How To Take Good Pictures of Flyers & Upload Them to SC

[FallenPixels]

With some new members, I thought this would be helpful. (This is in no way meant to put down those who have been posting flyers, just some general tips)

Often flyers are very big and when you take a photo of the whole thing, you need to be quite far away to fit it all in, so taking photos of sections makes it much clearer when uploaded.

I usually take photos like this on long sheet papers and 1 page for smaller pages (like the food section in SDM flyers)


Take pictures in natural light if you can, they will turn out much better but if you need to use flash, a piece of masking tape (or even a white sock) over the flash can help reduce the glare on the paper

If your camera has a macro feature, using it will make the text and pictures much sharper. It has a little flower icon

some cameras also have a text option

Once you have all the pictures, transfer them from your camera to your computer. While SC can resize on upload, I find it saves me time uploading if I resize them myself.

I use fotosizer, you just drop all the files into it, choose 700px wide and resize. It will save renamed files that you are now ready to upload.

Start your post and go to Go Advanced then scroll down to Manage Attachments. Browse one file per box and click upload. You may need to do this multiple times for all the pages, it remembers the pages already uploaded.

The forum software messes up the order of the pages (it uploads in order of upload so some smaller files upload first) - there is nothing you can do about this unless you want to upload the long way (one page at a time using upload picture)

Updates
If you take pictures of a slimmer sheet, crop out the extra, it means the details will be clearer when the photo is resized (the flyer will be the whole 700px and not 400px with 300px of background)


You can see how much more detail can be seen if you take two photos of this page, top and bottom half


and even more if you take the photo in natural light (near a window etc) rather than using artificial light at night


Don't forget to rotate images if you rotate your camera to take a picture. I find it easier just not to rotate the camera (but that means you need to take wider rather than longer images). It hurts the neck to try and read a flyer side ways

[FallenPixels]

Fotosizer can be downloaded here http://www.fotosizer.com/Download.aspx

[SavenRaven]

Excellent tips! Thanks FallenPixels

[Miss Molly]

Thank you thank you thank you!

[PurpleBunny89]

I used microsoft picture manager to resize my pictures, it came on my computer in case some people might not have enough room to download the other program check and you should have this one.

[FallenPixels]

Yes, any image software can do it (even paint) but this one does them all at once- there are lots of bulk resizers out there though

[screamy]

Thanks! I'm pretty hopeless without detailed instructions, I never upload stuff because I didn't know how to do it properly (not something I can ask my IT guys at work about either, heh).

[Darth Penguin]

can you make this a sticky??

[ColleenMGorecki]

thank you for sharing your knowledge FallenPixels. lt always nice to learn new things

[ColleenMGorecki]

Can you make this into a sticky please it would be very helpful to members throughout the year

[FallenPixels]

I will once we bump it a few times, stickies tend to get ignored as people scroll down to the main forum area

[MrsSunshine]

ok Miss smarty pants..i've had my camera nearly 3 years.. i had NO idea what the heck the little flower was for until just now.. so what else can you tell me about it.?? lol. thanks for the awesome tips.

[nessa23]

this is great, thanks for the tips!

[FallenPixels]

ok Miss smarty pants..i've had my camera nearly 3 years.. i had NO idea what the heck the little flower was for until just now.. so what else can you tell me about it.?? lol. thanks for the awesome tips.

[FallenPixels]

Bump for the person who asked me about resizing coupon pics for peachy's thread