Am making my first attempt at building a portfolio web site. And I am fairly confident that I have a handle on layout and design. But I can't seem to get the main component right. Scaning, file size, and thumbnails. From what I understand, a monitor can't display better that 72dpi ?? Is this correct? Should I only scan at 72dpi? I have been told that RC Gloss is the best to scan. All of my prints are FB. Is there a difference? Is it better to scan a 5x7,8x10,11x14? I want to be able to display an acurate representation of my work without long load times or running larger than the screen. When creating thumbs, do I just decrease size to 1"x1". Please remember, while I might be able to hold my own in the darkroom, I am a complete novice in this area. I have spent a fair amount of time reading and learning the tech. aspects of web site design. But I have yet to find direct info on site design for photographers. I belive I have the right tools, just not the knowledge to use them. I would appreciate any and all help and advice. Thanks John

-- John Carolan (jac@absorb.com), October 19, 1998

Answers

You should scan at a resolution that gives you an image the size you want on the screen. An average monitor shows about 72 dpi, so if you want a 5x7 photo to occupy 5x7 inches on the screen, scan at 72dpi.

5x7 inches is not a bad resolution to show a full frame photo on a web page. 8x10 is OK, but might require some scrolling. To scan an 8x10 photo and have it show up at 5x7 at 72dpi, scan it at about 45 dots per inch.

I use the X-windows tool 'xv' to format images for the web, so I normally reduce photos to about 1/4 original size and that gets an OK sized thumbnail. When saving B&W images in .jpg format, a high degree of compression (50 on the 0-100 scale) gets reasonably small images - 30K for the large ones - with reasonably good quality. I save the thumbnails at higher quality since the images are small to start with.

Examples of the results are at http://members.tripod.com/~mike_rosenlof

-- mike rosenlof (mike_rosenlof@yahoo.com), October 19, 1998.