I have a new set of water color illustrations from a local artist. I know i asked this question before but cannot find it on the forum–i apologise!
Is there a suggested size and format for saving them digitally?
Bloom is designed to work with images saved as jpg or png. Either can work well; generally photos will be smaller files as jpgs and line art will be smaller as png. Scanning water color illustrations will probably work best saving as jpg, but why not try a few both ways and see how it goes?
I don’t know exactly how you’re digitizing them. A scanner will usually offer a fixed resolution. A digital camera will too, but you could vary how much of the picture fills the frame and then clip the bit you want if it is giving too high a resolution.
As for size…that depends on how big you want them to be on the page. When you insert a picture into Bloom and hover over it, it will tell you the resolution and that 300-600dpi is recommended (especially for quality printing). if you’re getting more than that and can find a way to make the scans smaller, that will save you storage space and may help to prevent running out of memory. If you’re getting less than 300dpi, you may want to look for a better way to digitize the pictures.
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I’ll add to what John T said that generally speaking a higher resolution for black and white, saved as PNG, is a good practice, perhaps 600 DPI. Note: People often scan black and white line drawings as color, which is unnecessary and adds size.
Color images will always be larger, so it is probably good to use something more like 300 DPI with color just to keep the files from being too huge. You can also use a “bit depth” that is not the highest. With water colors, particularly, 8 bit/256 colors may be adequate. For photos, probably not more than 24 bit, 65,536 colors. I’ve seen images as high as 32 bit.
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