Help with curriculum

[jeaniesa]

Congrats Margaret! Thanks for letting us know how it went!

Jeanie

[boingo82]

Oh, I wish I had seen this thread before. I work at a newspaper in a retirement town and my job is processing photos for print. This includes photos submitted for birthdays, anniversaries, 5 generations, weddings, missionaries, obituaries, etc. If anyone is aware of what the public at large needs to know about photos, it's me.
Things I hope you covered:

1. Resolution: Most non-professionals would mostly be playing with photos to email to their kids, or print out for display, or submit to the newspaper, etc. Today someone sent me the 4kb attached file on the left, which I had to run b/w at the size shown on the right. This is for an obituary, which many people will probably cut out and save in their scrapbooks, and the woman will not even be recognizable. I try to get people to send me a new copy that's bigger, and they say, "We had to size it down to send it in email. Just size it back up!". I would cover proper resolutions depending on the purpose of the photo. For example, for print 200ppi is the standard, and for viewing onscreen, 72ppi.

2. Data loss. Every day I get photos that have been scanned in to someone's computer, printed out on their crappy dot-matrix printer at 72dpi, and they want me to SCAN it in again!! If they have it on a computer (and they have to, if they printed it off one) then why don't they EMAIL the photo to me? Printing, especially on a bad or non-color managed printer loses TONS of image data. I wish people knew this.

3. Appropriate file formats. All the time people email me their photo in .bmp format for use, (and usually without cropping the whole scan bed out of the image) and in order to get the .bmp to attach they have to send it at 30ppi or something ridiculous like that. If they would merely send in .jpg format, they could compress the image without losing too much noticable data and could give me a LOT more to work with since it would be at a higher resolution.

4. Cropping. I don't need the whole scan bed in the photo emailed. Just the important part would be nice.

Well congrats on having gotten through your presentation. I bet it was fun. I think it would actually be very rewarding to share something you're so interested in with others.

[boingo82]

duh, forgot to attach pic.

[winwintoo]

Thank for the info Boingo - I hadn't thought of that aspect of photo editing. We did spend quite a bit of time talking about resolution and the different file types and their uses - they even got to copy a chart off the white board (they get restless if you don't let them take notes )

I ran out of time, but they want me to continue the next time the group meets and I will take your suggestions along - I don't expect them to become experts, but hopefully they will give it some thought.

It was fun - and I hope there will be other opportunities.


Take care, Margaret

[chris h]

"Even a couple of curmudgens in the back row listened intently before announcing that THEY would never waste their time on anything as frivolous as editing photos"

Margaret , It was myself and a friend we slipped in through the fire exit!

[winwintoo]

Chris, you devil, why didn't you introduce yourselves?

Margaret