Help and Advice

1. PURCHASE THE RIGHT SIZE

One of the main things to consider when purchasing an image for use in your web or print projects is to make sure it is the right size. It is always best practice to purchase a size larger than what you need to allow for any cropping of the image to fit the desired space on your website or printed page.

With web images they are supplied at 72 dpi and will not resize well and if resized detail will be lost. With print images, they are supplied at 300 dpi and can lend themselves to some enlargement without quality loss.

2. COLOUR CONVERSION

With web and digital printing, the color space of your images isn't as important as it once was. To be safe all web images should be moved into sRGB colour for the best colour accuracy across any and all platforms that will use the image. For digital printing, Pro Photo or Adobe RGB is best with Adobe RGB being the most common. Our print images are supplied in Pro Photo RGB.

The colour spaces can be easily changed in Photoshop by going to Edit > Convert to Profile > Change to the (destination space).

Never Assign the Profile always convert it with our images as the files come with an embedded profile.

3. IMAGE SHARPENING

Sharpening images is a print process, not an editing one, so none of our images that are downloaded are sharpened for this reason. When you download your web or print image and it has been resized to its final size, then it should be sharpened. For web images, we recommend using in Photoshop Filter > Smart Sharpen (keep your radius lower than a pixel and amount between 60 - 80) keep in mind that if the images are being used for applications like Facebook or Instagram they can apply their own sharpening as well so if the image looks bad after uploading to these platforms try no sharpening it. You can always redownload your image in your account should you not have a replacement copy.

For print images we recommend in Photoshop Filter > Unsharp Mask (Set the preview to 50%) and apply at least 1 to 1.5-pixel radius and the amount to the point wherein the 50% preview the image looks slightly over sharpened. You do this as part of the print process the image will not be as sharp in print as on screen due to the difference between viewing it as a digital file and a hard copy on paper.