The right photos can round out your website very nicely, but not if they’re edited poorly. Photoshop is a great tool for getting your photos ready for publishing on the web.
Remember to work in RGB. There are several different color modes you can convert your photo to. CMYK is used for print, because it uses cyan, magenta, yellow and black as the base colors, the same colors that are in your printer. Since you’re working for web, you don’t need to worry about multichannel or any of the other options. RGB stands for red, green and blue, the colors that are used in digital screens.
Be conservative and don’t get overzealous with the filters and editing options. If you want your photos to look professional, stick to the basics. Use Channels and Levels for adjustments to color, density and contrast. Follow it up with tweaks to Color Balance and Brightness/Contrast. If you want to make your shadows pop, then play with Shadow/Highlight a little bit. Don’t go overboard. In most cases you’ll want your photos to look as natural as possible, so you’ll probably limit your editing to fixing the color and darkness of the image.
Don’t forget about resolution. When you’re working with print you want everything to be high res, because low res images print really fuzzy. On screen, a lower resolution is your friend. Your image doesn’t have to be larger than 72 ppi (pixels per inch) and you will still get the same clarity you would from a printed image. But a larger image will take much longer to load and could slow down your browser. When you’re ready to crop your image, change your resolution to 72. If you want to see how your image will look, go to View, then Actual Pixels. That will set your zoom to 100 percent.
