 What do you do if you are an architect and have a project that you need to photograph, but it is not DONE? There is little furniture and no art to speak of. In addition to that, the place is neither finished or cared for. We just photographed a place like that on a beautiful site in the Suisun Valley. The results were spectacular. Architect Karen Mar of YAMAMAR Design, who designed the remodel, realized her project needed some help. She rented key furniture pieces, culled artwork from home and office, and showed up on shoot day with armfuls of props. We reciprocated by bringing stacks of books and shopping bags of accessories. This simple shoot required an exceptional amount of planning and execution. Working as a team, we pulled it off. Here are some of the before shots of the interiors we dressed up. The giant, multiscreen TV dominated the space and needed to go. The temp-outdoor style living room furniture needed to go outdoors. The bedrooms were good but needed some propping. The front entry was empty offering a great opportunity to feature some interesting furniture and art. Karen Mar using her amazing resourcefulness pulled most of this together. We followed up with some serious Photoshop work which included refinishing the wooden floors that bleached unevenly, strategically placing art around the house, and cleaning windows and backyard clutter. A cooperative herculean effort saved the day and created an excellent set of images everyone can be proud of.
 Upgrading Your Web-Sized Photos: Get to 2880 Do you have high-res photos that sometimes don't look sharp on your website? Why is that? It could be your website code. In addition to "responsive" design, you also need to consider retina-ready website design. They are two different things. What does Retina actually mean? This Macworld webpage gives a good explanation. Luckily, the tools you need are out there and are getting easier to use. If you are using a theme or template from a website marketplace, such as Envato, make sure it says "retina-ready" in the description. If not, get a new one. It's worth the trouble. You've likely paid for high-quality photos so why settle for subpar presentation? If you've hired a web designer to create a custom site, or are doing it yourself, verify that it has the Javascript or CSS code necessary to downsample images to non-retina sizes. This important bit of code tells your web browser which variation of your image to display based on your viewer's device. I found this great tutorial here: The Right Way to Retinafy Your Websites. Screen resolutions are constantly getting better. What that means is the 600px wide standard for web images has been upsized about four times in the last ten years and can now be up to 1920px, 2560px or 2880px wide, depending on your device. Apple is boasting a new 5000px wide display coming to the market! Today, it's a moving target and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. 2880 px wide should be your new standard when uploading image assets intended for full-screen display on your website. It covers all your bases. Start large and let your code and web browser decide if the image should be downsampled. If you have not resized the images on your website in the last few years, it may be time to think big, again. Dont try to upsize your existing, small JPG files. Rather, go back to the original TIF files and make a resized sRGB JPG from them to the 2880 standard. You will need to compress it to keep the file size around 500KB. I choose a quality level of "6" (out of 12) in the compression dialog window when saving my JPGs for web in Photoshop. Would you like us to resize your images for you? Contact us for help. And while you're at it, ditch any web design that is dependent on FLASH and trade it in for an HTML5 site. Embrace the change! |
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