quality of images for my tutorial?

[dpnew]

Hi Doug,

FYI, I was at the Retouch Pro home page, and I noticed a menu on the left. I assume that is the "fly away menu" you mentioned. Within that menu, there is a publish button, but when I navigate from the home page to "Tutorials", there is no menu on the left, and now way that I can figure out to access the publish button.

Also, I was wondering what quality images to post for my tutorial. In PE2, I'm clicking on Save for Web, and unless the jpeg quality is high, I'm getting a lot of blurring, however I'm worried about excessive download time. Any advice?

[Doug Nelson]

It sounds like you're having some cache problems, since there is no "publish" link on the flyout menu on the main site page. The javascript might have gotten corrupted during download, and now it's just calling the same corrupt one whenever you visit. You might want to flush your cache and try again.

As for image size, the tutorials area width is 700 pixels and you'll probably want to leave some white space around that. I usually use 400 pixels for images, and lifesize for screencaps (unless they're full-screen). At that size I can usually get away with a SFW setting of 60 for JPG images. I've also found out that GIF gives less artifacting for screencaps (like for palettes, menus, etc.).

[dpnew]

It sounds like you're having some cache problems, since there is no "publish" link on the flyout menu on the main site page.

Nope. I just don't know where I am on the site. I had been clicking on the Tutorials Forum link and then looking for the publish button. I just realized that the fly out menu is on the Tutorials "page" as you've been saying all along--I just didn't know that was a different place then where I was--the Tutorials forum. I'm not sure how I navigated there, but I saw the fly out menu. I guess it looked like a home page to me, and I didn't realize I wasn't at the real Retouch Pro home page.

Any chance you could change the title of the post to "quality of images for my tutorial?"? The current "quality images for my tutorial" looks like I'm begging for people to donate images.

Thanks for all your help.

[dpnew]

Is there a way to upload all your images and your tutorial write up and work on it without it being visible to other forum members? Then, when you're ready, turn it on for public viewing?

[Leah]

I don't know, but I always write mine in a text editor, make a note in the text where I want to insert particular images, then when I'm done I cut and paste into the tutorial system, upload my images and insert them at the previously-marked points. I know that doesn't answer your question directly, but I hope it's of some help.

[Doug Nelson]

There's no way for you to hide tutorials. Leah has the best solution. Plus you really shouldn't be writing tuts directly into the system because if it glitches (which you know is inevitable) you'll have to start from scratch. I learned this the hard way

[dpnew]

Hi,

Thanks for the responses. I read the tutorial on "How to write a Tutorial", and in accordance with Leah's advice that is the way I'm compiling my tutorial. But, you can't determine if your images are wide enough, whether your screen shots are clear enough, nor how everything looks like font size, section titles, etc. It seems to me, all of that requires significant fiddling.