How To Ensure Judges Don't Reject My Photograph Because Of File Quality?

[Two_In]

I'd really appreciate some advice and suggestions.

I'm entering a national art/painting competition. Submission is by photograph online. How do I ensure that the submitted photograph of my painting is good enough to get through the first stage? Thousands enter these competitions and it's occurred to me this part of the process is like sifting through job applicants' CVs - where spelling mistakes, poor presentation Etc. gets a CV instantly dumped in the bin. I'd love to hear from anyone who's judged a photography competition - what do you actually see and look for at this stage?

In the past I've struggled to get my photograph down to the required MB limit - though 10MB seems more generous than usual. Is this limit a trap? It must weed out a lot of entrants who can't rescale their photograph successfully.

When I photograph my paintings I use my Nikon D3200, set to manual, x2 studio flash and tripod. Post-production: I nearly always use Photoshop - 'dust and scratches' filter - to remove 'sparkles', where the lights highlight brush marks etc. I will occasionally use the retouch tool to deal with larger 'artefacts', and I always crop the painting out from the background - I lack a good background. I generally submit in Jpeg - Baseline Optimised.

These are the requirements and info at the point of submission for this competition:

• Photo of artwork
"Choose File"
One file only.
10 MB limit.
Allowed types: gif, jpg, jpeg, png.

Other instructions are:

• "Please ensure the image you upload is of a good quality, preferably in a well-lit space with a clear background. "

 

[ecoleman]

10Mb is more than enough for a high quality, large .jpg file.

 

[Two_In]

10Mb is more than enough for a high quality, large .jpg file.

Yes but my photographs save larger than 10Mb. How do I reduce the size without messing up the image?

 

[ecoleman]

Two things to look at.

What size are you saving the image as. You probably don't need to submit a 6000px wide image. Reduce the size of the image to 2000px or 2500px which should be plenty large enough for a judge.

What compression setting are you using. JPG files can be compressed and you are usually given the option to choose the quality between 1-12

12 is the best setting but if you choose 10 you will reduce the file size quite a bit but not see any difference in quality.

Bear in mind that different software will use different compression scales so just knock it down a couple from the highest and you should be fine. So if the scale is 1-10 then save it at level 8

 

[Box Brownie]

IMO because as this is an art competition I don't think they are trying to weed out those artists without photography & photo editing skills.

You have no control over the viewing room situation e.g. all viewing done on desktop screens, projection onto screen @ 15ft away or larger on @ 50ft away.

So in regard to "Please ensure the image you upload is of a good quality, preferably in a well-lit space with a clear background. " and your other post about distortion.......have you considered taking the paintings outside and photographing it under 'light (not dark) overcast skies' to potentially overcome the distortion (more space than in your studio) and specular highlights/reflections.

Lastly, best of luck with the competition(s)