How to Format Artwork So It Looks Good on the Internet

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-Kate


By Lance Klass

Ever come across pages that seem to take forever to load, or you get on an artist's page and you wait and wait and slowly but surely the images start to appear and fill out? Even though the United States has one of the slowest load times of any industrialized nation (I understand France's internet is 12 times faster than ours), pages and sites and images should all load pretty quickly. If they're not, a reason might be that the image scans are just too large (and perhaps you've got a slow connection as well).

So here are some pointers on scaling your scans so they come up quickly and look sharp.

1) Make sure that your original scan, of whatever size, is clean, clear, and cropped well so there's nothing extra showing up, like unwanted background behind and outside the image.

If the scan isn't representative of the quality of the original, work with the color saturation, contrast, darkness and other qualities that can be manipulated in programs like PhotoShop so that you're happy with the scan. This is the master scan that you'll send out to licensees, assuming you've shot it large enough for most needs.

2) After saving the big scan just the way you like it, reduce the overall density of your scan to 72 dots per inch (dpi) and save it at that resolution. The reason for this is that most monitors can only show 72 dots per inch, so why have an image with 150 or 300 dots per inch? If you make sure that every image you post on the internet is at 72 dpi, you'll have cut down the overall size of the images from something in megabytes (millions of bytes, or MB) to something in kilobytes (thousands of bytes, or KB).

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