Photo Advice

The old adage of “an image speaks a thousand words” is never truer than when it is in regard to your website. Really good, professional looking photography can convince a customer to work with you or buy your products in seconds, before they have even read a single word of text on your site.

Here are a few tips from Concept to help you achieve the best results from your photography for use on your website and other marketing materials: –

Image Size

Images should be as large as possible. The larger an image is the greater the degree of flexibility we will have with their use. Large images can be used for almost anything on a website ie. Full page width background images, large slideshows, article images, gallery images, thumbnails, etc, etc. This is because large images contain large amounts of data so they can be easily scaled down without losing any of the image detail.

High resolution images can easily be reduced in size with no loss of fidelity


However smaller images only contain small amounts of data and cannot be scaled larger and still retain detail. So, the use of smaller images is somewhat limited to article images, gallery thumbnails and avatars.

Low resolution images however lack the information required to make larger images from them

Image Resolution

Just like the Image Size, Image Resolution should be as large as possible especially if there are any plans to use the photographs in printed materials. Monitor resolutions are approx. 72 pixels per inch but printers are approx. 350 pixels per inch, so by providing high resolution images this will mean your files will contain the necessary data required to produce clean, sharp images.

File Format

If your camera supports it, all photographs should be taken in RAW format whenever possible. RAW files have the capacity to capture up to 281,474,976,710,656 different colours, JPEG images only have the capacity to capture 16,777,216 colours, so by shooting in RAW you are able to capture 16,777,216 times more detail that by shooting RAW.

Being able to capture so much detail comes with a cost though, RAW image files are substantially larger than JPEG but that’s because it is an uncompressed file format and you are capturing all of the light information that is available. But the payoff is worth it, having 16,777,216 times more colour and light data gives us much greater editing options such as pulling unseen details out of shadows.

This is an image of an apple deliberately shot in a dark room

ISO64 50mm F/6.3 1/5s

  • RAW
  • RAW
Shooting the photo in RAW allows the extraction of more light and colour details, because it contains the information of trillions of colours the results are finer and smoother.

  • JPEG
  • JPEG
Although the JPEG photo can be enhanced enough to see the apple, the fact it only uses millions of colours instead of the trillions that RAW does, means there is a distinct lack of fine detail. The final result is pixelated and blocky.

What should the images be of?

Images should convey a company that is professional, customer-friendly, trustworthy and provides a very high-quality service or product.

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