Creating a Bio PhotoIt is crucial to pay attention to your portrait, it some shape or form it defines what type of person you are. Its been said dont judge a book by its cover but in the industry of media, aesthetics is quite important, and to present yourself professional manner. A simple well-shot portrait could, catch the eye of a potential employer.

There are a variety of ways that you could photograph yourself. You could easily use the front facing camera of your phone, but this should really avoided as most front facing camera have relatively low resolution and quality compared to the back camera. Take for an example the iPhone 6 back camera has an 8 MP with a maximum resolution of 3264 x 2448 pixels, compared to the front facing camera, which has only a meager 1.8 MP. To get the best photo, I would recommend using the back camera to get the best photo.

There are also choices in the file format, you want to save your photo into for the web. For example JPEG, PNG, and DNG. JPEG is the most used file format for most photograph, it delivers good quality images with just enough compression to reduce the size of the file. The basic rule with file formats of photographs is the more you compress the file, the less information it will have resulting in lower quality photographs. PNG is the uncompressed file format for photographs; they have a better image quality, which results to a larger file size. DNG or Digital Negative Format is the highest file format your photo could be saved in, it is also known as a raw file and the file format extension for each brand differs for example Nikon uses .NEF, whilst Canon uses .CR2. DNG allows better manipulation during editing compared to the previously mentioned file formats. This makes it the best format to photograph in. the only downside to it is the ridiculously large file size, not to mention most browsers, websites does not support this format for viewing. DNG files are normally exported to JPEG or PNG depending how much quality you want for your photo.

Here is a DNG file opened in Photoshop, as you can see it has numerous settings that could be tweaked to achieve your desired look. It also shows the metadata of the lens, ISO, F/Stop, and Shutter Speed.

As you can see from a few simple tweaks, the image has already vastly improved. The previous image was too dark and seemed to give a moody feel to it. It was also heavily red saturated, which changed the skin tone, and by turning down the vibrance and saturation it revealed a more natural skin tone. Another tweak that was used is Shadows, as you can see the face was partially obscured by the shadow, and by removing a bit of it revealed few details that was covered in darkness.

There are plenty of negative spaces in this photograph, which really dont have any relevant information. Using the crop tool you can remove these negative spaces. You must remember to not crop too close, allow your photo to have space, otherwise it would feel too cluttered.

The background of the photo, is quite bland and theres a mixture of different shades of colour. Using the selection tool and highlighting the background you could change it to whatever you please. It is advised to use the refine tool after youve selected anything at all; this tool allows you to refine your selection such as smoothing, feather etc.

After the refinement, another layer of the background was created, this allows you edit the without any distraction and without ruining the original image. The color balance tool is being used to change to colour of the background to a more greenish tone, this was done to make the headshot contrast well against the background using complimentary colours. The face has a red tone to it and contrasting against green the color opposite of the color wheel to make it stand out.

Now its time to save it, normally many users, would just use save as, but for this it would be recommended to use save for web instead which offers more concise options when saving your final product. For this photo it is being saved as a JPEG first in its original image size. Having a backup full size photo of your image is crucial just in case you need to do further refinements at a later date. As you can see this is the right size for web. It is only 826 kb, which is almost nothing to our current network speeds. It is important to consider the size of your images, because some website host have size restrictions and the download speed of some devices are not very fast, which could potentially irritate your audiences if your images are slow to appear on the page.

For the actual image that is being uploaded to the web, it is being saved at PNG, which is has a better image quality than JPEG, other images could be saved as JPEG instead, but this is your bio photo, a high quality image is needed to present yourself professionally. Its also been resized to 500 x 535 pixels, which is a good size for Facebook and Twitter. As you can see below, Facebook recommended size is only 160 x 160. Sometimes it is better to go over the recommended size for sites such as Facebook, because users often to like to see an image in its full size.

Upon uploading, as you can see here the box feels harsh on the eyes, its vivid iridescent green background contrast well against the plain white background. A quick solution that could be done is cropping the photo and exporting it as a circle instead. Using the elliptical marquee tool, then right clicking and select inverse, which selects everything outside marquee instead of inside, and then press delete. Once again export it through save for web, however instead of exporting it as a JPEG, it will be needed to be exported as a PNG, to keep the negative space outside the circle transparent (JPEG does not support transparency)

When designing your website, it is important to put as much effort into your bio photo as you would do with your materials, because your bio photo is an online representation of yourself, if its a poor quality, your audiences would assume that you could be technologically handicapped and youre not a professional.

Reference:

GSM Arena. 2015. iPhone 6 Specification. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.gsmarena.com/apple_iphone_6-6378.php. [Accessed 01 May 15].