|
Hire me
to Prepare your Digital Jury Images |
| |
|
4x6 isn't 1920
and other image problems |
Jury slide photographers again
An artist e-mailed me some images to see if the cropping and color could
be improved. The photographer who regularly shoots her jewelry was away
and she had to use a different photographer to have pieces photographed in
time for the art shows she wanted to apply to. The images were 1920 pixel
long dimension in the Adobe RGB (wrong) color space
and hadn't been cropped. Now the artist is stuck with incorrectly
proportioned dead looking images. And on top of all the other problems,
there was a mark on the background in each image that could have been
sensor dust. When confronted about it, the photographer told the artist
which tool in Photoshop she should use to fix it herself. |
|
scroll down
or click here to see the image comparison |
| This is the same photographer I wrote about previously (the
case of the missing pixels) who provided another
jeweler with 1800 pixel images of vertical jewelry shot horizontally so
when cropped for jurying, most were under 800 pixels long, less than half
the size needed for ZAPP. After seeing such poorly cropped images again
from the same photographer I decided to look at the photographer's web
site to see if I could figure out what was going on. Do artists know what to ask for before hiring a photographer?
Though it doesn't explain the poor quality images, the photographer only offers two sizes of digital files, 4x6 at 300PPI
and web size, and charges an additional fee to make the images ZAPP ready.
This isn't the first time that I've seen a jury slide photographer think
images for print (postcards, brochures and banners) are more important
than jury images, not realizing that artists need to actually get into the
art shows before they need the other materials. And not using the sRGB
color space for jury images should be a hanging offense because the
artist's careers depend on the photographer knowing how to do correctly what they
say they can do. |
| Some clueless wording
from his web site: "The viewing life of a jury slide is 5-10 seconds, not
enough time to pick apart either the subject or the photography."
Any photographer that doesn't understand
how competitive the shows are shouldn't be shooting jury slides. Over 95% of the shows use monitors so the jurors can take their
time to study the images. |
What to ask the photographer for
Besides getting images formatted for both ZAPP and JAS, artists need to
ask for the full size files. I always provide the full size images on the
CD I give the artist after photographing their artwork, as do a number of
other jury slide photographers I'd be happy to recommend. |
|
Example images
originals and my corrections |
| |
| |
