Obtaining and Editing Pictures for Tree of Life Pages

On this page, you will find information about

Getting images into the computer

Sending slides for us to scan

Editing electronic images
Getting help in finding and obtaining images

If you would like to use illustrations that have previously been published or that were produced by other people, please also see the page about copyright issues.

Getting images into the computer

The first step in adding images to Tree of Life pages is getting them in electronic form into the computer. This can be done in several ways:

• acquire electronic images directly with a digital camera.
• take photographic prints or slides, which can then be scanned using a flatbed scanner (for prints) or slide scanner. Scanners are widely available. Currently, there are also resources available at the home of the ToL to scan images from slides; see the section on Sending slides for us to scan.

Sending slides for us to scan

If you want us to scan slides or prints for you, please contact us. Please prepare any slides to send in the following way:

• Send the slides in plastic slide sheets, with cardboard and other protection around them that we can reuse to send them back to you.
• Place prominent, numbered labels on each of the slides.
• Include a written list, with a caption for each slide written beside the number for that slide.
• If you wish to have only a portion of the slide scanned, then indicate this by little pencil marks along the edges of the slide. For example, in the following slide, only the little blue ball would be scanned:

  

  If you do not mark the slide in this way, then the entire slide will be scanned.

Editing electronic images

Once your images are in electronic form, you will need to edit them to prepare them for your web pages. In particular, you might need to change the size of the images, increase their contrast and color saturation, remove any dust specks, etc. If you do not have much experience in the manipulation of electronic images, we will be happy to help. Just send the scans of your images to treegrow@ag.arizona.edu along with information on how each image will be used; e.g., will it be a title image, will it be used in a text section or on an accessory page?

Below are some recommended procedures for those of you who want to edit their pictures themselves. We recommend saving several copies of each picture during the different stages of image processing. The details of how the different steps are achieved will vary with the image editing software you use.

1. Save a back-up copy of the original, scanned image so that you can always go to back to that if needed.
2. If necessary, rotate and flip the image so that it is in the appropriate orientation.
3. Crop the image to eliminate scanned edges and any unwanted content.
4. Remove any flaws in the image. This might include removing dust specks or distracting objects visible in the background.
5. Adjust brightness, contrast, and color saturation on your image.
6. Save the edited image. This will be your back-up copy of the processed, original-size image. In order to preserve the original image quality, do not use a compressed file format (JPEG or GIF) to save your file at this point, just use the regular format for your software (e.g. Photoshop format).
7. The next step is to resize and sharpen the image. There are two different ways of doing this, and which works best will depend upon the specifics of your image: either resize your image, THEN sharpen it, or sharpen it, and THEN resize it. We suggest that you try both, and choose the best final product.
   • If the picture is for a title graphic (the pictures at the top of the page under the title), we recommend that you choose a standard height for your images, so that all title graphics for a page are of the same height (if they will appear side-by-side on the page), as discussed on the page about Title Illustrations.
   • Be careful not to oversharpen your image, and do not sharpen your image more than once. Ideally, sharpening should be one of the last things you do, as information is lost from an image upon sharpening.
8. Save a copy of the resized and sharpened image.
9. Now you need to save a copy of the image in a compressed format that can be published on your ToL page. Please use only lower-case letters in the names of these files.
   • Photographs should always be saved in JPEG format. Since the quality of your image will deteriorate each time you save it as a JPEG file, it is best to make all changes in the original file and to then use JPEG only for the final version that is to be published.
   • For line art, drawings, and diagrams that do not contain subtle color gradients, the GIF format often gives you better results than JPEG.

At the end of this procedure you should have four different files:

• the original scanned image
• the rotated and edited image
• the shrunk and sharpened image
• the JPEG or GIF version of the image for publication on the web

We recommend that you save copies of the image at the different steps outlined above, so that it is easier for you to produce additional images from the same original scan. For example, you may need another copy that is larger or smaller than the one you created before.

Getting help in finding and obtaining images

Authors who do not have access to high quality images to illustrate their Tree of Life page can request assistance from us. We are in contact with several photographers who may have suitable images on hand, and we can help authors to locate additional resources.

If you want to illustrate the geographic distribution of your group, you can download the ToL World Base Map. This is a simple basemap that you may use for your Tree of Life pages. The map is featured on several of the beetle pages, for example, that for the Bembidion (Bracteon)

In conjunction with the new Tree of Life database, we are also developing a ToL-Image database. Along with those illustrations that are already featured on ToL pages, this database will contain a collection of additional images that have been offered to the ToL by various artists/photographers.