Your hard portfolio looks fantastic! Great.
What about your online one?
It doesn’t matter how good your physical prints look, the only people who will be able to appreciate them are the ones you show them to. Luckily, a guy named ‘Tim Berners-Lee’ invented something called the ‘World Wide Web’ ;) , saving you from (literally) chasing after potential employers.
However, the world of web imagery and the world of tangible prints is quite different. Why?
Resolution:
At the moment the most common computer screen resolution is 1280px x 800px. It’s no good uploading your 5,616px × 3,744px RAW image, you’ll need to resample it to a suitable size for the web. I don’t tend to go above 800px for the longest side of the image, this will generally mean that the viewer can see the whole image without having to scroll around.
Colour Profiles:
This is where it can get a bit geeky and confusing, but I’ll keep it as simple as possible and link you to the geeky stuff at the end of the article. In layman’s terms, the image has to be represented on screen and in order for the web browser and operating system to do this it must interpret a ‘colour profile’ that has been embedded within the image.
You should always use RGB mode (as opposed to CMYK) for anything intended for screen.
One of the most common complaints I hear from photographers putting their shots online (especially from DSLRs) is that the colours look a lot muddier than when they viewed them locally. I pretty much guarantee this is due to the colour profile.
I recommend using the sRGB colour profile as all graphical browsers interpret the colours from this profile in pretty much the same way. Although modern browsers are getting much better at representing different profiles, you may still find that the colours aren’t turning out as you’d like.
Compression:
Images need to be compressed for the web. Compression means reducing the file size, the benefit being that the image will load much faster for the viewer and lessen the demand on, not only their bandwidth, but also that of the server hosting it. The most common compression format used for web photographs is the ‘JPEG’ file format. If you’re using Photoshop, I recommend selecting ’10′ from the quality settings; The reason I don’t choose ’12′ is because it offers negligible improvement in quality (at this resolution) yet a significant increase in file size.
More detailed information on Colour Spaces
Cormac
