Those of you who wish to participate in the Photographers Forum monthly competition through digital images, please use the following parameters.

Image Size

Crop, resize or manipulate your images in any creative way you desire but the largest size acceptable for display is 1024x768 (horizontal x vertical) pixels. These are the horizontal and vertical limitations of the projector.

You can do this in Photoshop Elements by selecting: "Image / Resize / Image Size" and then changing one of the dimensions to the appropriate number of pixels. When you do this you lose detail in your photo because you are resampling down to a smaller number of pixels. You may want to experiment with the choice box at the screen bottom that allows you to specify the resampling method. Below are three choices and their effects:

• "Nearest Neighbor" shows detail but creates jagged edges
• "Bicubic" smooths edges but blurs detail
• "Bicubic Sharper" is a compromise between the above two

File Type

Submitted files must be in JPEG Format.

Regardless of the format you use to manipulate and size your image (TIFF, PSD, etc), the final step in saving your file before submitting for competition is to save your image as a JPEG file. Keeping in mind that you lose image quality every time you save a JPEG, be sure that this is your final step before forwarding your file.

You can do this in Photoshop Elements by selecting: "File / Save as... / JPEG". The JPEG image quality is based on a 0-12 slider and a setting of 8 should be used as a standard quality setting. If your photo is the maximum size of 1024x768 pixels, it will contain 0.786 Mpixels. Since there are three bytes per pixel (for the red, green and blue color values), the bitmap (BMP or TIFF) file size is 2.36 MBytes. The JPEG 8 compression is about 10:1, so your final JPEG file size will be about 0.3 MBytes.

E-mailing your Images

The deadline for submitting Digital Images is 9:00pm on the Wednesday evening prior to the Competition Meeting. A reminder e-mail will be sent out on the Monday prior and this deadline will be STRICTLY adhered to. Since all incoming e-mails are date and time stamped, enforcement of this policy will be easy to document. Please avoid problems and watch the calendar and clock.

Send images to the competition mailbox,  competition @ photographersforum.org   Please send only one image per e-mail. 

When sending your e-mail with your image file attached, please include the following information.

• Maker Name:
• Image Title:
• Competition Date:
• Class:
• Category:

Please also name the attached file as:   Title   Maker   Class   Category.jpg

For example:   Antique_Tractor-Pete_Johnson-A-Antique.jpg