Improving Photos For The Web

• Remove/Fix dust, scratches and noise/artifacts
  
  • Dust should be removed from the image prior to scanning the image.
  • Photoshop Filters
    
    • Despeckle filter diminishes noise by subtly blurring an image, except at "edges" and significant colour shifts
    • Median filter blends the brightness of pixels and discards pixels that are radically different from adjacent pixels
    • Dust & Scratches filter removes dust and scratches from your photo.
      
• Sharpen the image
  
  • This is not a solution for poorly shot or scanned photographs.
    
  • Only moderate amounts of sharpenning can be applied before the image quality is lost.
    
  • Photoshop Filters
    • Sharpen filters globally increase the contrast of adjacent pixels. You can repeatedly apply these filters.
    • Sharpen Edges filter only sharpens where there are major changes to the brightness. Areas of "smooth" brightness are untouched.
    • Unsharp Mask filter creates a blurred negative version of the photo and averages this with the original. This is the most commonly used sharpening filter for Web photos.
• Adjust the contrast, tint and increase the dynamic range
  • A photo with low contrast often appears "dull' and uninteresting. On the other hand a photo with two much contrast generally loses it's "content".
  • If you look at the histogram of the image brightness, a low contrast image is represented by a peak at one end of the graph. A high contrast image has peaks at both ends of the graph.
  • A photo with a small dynamic range has the range of brightness of it's pixels all within a small range. Generally the wider the range of brightness found in a photo, the better.
  • Remove any colour tints that might be present in the photo.
• Remove Red-eye
  
  • If there are people in the photo that have "red-eye", remove it.
• Crop
  
  • Besides improving the quality of the photo, cropping out unnecessary information will reduce the size of the photo.
• Resize
  • Resize the image down (never up), to the appropriate size for your web page.
  • Do not do the resizing via HTML's IMG width and height attributes, besides taking longer to download, the resizing algortithms of browsers tend to be poor.
• Remove or clean up busy backgrounds
• Backgrounds that have a lot of detail can detract from the main subject and may also result in larger file sizes.
• This step should have been done when the photo was taken.
  • You can select the background and total replace it with a neutral plain background if appropriate.
  • If appropriate the background might be made transparent.
  • You can also blur the background to put it out of "focus"