Customising images

Modifying digital photographic images

Photographic images can give your e-learning resources a great sense of reality. The wide use of digital cameras and even mobile phone based cameras has meant that digital photographic images have become very easy to create and use.

Replacing an image in a web page

If you have a learning resource in which you wish to change an image, the simplest way is to save the new image with the file name of the one you want to replace. When you place the new image file in the appropriate directory, you will be asked if you want to replace the existing file. By selecting to replace the existing file with the one you have uploaded the new image takes the place of the previous one in the web page.

Resizing an image

Photographic files downloaded from a digital camera are usually very large files. (A 4 Megapixel camera will create image files that are over 1 Mb in size). These large files can take a long time to download and will take up all of the computer screen.

Before you use a photographic image file, you should alter the resolution and size of the file. This will ensure that it fits in the space in the web page and has a file size that is small enough to download quickly.

Photographic images are best saved as jpeg/jpg file types. These types of files can have their “quality” altered to further reduce the image file size.

Modifying images

If you only want to use a part of a photo, you can crop the image. Cropping involves selecting the region you want to use and then using the CROP tool.

Most image editing software will also allow you to alter the brightness and contrast of the image to improve how it looks.

You can add text to your image. This could include

With a bit of imagination you can add parts of images that have cropped from different images into a single image to make a composite image. Some examples of this could include

Resources

Last modified: 15/9/08