Image editing

The Scheme's staff primarily use Adobe Photoshop packages to edit their images. This is the best software to use, but somewhat pricey. You can download photo editing software from the internet for free, or your camera may have come with a package. Free downloads (that operate similar to Photoshop) are listed below, but we don't provide support for any of these programmes, so use and install at your own risk!

• Gimp
• Paint.Net
• Pixen

You will first need to download the photos from the camera as per the manufacturer’s instructions. We recommend saving them into a folder entitled ‘Object Images’ so you know where they are for uploading onto the database later on.

Important: to facilitate publication, we need images uploaded at a minimum of 300 dots per inch (dpi) for objects and 600 dpi for coins.

The following steps describe how to manipulate the images into one view.

1. Open the photo editing software
2. Open up all the photos of one object,as shown below:
   
3. Use the rectangular select tool and the move tool to highlight, cut, paste and move the images into one as shown below:
   
4. The complete image needs to have the object front (coin head) first, then the side and then the back from left to right. If there is a shot of the top or bottom this goes above or below as required
   Try and keep the images of the object about one scale bar width away from the scale itself. Too tight to the scale bar can make it hard to edit for publication later. 
5. You may want to clean up the background of the image. The image should have no shadows or bits of plasticine showing. You can do this by using the magic wand tool and the rubber. 
6. Crop it so there is not too much background visible around the object. (Do not crop too close to the edges of the object though!) 
7. Save the image as a jpeg file type (or tiff), high quality. We recommend that you make the file name the object record number, so when you come to upload the image it is easy to find.