Using Digital Images: Part 3

by Jim Lengel, Boston University College of Communication

In the last two articles, you learned how to capture and then to edit digital images gleaned from cameras, scanners, and the Web. This week's article shows you how to publish and employ these images in a variety of settings, from simple reports to Flash animations.

Publishing images
By now your images have been captured, resized, edited, filtered, compressed and saved. All that's left to do is to publish the pictures so that others can see them. There re many ways to publish your images: printed on paper, as a part of written reports, as a slide show, on a Web page, in a Flash animation, or in a QuickTime movie.

Printed on paper
Teachers often print images such as maps and diagrams on paper for students to use in the classroom. Students include photos in the reports they turn in on paper. Even though we say we are moving to an online, paperless society, the realities often require us to print our works on paper. When printing your images, take a moment to get things ready.

First,, make sure you have the right kind of paper in the printer - the stiff shiny photo quality paper will produce much better results than plain printer paper. Also set the orientation of the paper - for a picture wider than it is tall, use the landscape orientation; for taller pictures, use the portrait mode. These can be set by choosing Page Setup from the File menu. Then print one copy, and see how it looks. You may want to adjust brightness or contrast again once you've seen it in print. As you learned last week, you'll get the best results with high resolution images of about 300 pixels per inch.

Embedded in a written report
The written report, built with a word processor such as Microsoft Word, is a staple of the educational enterprise. It's easy to embed your images into a Word document. First, place the cursor where you want the image to appear. Then from the menubar choose Insert - Picture - From File. Find the picture you saved earlier, and choose it. It will appear in the document. It's best to use your compressed JPEG or GIF copies, saved at 72 pixels per inch, for this purpose. The Word document with the embedded pictures can be sent through email, distributed on desk or CD-ROM, or printed on paper.

In a PowerPoint slide show
Teachers and students in many schools have learned how effective it can be to present their ideas through a slide show. Teachers illustrate their lectures with charts, diagrams, photos, and maps. Students present the findings of their research through a slide show that includes text as well as images. In a subsequent article in this series we will cover PowerPoint in more depth, but for now you can follow these guidelines to get your images ready for import into a slide show.

You should use the JPEG and GIF copies of your images at a resolution of 72 pixels per inch. On a blank slide, from the menubar choose Insert - Picture - From File. Find the picture you want to insert, and choose it. It will appear on the slide. Drag it from its middle to move it around the slide. Drag it from the corners to make it larger or smaller. You can put more than one image on a single slide. You can also set a background color for the slide by choosing Format - Background from the menubar. When complete, your slide show can contain a string of images, and can be viewed on the full screen. This PowerPoint file can also be distributed to others by email, disk, or CD-ROM.

On a Web page
More and more teachers publish their lesson materials as Web pages, even if they are used only in their own classroom. Many students are comfortable using Web page software to design their own publications. These Web pages can be distributed easily on disk, CD-ROM, over the local area network, or on the Internet. Web pages can inlcude images as well as text.

To prepare a Web page, you'll need a web-page editing program such as Microsoft FrontPage or Macromedia Dreamweaver. Place the cursor on the page where you want the image to appear. Then choose Insert - Image from the menubar, choose your JPEG or GIF image, and watch it appear on the page. For the Web, your images must have a filename with no spaces, punctuation, or special characters, and must end with the proper filename extension such as .jpg or .gif. Web pages can of course be posted to a Web server; they can also be distributed as attachments to email or on disk or CD-ROM.

In a Flash animation
Animation is no longer the province of Disney and South Park.New computer tools make it easy for students and teachers to produce animations that illustrate important concepts from their students, from moving diagrams in science to stpryboards in literature. The images that you have collected and edited can easily be turned into animations.

Macromedia Flash is the best way to present animated sequences on the Web. You can also prepare animations with Macromedia Fireworks. In Flash, choose File - Import to place your images directly onto the Flash stage. You can also copy and paste images into Flash. Macromedia Flash can easily move, dissolve, fade, and present images in an interesting sequence, accompanied by narration or music. Flash takes some time to learn, but you can find tutorials at the Macromedia Web site at http://www.macromedia.com.

In a QuickTime slide show
PowerPoint isn't the only way to prepare a slide show. If all your images are about the same size, you can very quickly arrange them into a slide show that will play on any computer and can be sent over the Internet. This is especially effective for photographic images that tell a story.

To create a QuickTime slide show,you'll need the QuickTime Player Pro software that you can download from the QuickTime web site at http://www.apple.com/quicktime. Place a copy of the images for the slide show into a single folder on your hard drive. Rename the images in the order you want them to appear, such as picture1.jpg, picture2.jpg, picture3.jpg, and so forth. Open QuickTime player. From the File menu, choose Open Image Sequence. Then go to the folder with the numbered images. Choose the first image in the series. Set the Frame rate to 2 seconds per frame. This will create a QuickTime movie that is a slide show of your images. This slide show can be shown from your computer, or distributed on disk or CD-ROM, or attached to an email, or embedded in a Web page.

These aren't the only ways to publish your digital images -if you have an Apple iBook, you can use the iPhoto application to organize and publish your images into a book, slide show, or Web site with a few clicks of the mouse. You can assemble your images into a digital video, using software such as Adobe Premiere, iMovie, or Final Cut Express, with dissolves between the pictures and accompanied by music and narration. Instead of PowerPoint, you can build a sequence of slides with HyperStudio or Keynote. You can also simply attach your image files to an email and send them to others. You may also copy all your images to a CD-ROM and distribute them as needed. The possibilities are many, as you find ways to imporove teachiong and learning through the power of images.