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Our Photo Standards

I believe that everyone can take a good photograph and you don't have to be a goddess, like Rita Hayworth here, to look great on TGForum.

We don't impose a lot of rules on photographs, but we do have standards and recommendations.

Photo Sizes and Types

I like to work with photos that are 150 dpi to 200 dpi. I can work with higher resolutions, but practically speaking anything above 300 dpi is going to be way too big to email unless it's teeny. Forget 72 dpi. This is just too soft for people with 256 color monitors.

Don't understand DPI? That's OK, just assume that the largest photo I want is about half the width of your screen. I can always shrink a picture down. Increasing its size is a problem.

Keep the total file size under one megabyte! We don't publish anything here, including pictorials, that are more than 250K. You might keep that in mind when looking at the size of your photo.

I also appreciate it if people send standard JPEGs, not progressive JPEGs! Second choice is a GIF file. BMPs and TIFs are acceptable, but they tend to be huge files that cause problems in transmission and are best left to non-web uses...I can take them though.

Appearance Standards

TG Forum will publish anyone's photo, within good taste guidelines, if they are part of this community. But though it rarely happens, some pictures are rejected

Reasons for rejection:

    1. Photo is too small. A photo here must be large enough to crop into a decent headshot thumbnail. We use thumbnails as a way to both save download time and show people who is in the main part of a photo. Our thumbnails are 110X130 pixels. Always.

    If I have to increase the size of a picture more than 20% for a headshot large enough for a thumbnail it usually gets way to blurry to use.

    2. Photo is blurry or dark. I'd say that 90% of the time this is a problem caused by the use of digital cameras, or worse, video captures. I can't do a thing with a blurry photo. Digital cameras are improving dramatically, but the inexpensive ones simply don't do the job right now. Dark photos and those with poor contrast are among the hardest of all to repair. So they're rejected.

Things I don't reject, but I don't like much either:

    1. Cluttered backgrounds. Keep the cool shot of your clothes collection in your private records. I want a plain background.

    2. Snaps with friends. I love party and friend shots, but NOT for a Photo Op or Personal ad. These are PERSONAL, not GROUP pictures. Send a solo shot.

    3. Lingerie shots. No matter how well done, Photo Opportunity and Personal Ads are NOT the place for underwear photos. These area are basically permanent archives. Save the lingerie pictures for the Lingerie Pictorial in April.

    4. Unsmiling pictures. Sure, I'll run them, but why on Earth anyone would want to "come out" to tens of thousands of people with a grim visage is beyond me. This is a PLEASURABLE moment, at least I hope it is!

If you have any questions, just drop me a line...

Cindy Martin
Publisher
TG Forum
cindy@tgforum.com

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