A. Resizing Your Image (Instructions How to Do It in Photoshop Elements)

A. Resizing Your Image (instructions how to do it in Photoshop Elements)

All digital images will be judged at a resolution of 1400 by 1050px.
1400 is the width across; all resulting images are landscape format.
Firstly, resize your image to fit within that pixel area. You will probably want to maintain the proportions of your image, so you may choose to add a background colour to fill the remaining space (see B).

1. While you are still working on the image, make sure it is in the sRGB colour space, so you see on your monitor the same as will be projected.
2. From the Image Menu, choose Image Size.
3. Make sure the units you have selected are pixels (top centre of the box).
4. Enter the width you want, i.e. 1400 & Constrain Proportion.
5. The height will adjust automatically providing you have the box ticked
6. Then check the height. If the height is now more than 1050 then you need to enter 1050 in the height – in this case it will correspondingly reduce the width to less than 1400 pixels. See section B next for how to fill in either height or width following these changes.

Click OK.

Tip: many people will talk about ‘file size’ or ‘dpi’ - none of this is relevant here, you are measuring pixels only.

B. Then Adding a Background

1. If your image is not exactly 1400px by 1050px (see A above) then it must be judged with a black background filling the remaining space. If you want to choose some colour other than black then you can do so.
2. Set the background colour on the colour palette to the colour you want.
3. From the Image Menu, choose Canvas Size. The Canvas Size dialog box is shown. Make sure the units are set to pixels. Type in 1400px for the width and/or 1050 px for the height (whichever is not set already). Click OK.
4. Your image canvas is now enlarged to show the picture and the spare margin/s around the outside. Ordinarily only top bands or side bands should be evident.
   See C below for how to save the file to a JPEG image file and what the file naming conventions are for competitions.

C. Finally Saving the Image & filename standards for competitions

1. To save a file as a JPEG file, from the File Menu, choose Save As. The Save As dialog is displayed.
2. Select the folder you want to save to and type in the correct title which should be no longer than 30 characters including spaces (see next). Next make sure the Format field is set to JPEG.
3. Click the Save button, you will then see the JPEG Options dialog box.
4. Set the amount of compression to apply to the image. You can set the quality to 12. This will ensure the final file size is not too large but will retain the quality of the image. Make sure the Format Options is set to Baseline (‘Standard’). Click OK.