Making the Media Function Work for You Use the Media function in WorkingArtist to keep track of artwork images that are bundled onto a particular media, such as a CD, a diskette, or a video. You can also use the Media function to track a catalog of your work or a set of slides. If you have a set of slides that you want to send to more than one person, then create a Media record for it and select (or create) a Media Type called "Slide Set."

Creating Image Files

Many people ask me how to create image files of their work. There are several ways. You can scan photographs or original artwork if it is flat. You can scan slides if your scanner has the attachment for doing that. Kinkos has scanners that you pay for by the hour but the one in my town does not scan slides. You can take slides of your artwork and send them out to Kodak to put onto CD. This is probably the cheapest way of getting your slides into digital images. You may be able to find a photo developer that will create image files directly from your film. You can find a local image technician who will scan your slides.

There are a couple of things to remember. If you want to print your images (separately from the database) the quality of the printed image will depend on having a high resolution image. My technical person has created tif images for me that are 900 dpi. However, these large image files are not good to put into a computer database. First of all, the screen resolution is only 72 dpi. An image that is 900 dpi might be as much as 11,000 kb. This size image will not fit into WorkingArtist. It is simply to large to display in the frame. Even if there were a zoom feature, which there will be in a future upgrade of WorkingArtist, an image this size would take forever to load.

It seems to me that to have the best of both worlds, one solution is to create your original image files in a high resolution (so you can print them), and then use image editing software to resize them down for WorkingArtist (or other database applications). You would, of course, want to keep a copy of the original image. If you are going to be dealing with images, it makes sense to have software that can edit and resize your images.

The industry standard image editing application seems to be Adobe Photoshop www.adobe.com. However, this is a fairly expensive application. If you want to do complex editing it is probably worth the price but there is a learning curve involved in understanding how the application works. When I have scanned images at Kinkos, Photoshop has been the scanning software.

Another application is Paint Shop Pro www.jasc.com. The latest version of this application seems to emulate many of the functions in Photoshop but I don't think it's as expensive. One thing I like about Paint shop Pro is that you can use it to easily capture screen shots.

Another application that may work very well for you and sometimes ships with Windows 95/98 is Microsoft Photo Editor. This application will allow you to resize your images.

All of these applications will read Kodak file images so if you put your slides onto CD, you may not need to purchase the Kodak software that reads the images.

I welcome other people's input into this subject. If you have other ways of dealing with image files, let me know, and I'll add your information to these tips.