Uploading Photos- The File Format

Monday, April 9, 2012
Happy Holiday-Whichever You Celebrate

Uploading Photos

The File Format

     Happy Holiday Monday, whichever you may celebrate. I just sent an e-mail to E-Bay, and hopefully, I may get a reply. My question was "which photo file format is the best to upload  to E-Bay?"

    I try to take high-quality photos that are:

1. Colour-balanced: This means that the true colours of the toys I am offering for sale are accurate

 in focus, well lit  - This means that you can see detail both in the bright areas/highlights and the dark areas/shadow, and finally - properly displaying all of the  detail (good and bad) of the item that I am selling.

     I normally reduce my image size to 4" x 6" @ 300 pixels per inch) for uploading images. By the way, 4" x 6" is approximately  100mm x 150mm in metric. 

  A 4' x 6" (100mm x 150mm) 300 dpi JPEG upload

     The montage (multiple image photo) above is how I present my photos on E-Bay. Rather than pay an additional 15 cents/photo or have the package deal  for more, I decided to create these montages. If you think of having to list 30 items with 3 photo each, that would cost me an additional  30 x 2 @ 15 cents = $ 9.00. E-Bay charges close to 8-10% in final listing fees, so I don't want to pay any more, and that 8-10% also includes shipping!

     Also, I wait for the beginning of the month to list, since E-Bay provides you with 50 free listings for the month. Lately, I only list about 35 listings, since every unsold item which is listed "counts" as one of the "free" listings.  I never am able to sell everything that I list, and I'm sure that's the same story with most everyone.

      E-Bay is going to allow everyone to place up to 12 photos for "free" starting in June 2012.

As I mentioned at the beginning, I e-mailed E-Bay to ask which format is the best., and that's how I decided what today's instalment or topic would be. I was never one to read every book and detail to figure out what A JPEG, TIFF, BMP, and so forth were. JPEG's work for me, so that's what I stayed withi. I have read that 2 things happen when you save a photo as a JPEG:

     1. It gets compressed initially when the photo is taken.

       hat is why everyone (Pros) and printers and software companies push for those RAW files.

     2. When I send a JPEG to E-Bay and then then post it, they  shrink it again, and more information and detail are lost.

     I decided that the best way to illustrate the best choice is simply to save the photos in the different formats that are available to upload to Blogger. The photos will be large enough for you to be the judge. Please don't forget that you can magnify any photo by clicking on it.

 A Screen-Capture of a RAW Image from My Canon T3i camera

The red simply means overexposure. Camera Raw files are supposedly "the best" as they do not compress like JPEG's which are the "other" format that your camera captures images.

 Notice how large the RAW file is!

A JPEG will also be the same size, but each timea JPEG is saved, you lose pixels.

 This is the size that I normally use for E-Bay.

16 x 10.67 is the same as 4" x 6"

 This is a normal JPEG photo that 

I will use in the future for those 12 "free" E-Bay uploads/ listing.

In order to keep this "test" identical from the start, before the conversion from RAW

 Here's the window that opens up when you want to convert a RAW copy to a BMP (Bitmap)

Since I don't know  or ever had to know all of the menu here, I simply went for the "default" settings and chose OS2 (I assume that's  fora Mac ) and 24 bit ( a term for how an image is processed). I did try for 32 bit, but that was not an available option.

A BMP format image

 Blogger doesn't offer thus BMP format as an option.

I uploaded it anyway,and it was accepted.

The only difference that I see is that this image is less red than the JPEG.

 The TIFF Menu

Once again, I was prompted to make some selections.

I kept the "default" settings, and saved the image as a Macintosh file

 A TIFF Image

Once again, I can only see a difference in the colour, with the same comment(less red) as before.

So that's it for today.

Have a nice rest of the morning, afternoon, or evening

wherever you may be.