Ultimate Auction Resource - Images, Imaging, and Image Hosting

Image IS everything. No matter how eloquent you write your auction descriptions, no matter how detailed and accurate you are, when it comes to selling your items nothing will ever do more for you than a good item image. You don't need to be a graphic artist or computer whiz to create excellent quality images either!

There are many ways you can create images of your auction items. Not all of the methods however, will give you good quality. Some of the most popular methods also yield some of the worst quality and most expensive results. While many of the easiest and most effective methods are surprisingly affordable. How do you know where to start, and what method is best for you? Read on as we explore some of the various techniques available.

Scanning a Polaroid Picture
This popular technique is perhaps the least effective and most expensive method and routinely yields the worst results. First off, using a Polaroid camera is expensive - about $1.00 per picture just for the film. Secondly, Polaroid pictures are notoriously fuzzy and poorly lit. Most people count on the built in flash plus any ambient room light to be sufficient. It isn't. Not by a long shot! Polaroid pictures will look brighter if you use sufficient additional lighting, but image sharpness is always a problem because most Polaroids use a fixed focus lens. Lastly, most Polaroid cameras can not be mounted on a tripod which is really important in getting crisp, sharp images.

Many people mistakenly think that after they scan their Polaroid picture into the computer, they can magically improve the image. While it is true you make some improvements, no computer program can make a poor quality image, excellent.

Home Video Cameras and Video Capture Devices
This is a common solution, and possibly the most affordable alternative when you include the fact that the video camera will be used for all sorts of home and family activities. Heck, you may already own the camera! If you do own a video camera, great, you're 80% there! If you don't have one yet, any will work. Choose the best one you can afford with the features that are important to you.

Digital video cameras, while a bit more expensive, can take digital still snap shots as well, and can make an outstanding dual purpose solution without having to buy a video capture card.

There are many types of video capture cards and devices, and they typically range in price from about $79 to $250 for most consumer level devices. If you use a conventional, analog video camera however (95% of what's being used today), you will need a video capture card that plugs into an expansion slot inside of your computer. Don't freak out, it's easy and many stores will install and configure it for you at little or no cost! There are also external devices like the popular Grab-It, or Snappy, that simply plug into the printer port on the back of your computer.

Poor quality equipment used in conjunction with good lighting and a camera tripod, will consistently outperform high quality equipment used with poor lighting and no tripod.

Shooting Studio Quality Images on a Dorm Room Budget
How many grainy, fuzzy, dark images have you seen on eBay? Most of those images could have been dramatically improved with some simple lighting and a camera tripod. Set up your digital camera, or your video camera and computer with video capture device, in a place where you will have an open surface of at least 4'x4' to place your auction items on. Kitchen or dining room tables work great. Next, get four aluminum reflector, clamp-on work light fixtures. These are cheap - about $5.00 each and found at most hardware stores. Be sure to buy the larger 10" diameter reflectors. It also helps if you can pick out the smoothest, shiniest, most reflective ones. Now buy four 250 watt, soft white reader bulbs (about $3.00 each and also available at most hardware stores). Dust out the inside of the reflectors, screw in the 250 watt bulbs, and clamp each fixture within three to six feet of each side of your table - left, right, front and back. It's best if the lights are above the table surface by a few feet, and you may have to get inventive as to what to clamp the lights to! (Chair backs work great.)

With everything safely arranged, plug the lights in. It's really convenient to be able to turn on and off all the lights at once, using one switch. That's easy too! Use a grounded multiple outlet box, and a few heavy duty extension cords (remember, you're using high wattage bulbs). Plug all the lights into the outlet box, and plug the box into a grounded wall outlet that has nothing else plugged into it - remember, your little studio here draws 1000 watts of juice! If you live in an older building with questionable wiring, you will want to split this into two boxes, plugged into separate circuits so you don't blow a fuse! Now, when you flip the switch on the outlet box, Pow!!! All the lights work at once and you can feel the instant heat! Flip them off. Whew!!! Cooler now. Aren't you glad you hooked them up with one switch?

Now lets set up the table. Cover your table with white paper or a doubled up white bed sheet. You want the surface to be absolutely WHITE and with no texture other than a flat, non glossy surface. Now make a white background with the same or similar surface. White poster board, curled and propped up in the back, but NOT CREASED in the middle. Now, place your item in front of the background by about an inch or two.

A tripod is absolutely necessary if you want to get crisp, sharp images. Tripods can range in price from $25 for a cheap, wobbly, department store model, to a couple hundred dollars for a high quality, heavy duty model. If you do much photography or video taping at all, a quality tripod is a very worthwhile investment that will serve you well for probably your entire lifetime! Excellent quality, medium duty tripods are available from better photographic dealers for about $150.00, including a head. A head is what the camera attaches to on the tripod, and how you position the camera. We found a quality, Bogen tripod with a fluid-cam head on sale for $99.00 several years ago. It's as stable as a rock, but still rather light weight. Using it consistently has improved our image quality dramatically. Today we don't shoot without it. Period.

Mount your camera on your tripod and place it directly in front of the table, positioning the legs so you can get the camera as close as possible. Adjust the camera height so it is only a few inches above the item vertically. Aim and focus your camera's view on it. Try to zoom in just enough that there is only a small gap between the item and the edge of the image view frame.

If your camera has a macro or close up mode, you may need to use it. Macro mode can do wonders for a nice close up, but watch your depth of field - (the area actually in focus) areas outside the narrow focus zone will be very blurry. If you use a standard video camera, be sure to "white balance" the camera against the white background, BEFORE focusing on your item. See your camera's owners manual for instructions on white balancing. Once the camera is correctly white balanced, the colors will be more accurate and the image is less likely to have off hues so common with video digitized shots.

Also, be sure to do "live video capture". What this means is that you are NOT recording the image to video tape, playing it back and then capturing. Rather, you have the camera in standby mode and you can see the live video picture on your computer monitor. When you have the composition you want, you click the capture button in your video capture software to take the picture. Capturing live may be more work if you have to move your computer around, but the superior images are well worth the extra effort - they'll be cleaner, sharper, have better color, and be much less grainy.

Digital Cameras
While a home video camera and inexpensive capture card are affordable and do give fair results, to be honest, the results can be disappointing if you really want great, sharp shots. The reason is video cameras are a low resolution device. Resolution is the number of tiny dots that make up an image. The basic rule is: The more dots, the more detailed the image. Most capture cards create a 640x480 sized image at 72 dots per inch. Here's where a digital camera or flat bed scanner can really improve upon.

Digital cameras are great because they're highly portable and are small enough that they can be set up on a small table-top tripod. Digital cameras generally take far superior images to most consumer video capture cards. We say most, because some low end and even some name brand mid-line cameras take horrible shots. Look for a camera that boasts at least one-million pixels, two to three million pixels is even better! The maximum picture size should be at least 1024x768 pixels. Also very helpful is a Through The Lens (TTL), view finder. This is similar to most 35mm cameras, where you are aiming through the same lens as the camera takes the picture with. This makes framing and focusing and MUCH easier and more accurate.

The camera's lens quality is very import too. Many, if not most consumer level digital cameras use inferior, plastic lenses. Make sure you buy a camera that uses a multi-element all glass lens. Many will boast that they are fully corrected and multi-coated too - that's good. A corrected lens will be sharp all the way to the edges, and multi-coatings aid in extra light transmission getting to the CCD chip - the device inside the camera that captures the image. Olympus, Sony, Kodak, and Nikon all make excellent digital cameras.

When buying a digital camera, watch out for cameras that boast gee-whiz bells and whistles, but do nothing for image quality. Audio capture may sound cool, but will do nothing to improve your image quality. Ask yourself: When the manufacturer added on this neat feature, what did they skimp on the imaging ability? There's only so many features a manufacturer can afford to put into a sub $500 digital camera. Don't you want it all focused on taking better quality images? Remember this one bit of advice, and you can't go wrong:

Flat Bed Scanners
Lastly, there's the flat bed scanner. You didn't know that you could scan something other than paper did you? Surprise! Many scanners produced today can fucus accurately on flatter three dimensional objects, up to about an inch or so deep. You can do much more than just scan photos, you can scan many items themselves, for incredibly detailed, professional quality images.

Some of the most popular auctioned items are perfect for scanning. You guessed it - jewelry! A good flat bed scan can show much more detail than almost any other type of imaging device. Other items suited well to scanning include: Books, knives, letter openers, silverware, match book covers, small hand tools, many advertising items including just about all paper items and flat tins, stamps, coins, and virtually any flat package cover.

When buying a flat bed scanner, our advice is buy the best you can afford. Make sure it is capable of limited three dimensional work, many aren't. Also make sure that its bed (the scanning area) is at least 8 1/2" by 11", and it can scan at a minimum of 600 DPI (Dots Per Inch) non-interpolated. Interpolation is a software technique of synthetically adding more dots to the resolution rather than the device itself actually capturing them. Interpolation does not render as sharp or detailed an image, and is a common trick to seemingly increase the performance and specs of a scanner without adding to it's manufacturing cost.

Finally, make sure it is capable of 36 bit imaging which yields much higher color fidelity. A 36 bit image can have up to 68 billion (Yes, you read it right, that's BILLION with a B) colors, while a 24 bit image (the norm just two years ago, and still used on less expensive scanners) has only 16.8 million colors. Agfa, Epson, Hewlett Packard, and Umax all make excellent quality and affordable scanners in their mid-line and high-end levels. Be sure to stay away from the bottom levels, usually priced cheaply in the less than $150.00 range. These low end scanners routinely yield disappointing results, frequently with some combination of darker, fuzzier images, and/or poor color matching and fidelity.

Scan your items at between 150 and 300 DPI, and magnify the scan to at least 200% so that the resulting image file size is at least three megabytes large. Larger items will require scans in the 8 to 12 megabyte range. You want a sufficiently large file so that it contains lots of detailed image information. Smaller files won't provide enough information we need, and any larger a file and you begin to have diminishing returns - plus you'll need a supercomputer to manipulate the huge files! Don't worry, your going to scale the image size down dramatically during image processing.

Image Processing
The last thing to creating great images, is image processing. Image processing is the art of taking your raw source image, shrinking it to size for the Web, doing any image enhancing, and saving the image in a Web compatible image file type. It is necessary on all images regardless of how they were acquired, and will greatly improve your image quality and download performance on your auction pages. If you have an image processing program already (many scanners, capture cards and digital cameras come with processing software) you're ready to start. If not, try one of the programs listed below such as Paint Shop Pro - a shareware program which rivals $500 giants like Photoshop!

Most people surfing the web (just like the real world) are impatient. They want the picture to appear instantly on their monitors, but as we all know, this just isn't the case on the Web. But hold on. You can make your images appear (download) much faster, and keep the image quality high too!

The first thing you want to do scale the image size. Make sure the DPI is set or reduced to 72 DPI. Now, with the image length and width measuring in pixels, scale the image size down by typing in a new length and width more appropriate for using on the Web. Look at the larger of the two dimensions. Height or width should almost never be more than 600 pixels - and that's for a HUGE web image, where you really need to show off the item, or it is very narrow (100 to 125 pixels) in the opposing dimension.

A good sized image is typically around 400x300. Try not to go below about 100 pixels in either dimension as the item in the image will be hard to see. A good trick to calculating a reasonable image size, is to add together the length and width numbers in pixels. Try to keep to total no larger than 600 to 700 total, such as 400x300 or 250x350, etc., and try not to go below about 300 total, such as 200x100 or 135x175. Keep in mind however, an image can be any combination in its dimensions, and the sizes given above are merely examples.

Now, if the image is a bit too light or dark, correct it using brightness and contrast. If is a bit soft or out of focus, many editing programs have a sharpen function. Use only the editing tools that actually improve the image. Your goal is to display your items as accurately as possible in both color and condition. As soon as your image looks exactly like the real item, you're done editing. Editing out any kind of damage, or enhancing the items appearance in the item's picture is misleading and dishonest - leave that to the weekly tabloids!

Saving Images for the Web
Now it's time to save the images in a compatible file format for the Web. The preferred image format is called a JPEG or .JPG (pronounced Jay-Peg) JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group, and is the standard on the Internet for displaying true color images in 16.8 million colors. There is also the .GIF file format, but images saved as a .GIF have only 256 colors and lack the fidelity to show off much high detail.

In addition to displaying in true color, .JPG images have the ability to be saved in different compression ratios. Without getting too technical into the heavy math involved, compression simply shrinks the images file size: the space it takes up in memory and on your hard drive when it's stored. File size directly corresponds to download time: big file - long download time, little file - short download time. Compression can take an image of one file size, (not to be confused with image dimensions) let's say 400K, which would take about two or three minutes to download, and shrink the file size down to about 20K, where it takes only a few seconds to download! Now the bad news - compression takes away some image quality. The more compressed an image is, the lower the quality will be, but the faster it will download. The less compressed an image is, the higher the quality will be, but the longer it takes to download.

The cool part about saving .JPG files is that most image editing programs allow you to choose how much compression to use. Typically you will want to use a medium level of compression. It's a balancing act between quality, and file size, but a nice happy medium usually works very well, rendering files no larger than about 50K - small enough to be downloaded in about 10 seconds.

Web Servers, Image Hosting, FTP and You!
OK, you now have a collection of excellent quality images you created, processed, scaled, and saved just for the Web. Now what? It's time to put your image files in a place on the Internet where the world can see them. This is usually on your Internet Service Provider's (ISP) computer system, called a Web Server. Web servers have a 24 hour a day high speed connection, direct to the Internet and are what "serve" out the web pages you look at. In order for people to be able to see your item images, you must upload them using special FTP software to a Web server, so they can be served each time someone looks at one of your auctions.

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. It is a special TOOL called a protocol, used exclusively for moving files onto and off of (uploading and downloading) the Internet. A protocol is simply a standard language that other programs that use the same protocol can understand. Just like English, German and Spanish, etc., there are many, many types of different protocols, each designed for a specific purpose. In our case, we will use a FILE TRANSFER protocol - FTP.

Virtually all web pages are uploaded, published, posted, or simply FTPed" to the Internet. Files are moved via FTP, or a special program script written into an advanced corporate web site, or by copying the HTML files directly to the Web server computer from another computer connected via a local area network (not the Internet) within the companies facility (typically employees of the ISP).

Many HTML editing programs, such as Microsoft Front Page, include built in FTP capabilities and may refer to the process by some other name or term. Regardless, you're still FTPing, and most of the rules and info required to make it work are the same.

If your HTML editing program does not include FTP capabilities, a separate FTP program MUST BE USED. Yes, there are other methods of getting files and images onto the Internet, but at the low end (for us consumers) there is no other way to transfer files via the Internet to your ISP's web server.

FTP programs are simple to use, but confusing to get set up the first time. The whole key to FTP is having the correct address to your web space that your ISP has set aside for your account. That is where we are unable to help you. Your ISP must provide you with this info. FTP programs usually ask for the following information in order to make a connection to your web space: The FTP address - typically, the address will be something like: ftp.aol.com or ftp.your-isp's-name.com) Then it needs your user log-in name and password, which you should already know since it's usually the same as for connecting to your ISP for surfing the Web. Then the FTP program needs to know the remote location (where on your ISP's web server computer) for your files. For many people it will look like: /~your-user-name/www. (The forward slash, AND the squiggly line - called a tilde - DO need to be typed in exactly as shown.) Finally, FTP programs need to know the location on your personal computer, of the files you want to transfer, which only you would know, since they are the files you have created. Once you have established the connection, you can transfer your files over.

To FTP, we recommend an excellent Windows shareware program called CuteFTP. CuteFTP is simple to use, and works extremely well. In CuteFTP, you have a split screen window. On one half if the screen are the files on your own personal computer, the other half of the screen is the view of files (initially there won't be any files since you have put any there yet) on your ISP's web server computer, for your web site/space. To upload your images (or HTML files) you created earlier, you would locate those files on your hard drive on the one side of the screen, then select the files you want uploaded, click and drag them over to the other side of the screen. CuteFTP then takes over, by conducting the transfer, which takes a few minutes. The active transfer status is continually shown and updated on the screen while the upload is happening, so you always know what is going on. When it's done, CuteFTP tells you so, and you'll see the files you copied on the IPS's screen side - your new auction pictures!

When you are uploading auction images, all you need to know after they have been successfully transferred to your web space, is their EXACT NAME and LOCATION on the Internet. This would typically be something like: http://www.your-isp.com/~your-user-name/your-pictures-name.jpg (or .gif, if your created GIF images instead).

Think of an Internet address as just like your home's street address (and email addresses are like phone numbers). If you invite someone to come to your home who has never been there before, you have to give them directions - your cities name, street name, and home's street address. The same is true on the Internet. Web pages and images do not just automatically pop up on the screen. Your web browser has to be told EXACTLY what city to go to (the ISP), what street to go to (your user name), and what page or image to load (the home's street address number). Once the web browser has this info, it will go to the location you have specified and try to load what you have asked for. If the file is there, great! If not, you will get a 404 error - file not found. Frequently 404 errors are caused by the incorrect address. If you give your visiting friend the wrong street name, or wrong house number, they won't be able to find your home. The same is true on the Internet - you MUST provide a 100% correct address or the image won't load. Period. Computers are EXTREMELY STRICT this way.

When you start a new auction on eBay, the auction form will ask you for an image location or address. This is the exact location where you uploaded your images to (using FTP). It will be an address just like we mentioned above, such as: http://www.your-isp's-name.com/~your-user-name/your-pictures-file-name.jpg (or .gif)

When you preview your auction, your images should come up in your browser - provided of course you did everything correctly. If not, don't freak out! Check the image's address you typed in first - it's easy to make a mistake typing in a long web address. Then make sure you actually FTPed the image over to your web space.

We hope this all makes sense (there's a lot of info to swallow here!) FTP is probably the most difficult step and most misunderstood. If you still have problems, don't despair, almost everyone has problems with FTP the first time around. We would suggest finding a friend or someone knowledgeable to help you first hand. Try to find someone who will sit down with you at your computer, and walk you through the steps. Once you've done it a couple times, it gets easy - just like driving a car - the first couple times can be rather hair raising!

If your ISP does not provide Web page space with your Internet account, you will need to find an Image Hosting service. Many image hosting companies will give you free web space to store your images on, in exchange for making your customers see some external advertisements at the same time they view your images. They're not a bad deal if you need the space. Other image hosting companies are full service, providing scanning, image processing and hosting for about $1.00 to $5.00 an image.

Now, you have auctions running complete with studio quality images. In fact, they look better than 90% of all the others you've seen! Sit back, have fun, and watch as your auctions make more money than ever - outperforming similar items - now that your customers can really see what they're bidding on!

The links below will help you learn more about imaging and image editing, you can download several excellent, professional quality image editing and FTP programs, plus there are links to image hosting, video capture card, and digital camera companies!

Created by Tom & Sarah Bardenwerper - werper@execpc.com
Auction Junkies Just Like You!
"It's the thrill of the hunt, the excitement of the sale!"

If you like this site, maybe you'd like to
View Our Current Auctions
Your Your Bids are Always Welcome - THANK YOU!

Gotta question? Have a comment or request? Email us!!

Image Editing Programs
Paint Shop Pro This shareware program is so complete, and has so many professional features, it give big guns like Photoshop a run for their money! Paintshop Pro is so outstanding, you may never need another image editing program!

MGI Photosuite Another good paint program for manipulating your photos.

Adobe Photodeluxe Good photo editing program.

Ulead Has several graphics programs for editing photos.

Corel Photopaint Another good photo editing program.

IXLA Camera Suite Another good photo editing program.

Microsoft Image Composer A nice program for creating Web images and graphics.

FTP Programs
CuteFTP Our favorite FTP program for getting your files and images to your site.

WS_FTP Another very good FTP program with some excellent features for more advanced users.

Other Great Imaging Help Sites
Pongo's Tutorials A great site for help with pictures, and making your first web page.

Twaze's AOL Picture Help A great site to help you load your pictures on "My Place" at AOL.

Image Hosting Companies
PA Publishing Image hosting

SSI Image Hosting

MyItem.Com Image hosting.

Video Capture Devices and Digital Cameras
AITech International Maker of PC to TV conversion/scan converters and video capture cards.

Coreco Manufacturer of PC based frame grabbers, image processing and DSP hardware products.

Digivision, Inc. Real-time video enhancement products adaptively process (at true video frame rates) video images to provide increased apparent resolution, more clarity and detail.

Dipix Digital imaging technology ranging from frame grabber and image processing boards for PCs to large end-users system solutions servicing various industries.

High Res Technologies Inc. Manufacturers of video frame grabbers & multimedia hardware for PCs.

Motion Picture High quality low cost image capture system for all PCs.

Quantum Leap Software Ltd Makers of the SnapMagic frame grabber and Falcon PCI video capture products.

Ronald A. Massa Associates Offers custom vision systems, frame grabbers, image processing, and CCD cameras.

Truevision

Willow Peripherals VGA to video, video capture, frame grabbing and scan conversion products.

Astron Systems Manufactures and distributes lighting systems for digital imaging, featuring the Orbiculight.

Canon Powershot

Casio Digital Cameras

DataPhoto Customizable digital image database software to organize images from your scanner or digital camera.

Dycam Digital Cameras

Electrim Provides digital camera systems for use with IBM-PC compatible computers. Both color and monochrome versions are available.

Fuji Electronic Imaging

Hasselblad Manufacturer of medium format cameras. Site includes dealer/service/rental info., history, products, etc..

Hewlett Packard PC Photography

HP PhotoSmart Digital Photography Product line includes a digital camera, photo scanner, and photo printer.

Kodak Digital Cameras

Kodak Digital Photography

Konica Q Series

Lexar Media Makers of CompactFlash, SmartMedia, and connectivity products for high-speed transfer of photo files from a digital camera to a PC.

MegaSource Provider and wholesaler for low cost digital cameras and related peripherals and electronics.

MegaVision Filmless Photography Produces professional high-resolution digital camera systems.

Adam's Olympus D-500L Page

Al's Olympus D-600L Page Includes a FAQ.

Olympus D-320L Includes specs, FAQ, sample images, and review.

Olympus Digital Vision

Panasonic PalmCam

Polaroid Digital Cameras

Samsung Camera

Sanyo

Sharp LCD

Eric's Sony Mavica FD7 Page

MAV! Magazine

ProductInfo.Net Information for the Mavica line.

Sony Digital Mavica Saves its images on ordinary floppy disks.

StarDot Technologies Makers of the WinCam.

Storm Technology Makers of EasyPhoto scanners and software.

UMAX Multimedia

Vivitar Vivicam

Disclaimer:
eBay is a registered trademark of eBay Inc.
The content of this site is not endorsed by eBay and the views expressed on this site are solely that of the authors and are no reflection, either expressed or implied, of the opinions of eBay Inc. We do not accept responsibility for any of the content or views of any externally linked sites. Comments about the links provided are for your convenience, and do not constitute our endorsement of the content of any of the external sites.

Ultimate Auction Resource
Copyright © 1999-2001
Werper Digital Media Productions
All Rights Reserved.