Preparing an Image for Digital Projection

Most photographic clubs now offer sound advice to members about preparing images for viewing with digital projectors. However, I still occasionally stumble across advice that is incomplete, misleading, or even wrong. Also, people often just follow a set of instructions without really understanding what they are doing, or why. I would like to address some of these issues here.

There are a few distinct steps needed when preparing an image for viewing with a digital projector. Images which will be viewed on a website need to be set up similarly to get the best results. The process may be summarised as follows.

1. Carry out any photographic manipulation or processing with your chosen software until you are happy with how the image looks on your computer screen.
2. Resize to the correct pixel dimensions.
3. Sharpen.
4. Set colour space to sRGB.
5. Save as a jpeg image, being sure you do not overwrite the full-size image in the process.

Each of these steps needs further explanation. Please click on any step above to read more about it in a new window or tab. As there are many photo processing programs available and I cannot possibly cover all of them here, I shall use Adobe Photoshop terminology. This should translate easily enough to other programs as the prinicples are the same in all.