a good thing to not leave the 
photo at the size produced by the camera (which is huge), but 1920x1200 
looks like a good balance.

- as you probably know, JPEG uses lossy compression. However, leaving 
the photo at 100% quality will produce a very large file size. In my 
experience, you can reduce the quality to 95-97%, have a considerable 
smaller file size and still acceptable quality.

-- 
nicu :: http://nicubunu.ro :: http://nicubunu.blogspot.com
Cool Fedora wallpapers: http://fedora.nicubunu.ro/wallpapers/
Open Clip Art Library: http://www.openclipart.org
my Fedora stuff: http://fedora.nicubunu.ro