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By Leah Murray - guest blogger, photographer and digital imaging artist
A picture is STILL worth a thousand words! So it better be a great picture!
Today more than ever before, you are what you seem.
Customers can find out a LOT about us and our small businesses in short order using their web browser, cell phone, or networks of friends and family. Our business image is everywhere, and our business IMAGES are more than ever a part of our stock-in-trade.
So how do we build up a cohesive set of images for our business to use in our branding, communications and marketing efforts without blowing a huge budget on specialists and staffers? In a small to medium sized business, time, money and people are always in tight supply, so we have to be organized and effective in what we do.
So let's start from the beginning.
When you went into business, you chose a business name, probably a logo or signature image, and you got these put on some business cards, along with maybe some envelopes and letterhead. These are the first items in your archive of business images -- you more than likely use or need them all the time.
In order to really make effective use of them in all the places you want them to show up nowadays (on your print marketing materials and packaging, your web site, your facebook fan or business page, your Twitter account, beside your LinkedIn profile, on your email campaigns and on your signage for your business and vehicles), you will need to make sure you have these images ready and in usable forms.
Ready to hand is pretty straightforward: if you have a set of folders for your business, you can just create a new one under Marketing that is called "myBrand" or "BizImages" if you prefer and put all the copies of this image that you have on hand in there, making SURE that you name each one differently from the others so that you don't shortchange yourself by overwriting some of them.
Now let's take a look at this collection:
Are any of your images available to you only as items embedded in a Word document? If so, you will need to enlist the help of someone knowledgeable about imaging to help you save this into a jpg file of acceptable quality for use on your small items. MS Word files will not be useable for larger items for a variety of technical reasons, but at least they can be made usable for your online and onscreen needs with little time and effort.
If all of your images are only available to you in MSWord and you have none in JPEG format (in a filename that has the extension ".jpg"), or vector format (filenames ending in ".ai", ".eps", ".cad", ".cdr" or any of the dozens of others listed at here) you will need to get in touch with the graphic artist who provided your images and ask them if you can have copies of the scaleable vector images of your logo and anything else they worked up for you.
These should have been offered to you when the original work was done, but you may not have known what they were or why you needed them, especially if some of them wouldn't open on your computer (some won't unless you have the right software, but that doesn't mean you won't need them for your next new campaign).
It will save you a lot of money if you can get your logo, business name and any letterheads you have in both scaleable vector graphics and raster graphics forms (raster forms are the ones that use pixels, and usually these end in ".jpg", ".bmp", ".gif" and all the others listed here).
Note that you don't need one in each individual file format -- just one in any common vector format and one in any common raster format will do - and the graphics person you deal with should know which ones are most common. Remember also that vector formats are images that can be stretched and shrunk to pretty much any size without losing anything in the translation, where raster formats are widely usable across different kinds of computer systems and in different kinds of software. Pay particular attention to the fact that neither is great at the other format's job, and of course, there is no in-between format yet that does both well!
Once your available formats are established, it's time to ensure that your storage and distribution systems are working correctly: check out my previous blog about storage systems to help with those.
Electronic distribution systems abound these days: you can put your images into emails, onto your web site, blog, facebook or LinkedIn page, online albums and into videos on YouTube. And then there are all the print applications: your catalogue, your stationery, your marketing postcards or mailers, your office mousepads and calendars.
Mainly what you need to know about the distribution systems is embedded in the answers to two questions:
1. Is it going to be viewed in print or on screen
2. What kind of protection do your images need in that form of output?
Let's talk resolution and size first.
Images used for printed items or hard materiels need to be "hi-res" -- meaning that you want the image resolution (ppi or pixels per inch) to be set at 300 ppi or higher depending on the item you are imprinting. As as rule of thumb, 300 ppi is fine for most newsstand media, 600 ppi is good for higher quality magazines with thick glossy paper and textbooks, and anything above that is into the fine arts category.
Blowing up images nicely is a LOT harder than shrinking them down, so if you decide to store your images as 4x6 inches canvas/paper size at 300 ppi, you will have a decently workable archive for almost every business purpose up to 8 x 10.
There is a direct correlation between the number of pixels per inch and the size of the paper by the way: if you are trying to get a printout of 4"x6" at 300 dpi, you would multiply 4 by 300 to get 1200 and 6 by 300 to get 1800, and your image would have to be 1200 pixels on one side and 1800 pixels on the side at 90 degrees to the first in order to print out properly at 300 ppi -- the "image resolution specification" would then be written in one of two ways: either 4"x6"x 300 ppi or 1200 x 1800 x 300 ppi.
Images used for electronic distribution can and should be smaller and saved at lower resolution: this is because of a peculiarity of the human eye. For some reason, human vision is capable of distinguishing a tremendous amount of detail in printed or physical media -- but when it comes to media made of light, like motion pictures and most computer monitors, our ability to perceive very fine detail is limited -- we actually can't perceive much detail finer than 72 - 180 ppi when looking at a screen.
This is one of the reasons why image frames taken out of videos or off of tvs and then printed look so awful to us on paper: we can actually perceive more detail of the image on paper.
Since most electronic distribution involves some kind of internet or email transmission, we want to keep the image file size down as well: small files load on our web, facebook, LinkedIn or photo album pages more quickly.
Actual screen space is measured in pixels -- and the size of the displayed image depends on the resolution the screen is set to use. Most computer screens these days are using using resolution settings of 1024 pixels by 768 pixels; older ones will be using smaller numbers of pixels and newer ones will use larger.
Most images displayed on the web will not be allowed to use the entire screen: if you look at any web page, you will find that the top inch or so of the screen is used up by web browser menus and tool bars, and then you probably have to give away another inch or so to a company logo and page header and maybe a menu that belongs to the web site you are looking at, and the bottom of the screen has a status bar across it and possibly some information about the images above that. Images taller than 530 - 580 ppi tall generally are too tall and push some valuable information off the screen or force you to scroll down to see the whole image.
The same thing applies to the width: most web sites have a navigation bar to one side or the other (or BOTH), and you never want to have to scroll sideways. Most of the time you will want your image width to be only up to 766 ppi wide in order to allow for this.
So we have now established that for web site screen displays and screens in general, we probably want the images to be no bigger than 580 ppi tall x 766 ppi wide x 180 ppi resolution. This is a size that will display perfectly on the most common screen resolutions out there without forcing the person viewing to make annoying monitor adjustments or to scroll sideways or up or down.
Whether you are displaying images on your web page, in your photo album, on LinkedIn or on your blog, setting a maximum display size and setting your images to that by habit will stand you in good stead into the future.
Please take note that image editors of the type that come with your camera (most of them), Adobe Elements and the freebie GIMP can all help you resample (mathematically resize) your images down to 72 - 180 ppi resolution and reset the canvas or paper size as well -- Picasa and Windows Paint can't do this, though, and neither can most image DISPLAY programs.
Protecting images that matter to your business is done through establishing and displaying ownership of the image.
If you have product images, for example, that you hired a photographer to take, you will probably want a work-for-hire agreement with that photographer stating that the images were taken for you or your business and that you have the right to decide how to use them after delivery of the images. The photographer keeps the copyright to the images, but signs over the usage rights to you in such an agreement. In this case, you would put a notice on the web site or album page or with the image on Facebook, Etsy (a shopping application), et al stating that the images have been licensed to you or your company and are not available for use without prior written permission.
If you took the images yourself, you own the copyright, and things get simpler: you can just put a copyright notice with the image or on each page where your images are displayed that says "©My Name, Year-it-was-taken". OR you can embed these notices right in the images themselves using an image editor if your taste runs that way. Keep in mind that text on images should be noticeable enough to prove that you put it there and not noticeable enough to spoil the enjoyment of the image. T'is a fine line to walk, but it gets easier with practice.
Step four in the process is to acquire more images of your products or services to use in your business branding.
You can do this by taking photos of special occasions in your business life yourself, by appointing a gifted employee or family member as the event photographer for the company historical records and offering them a credit line in the company history for their trouble, or by hiring a photographer or videographer outright for the occasion. Which way you choose to do it will depend on the event, the size of your company and the size of your budget for the annual marketing/branding effort.
Most often, the least expensive way to record ongoing events is to either do the photography yourself or get a family/staff member to do it for you, and for most purposes, there is someone you know skilled enough at close hand.
Keep in mind that if you absolutely need to make a professional presentation of your products, it may pay you to have a trained photographer do some or all of the shooting with lights and backdrops. This you need to judge carefully - don't throw money out freely, but learn to know when you need to spend more. In this case, phone around for quotes and choose your service photographer slowly in order to get a fast and easy shoot done within your budget. Everyone, including the photographer, has to make a profit in their business, but none of us needs to gouge to get there.
Last but not least, consider backups: if you spent a lot of time and effort getting your photos organized and usable, don't trust to the whims of the computer gods to keep them safe. Loki, Coyote, Raven, Nanabush and Brer Rabbit are just some of the faces of the computer gods, and all of them have a Murphy's Law name tag sewn into their shorts!
Guest Blogger, technical consultant, photo-journalist and digital imaging artist, fascinated by all things either technical or small business
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