Help and Advice

1. PURCHASE THE RIGHT SIZE

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

Web images are supplied at 72 dpi and will not resize well. Enlarging a web image can result in a loss of detail and image quality. Print images are supplied at 300 dpi and can generally be enlarged to some degree without significant quality loss.

2. COLOUR CONVERSION

With web and digital printing, the colour space of your images is not as important as it once was. However, to ensure the best possible colour accuracy across different platforms and devices, all web images should be converted to the sRGB colour space.

For digital printing, ProPhoto RGB or Adobe RGB are generally preferred, with Adobe RGB being the more commonly used colour space. Our print images are supplied in ProPhoto RGB.

Colour spaces can be easily changed in Photoshop by going to:

Edit > Convert to Profile > select the desired destination colour space.

Never use "Assign Profile". Always use "Convert to Profile" when working with our images, as our files are supplied with an embedded colour profile.

3. IMAGE SHARPENING

Image sharpening is best treated as part of the final output process rather than the initial editing process. For this reason, none of our downloadable images are pre-sharpened.

Once you have downloaded your web or print image and resized it to its final output size, it should then be sharpened for its intended use.

Web Images

For web images, we recommend using Photoshop > Filter > Sharpen > Smart Sharpen.

As a starting point, keep the Radius below 1 pixel and set the Amount between 60–80%. These settings may need to be adjusted depending on the image and its intended use.

Keep in mind that platforms such as Facebook and Instagram may apply their own compression and sharpening when images are uploaded. If your image does not look as expected after uploading to these platforms, try uploading the image without additional sharpening.

If you need to make adjustments, you can always re-download the image from your account if you no longer have a copy of the original file.

Print Images

For print images, we recommend using Photoshop > Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask.

Set the preview to 50% and start with a Radius of 1–1.5 pixels. Adjust the Amount until the image appears slightly over-sharpened at the 50% preview.

This is intentional because an image will generally appear less sharp when printed than it does on a computer screen. The final sharpening should therefore be performed as part of the print preparation process, taking into account the difference between viewing a digital image on screen and viewing the final image as a physical print.