Scale an image?

Photoshop = head to the image menu and look for Resize, then Image size. Or press Alt+Ctrl+I

Irfanview = image menu & selet resize/resample, or press Ctrl+R

GIMP = Image Menu, scale image.

This command is more useful to scale an image down to save space for example. If you’ve been told you need a bigger image, resizing up is not the answer.

Create an image for print on demand?

Assuming you’d like to put a photo of the dog on a tshirt, You’d first choose your favourite image and open in any of the editors mentioned (i.e. photoshop, irfanview, GIMP). You should open your image and firstly use the view menu commands to ‘fit image to screen’ as well as view it at 100% full size. The idea here is to see if there is anything obvious you’ve missed. Perhaps a bit of red-eye or a spot of doggy drool you didn’t see before.

Next up consider image composition, layout and if cropping can help you achieve a better result. A very simple technique is to create a frame with your hand in front of the screen making an L-Shape. Pretending you’re the director, you want to block off areas of the image to consider new areas of interest for potential cropping. A common mistake is to take photo’s with the subject in the very center of the frame. Our eyes like to scan the edges as well and artists consider using the rule of thirds a good technique for choosing your areas of interest.

The rule of thirds

Next task to attend to when preparing your image for DTG printing is tweaking the brightness and contrast settings.  You need to consider that images on screen will be brighter than the same image printed and applied to you tshirt or whatever item you are using. I use Photoshop to tweak these settings as it allows me to adjust brightness in the shadows, in the highlights and also overall.

Backup Backup

Backup and save often. Don’t let computer gremlins or virus problems wipe out your precious files, photo’s and future memories. Computers still mainly use moving parts to store data and anything that spin at 7000rpms has the potential to go wrong.

Storage is so cheap these days you can easily afford to buy a thumb-drive just for backing up your family photo’s.

Backup files the easy way by pressing 4 keys.

Press and hold Ctrl, Then press A,C,V.

That’s it you’re done. Now be an expert backerupperer by copying your copied files to a USB thumb drive and take them to work and leave them in your drawer.

What you’ve done is a bloody fast way to back stuff up but you end up with duplicate files all starting with “copy of…”. If you’d like an elegant solution consider installing 7zip as that way you can select the files to be backed up, right click and select from the menu “Add to archive”. Give it a name and 7Zip will pack them all up into a nice little package that can then be easily copied to an offsite location, DVD,CD, thumbdrive or even emailed to gmail or hotmail.