For images that you intend to post onto a web page or upload to an online photo-sharing site, the last two things you’ll want to include in your workflow are cropping the image and signing your name.  We’ll consider both tasks in this section.
    If the web site that you’re uploading your images to isn’t your own, you’ll need to find out what restrictions the site places on image sizes—both in terms of resolution (i.e., number of pixels along the x and y axes) and the file size (in kilobytes or megabytes).  For example, BirdForum.net currently limits its users to images not larger than 1024×900 pixels and file sizes no greater than 325Kb (kilobytes).  As another example, Flickr.com limits file sizes to 10Mb (megabytes) and 1024 pixels on the longest side (unless you have a “pro account”).  In many cases, if you try to upload an image that exceeds size or resolution limits, the server will automatically resize your image; this is generally a bad thing, because the automatic resizing algorithms used by these servers very often reduce image quality, so what your viewers see on the site may not look nearly as good as what you see in Photoshop.  By resizing the image yourself, you retain some control over how the image will be rendered on the web.  If, after resizing the image to particular dimensions, you notice that the bird now lacks significant detail, you have the option of cropping closer to the bird and then applying a less aggressive down-sizing, which will typically result in more subject detail.



    Recall from sections 8.1 and 10.1 that cropping can be used to as an artistic tool for re-framing the subject and thereby pursuing a more pleasing composition.  Inasmuch as the act of cropping affects the aesthetics of the image’s composition, you’ll need to balance the compositional considerations against the advantage that cropping provides when you’re facing image size constraints.  As with many things, I personally take an empirical approach to resolving this issue in my own images: when faced with sizing constraints (whether denominated in resolution or file size), I try out many different options for cropping the image, viewing each at the target size and assessing my feelings for each.  If I don’t find any of the options acceptable, I simply don’t post the image (at that venue). 
    The actual mechanics of cropping and sizing of the image are straightforward in Photoshop.  We’ve already discussed the Crop tool (section 10.1); the use of this tool is illustrated above in Figure 12.7.1.  Resizing an image in Photoshop is performed via the Image > Image Size option, which presents a dialog box with various options (see the figure below).  Here you can either specify a resolution in pixels, or a percentage of the original (e.g., 20% of the original image dimensions, applied equally to the x and y axes).  If you enter only one pixel dimension, the other will be computed for you automatically (unless you click on the chain icon, which voids the constraint on aspect ratio).  There are a number of other options in this window, but I personally ignore just about all of them.



    One particular setting in the Image Size window to be careful about is the resampling algorithm (shown at the bottom of the window in the figure above).  In the preceding example, this is shown as Bicubic; other alternatives include Nearest Neighbor, Bilinear, Bucubic Smoother, and Bicubic Sharper.  The last of these—Bicubic Sharper—is very likely to tempt you at some point, once you notice the loss of detail subsequent to resizing under the default algorithm (Bicubic).  In my experience, the Bicubic Sharper tends to introduce artifacts and in general to just be too unwieldy.  My own approach to dealing with the loss of sharpness that typically occurs under the default resizing algorithm is to apply a pre-sharpening before resizing and post-sharpening after resizing.  For the pre-sharpening, I use the Unsharp Mask with a radius of 0.3; for the post-sharpening I use a radius of 0.15 or 0.2.  In order to find the ideal settings for the Amount slider in the Unsharp Mask, I typically go through several complete iterations of trying out different settings for the Amount of both the pre-sharpening and post-sharpening.  This process may sound laborious, and the first few times you do it it may be laborious, but once you’ve got the hang of it it’s typically not very time-consuming at all.
    In terms of choosing the pixel dimensions, if you’re posting the image to your own web site you’ll generally have complete freedom to size the image as you like.  To be practical, you’ll generally want to size your web images so that they’ll easily fit within the web browser window of the typical internet user.  Doing so helps to reduce the chance that your images will end up being auto-resized by the user’s browser; these auto-resize operations typically reduce image quality, and it’s thus best to avoid them if possible.  Assuming your user has his or her internet browser maximized and is using a typical monitor of size 1440×900 or larger, the free space in the viewing pane of the browser will typically be about 1024×768 (remember that the browser has a menu bar, scroll bars, and typically a control panel with navigation controls, and these all take up real estate on the screen).  Thus, you should try to keep your images smaller than 1024×768 to reduce the incidence of auto-resize operations by the user’s browser. 


    As of mid-2010, many laptops are selling with screen sizes of 1440×900, while most stand-alone computer monitors are in excess of 1280×1024 pixels.  Keeping your images small enough to display at full size on these devices (after accounting for loss of real estate due to visual elements of the web browser) will help to improve the chances that users will see the image without any resizing artifacts introduced by their browsers.  Another thing you can do, when hosting images on your own web site, is to encapsulate each image in its own HTML file.  Some browsers will resize images when the page consists of nothing but the image itself, while images embedded within a proper HTML file will sometimes be spared any resizing.
    In terms of file size, there are a few things you can do if you find yourself exceeding the limit of some online venue.  First, you can obviously reduce the file size by further cropping the image, since cropping eliminates pixels and therefore the need to encode those pixels in the file.  Thus, when the destination site imposes both resolution and file size constraints, it’s best to first attend to the resolution constraints, and then to see if, after having reduced the resolution as needed, there is still a need to reduce the file size.  If so, you can do so via the JPEG Options dialog box in Photoshop, which will appear when you try to export a PSD or RAW file as a JPG image.  This is depicted in the figure below.


    For web images, many people use a default Quality setting of between 8 and 10, which in most cases should produce images with very reasonable file sizes.  Increasing the Quality setting to 12 often results in a very substantial increase in file size, and in many cases the difference in image quality between settings of 10, 11, or 12 won’t be apparent to casual viewers.  Unfortunately, the only way to be sure is to try saving the image at different Quality settings and comparing them on-screen after re-opening the exported JPG files. 
    The costs associated with posting larger image files on the internet are gradually decreasing, but are still worth considering at present.  Keep in mind that not all of your users may have high-speed internet access, so if you’re in the habit of posting Quality 12 images approaching 1 Mb in size, you may find that some users avoid your web site due to the slow download times of your images.  Depending on your hosting plan and the level of monthly traffic to your site, you may also want to consider the impact of posting large files on your monthly bandwidth quotas; for quality hosting plans this won’t normally be an issue unless you’ve got hundreds of thousands of viewers coming to your site every week.
    For non-web deployment of images, sizing considerations tend to be simpler, since you’ll generally want to use the highest-resolution version of a file that you’ve got; this is particularly true for print publication, where the ever-increasing capacity of print devices tends mostly to place lower bounds rather than upper bounds on practical image resolutions. 
    Now let’s consider what should, in most cases, be the very final task prior to web publication of your newest bird photo: proudly signing your name to your new masterpiece.  In Photoshop you need only invoke the Text tool, click on the image where you’d like the signature to appear, and then type your name.  It’s a good idea to also include a copyright notice, such as ©2010 before your name, if you’re concerned about unauthorized use of your images. 



    With the text tool still activated, you can click on the color indicator near the top of the screen in Photoshop to bring up the text color window (see the figure above).  I highly recommend choosing a text color that blends well with the part of the image behind your name, so that your signature is clearly decipherable upon careful inspection, but does not stand out in the image as a whole.  Viewers who want to know who the artist is will surely inspect the lower left and lower right corners of the image (where your signature should appear), while others who are uninterested in knowing who deserves credit can still enjoy the image without being distracted by a gaudy copyright sign—or, worse yet, a highly visible watermark image superimposed in large strokes over the central part of the image.  When it comes to signing my own works, I take inspiration from classical painters who signed their names discretely in some out-of-the-way part of the painting near the bottom of the canvas.  This serves the twin goals of asserting the artist’s rights while preserving the aesthetic impact and visual beauty of the overall work.