Creating a web gallery is by far the most immediate and efficient way to show your portfolioyou can then post it on your own web site or on other sites that cater to photographers. There are also numerous sites that will allow you to display your web portfolio for the purpose of selling your prints. Best of all, Photoshop CS2 and Lightroom let you create web portfolios pretty much automatically. One of the things you can do with those portfolios is use them on your own web site. You could have a button on your home page for specific categories of work that you do. And each of those buttons could open a different portfolio. If you own your own web site domain, you can create different pages for different categories of photos. For example, you might want to have a link called "portfolios" or "photographs" on your main menu and have that link direct the viewer to another page listing different styles, types of subject matter, specific events, or what have you. Each of these topics could then link to an individual page. 12.3.3.1. Preparing the images for your gallery There are a number of additional considerations that you'll want to keep in mind if you're publishing your images on the Web. For example, your images may be perfectly exposed, color-balanced, and adjusted for viewing individually as prints. However, when you put them on a web site they're going to be viewed as part of a group, so it's ideal to have more uniform brightness, contrast, and color values between them. (For example, compare the three side-by-side photographs in both Figures 12-31 and 12-32.) You'll also want to crop and transform these images in such a way as to make them complement one another as much as possible. The difficult part is doing this efficiently to many images at once so you don't run into any holdups getting your site up and running. Figure 12-31. The original images as the camera saw them. Figure 12-32. After matching the exposure and contrast so that all three images have a uniform appearance. The solution to these issues lies in setting up a routine that is likely to produce the most pleasing and uniform results. Don't have one yet? No problem. Just use mine: 1. First, gather all the files together and place them in individual folders that will hold the contents for each portfolio category. 2. Use the Image Processor to save the files in each folder to JPEG format at the highest quality setting mode (12). This keeps the originals in excellent shape but also compresses them so that they will be easy to store on a CD. (It also makes them quick to render if the portfolio-making software has to resize and optimize them.) Feel free to add whatever other changes you need (e.g., color correction) to the images before you save them. 3. Use the Photoshop File Browser to quickly compare images. Here, you can eliminate any duplicates, check to make sure all files are large enough for your purposes, and easily see which images require adjustments in color saturation, contrast, or brightness when seen in the context of the rest of the collection (Figure 12-33). Figure 12-33. Viewing the adjusted images in the Photoshop Browser after matching their exposure and contrast. 4. If the files have coded names, go through all the images and give them names that will serve as titles. This will make it much easier to retitle images when you do the final editing on your gallery in your HTML editor (e.g., Macromedia Dreamweaver or Adobe GoLive). Once you've done all this, use the Photoshop Browser to pick the images that are most in need of editing. Then use the following routine for each of those images: A Solid-Color Frame If you just want a quick, solid-color frame, record the following Action. First, choose Select All; choose Image Canvas Size and increase the canvas size by half the number of pixels you want in the frame; choose Edit Stroke and enter a pixel width for the frame that's twice the desired width (the other half will be outside the current canvas); choose the color you want for the frame and click OK. Stop recording the Action. You can now play it for all the images you want to frame. 1. Crop and transform the image to improve composition and straighten perspective. 2. Use the Levels command to adjust the range and brightness of that image. 3. Use the Curves command to tweak the brightness and contrast of the image, if needed. 4. Use the Soft Light layer technique (and/or Photoshop Shadows/Highlights command) to extend the range of shadows where needed. 5. Use a Brightness/Contrast adjustment layer for vignetting, burning, or dodging large areas. To do this, use the Lasso to select the general area and then feather the selection so that the Brightness/Contrast command will blend smoothly with the rest of the image. 6. Use the Hue/Saturation command to bring the images' colors to life, if necessary. 7. Consider preframing your images. The quickest way to do fancy framing is to pick a plug-in that automatically frames images, create an Action that preframes one image, and then use the Photoshop File Browser's Automate Batch command to frame all the images in the gallery. 8. You may want to watermark the images that will appear in your web galleries. Refer to the "Protecting Your Copyright with Watermarks" section earlier in this chapter. If you've followed the recommendations above, you'll find that most of the automated web gallery routines do a decent job of optimization on their own. (If they don't, see the "Optimize Images for Web Viewing" section earlier in this chapter for information on how to do it yourself.) Note, however, that what you'll actually be doing is optimizing the images individually and substituting them for the images automatically optimized by the web gallery application. 12.3.4. Put Together the Web Gallery Great web designers are expensive to hire and hard to find. Even if you do end up having someone else do most of your web design, it's a good idea to learn enough about it to speak knowledgeably to your designer and to have reasonable expectations. You'll probably end up creating web portfolios and email/CD portfolios in Photoshop or Lightroom since they are the applications you'll have at your disposal and they get better at it with each new version. However, it would be worth your while to examine all the products mentioned in this section because each one creates galleries (portfolios) in different styles and some of them have bigger style collections. For example, Figure 12-34 shows a web gallery dialog in Photoshop CS2. Figure 12-34. Creating web gallery created in Photoshop CS2. Creating the pages is the easy part; you can do it in either Photoshop (actually Version 6 and above), in Photoshop Elements 2-4, or in Lightroom, each of which offer different sets of gallery styles. The styles in Photoshop CS2 are much more professional and flexible than those in earlier versions. With a basic understanding of HTML, it is quite easy to customize any gallery you automatically create. Photoshop writes the end result in legal HTML code, which you can easily edit using the search and replace command in your HTML editor if you want to change the positioning, size, text style, or any other characteristic of an element. NOTE If you've followed my advice about keeping an original JPEG library for each gallery, you can even create larger image sizes in your editor. You'll know which image belongs in each frame, so just run Image Processor to re-size the originals to the size you want and then paste them into the large space specified in your edited version of the gallery. The following method will give you a good idea of how to create an automatic portfolio in Photoshop. By studying the screen shots, you'll see that you have quite a few modifiable style and format options. 1. Use the keyword search capability in Bridge to locate, organize, and place the photos into any of the individual galleries. Once the search is completed, you'll see all of the thumbnails for the photos in the Bridge Workspace. Select all the images you want to include or (better yet) use a label color you rarely use for anything else or that you use to designate pictures to include in a project. Then use the Unfiltered menu to show only the images with that label. 2. From the Bridge menu, choose Tools Photoshop Web Gallery. The Web Photo Gallery dialog will open, as shown in Figure 12-35. Figure 12-35. The Web Photo Gallery dialog. 3. Choose the Style you want to use. You'll get a preview of these styles each time you choose one, so you can go through the list until what you see is as close as possible to what you want. Actually, I'd suggest you choose about six images in the Browser and then create a test of each style. 4. When the gallery opens, make a screen capture of each "page" in the gallery. Then paste the screen capture into a Photoshop New file with an 8x10 dimension at printer resolution. You can then put the gallery style, settings, and both the thumbnails and large image view on the same page and print out a catalog. You'll get a much better of what style you want to use for what purpose. Besides, you can show it to a client and let the client decide. 5. Enter your email address in the email fieldunless you don't want any feedback from the people who view your gallery, or want to make it really difficult for them to contact you. 6. Under Source Images, choose Folder as the source and click the Browse button to locate the folder into which you placed the images for the gallery. Be sure to uncheck the "Include all Subfolders" box unless you had a very odd way of storing your images. Next, click the Destination button, browse to the location where you want to place the finished web gallery and HTML code, and create a folder. 7. Now comes the fun part: choose the Options settings that will allow you to customize your gallery. In Photoshop CS2, they appear as a set of configurable items inside the Options box that switch depending on which drop-down menu is selected (see Figure 12-36). Figure 12-36. The options in Photoshop Album's Web Photo Gallery dialog. 8. Choose Banner from the Options tab or drop-down menu. In the Site Name field, enter the name as you want it to appear on your site. In the Photographer field, enter the name of the person or organization you would like to designate as the owner of the photo (e.g., yourself). You can actually enter any information you wish in any of the Banner Options fields. For instance, I put all my contact information in the Contact Info field, but if I want to include ordering instructions or comments about the photos, I write that information in the Date field. (I don't like to "date" my galleries, unless it's a private gallery for use by a specific client, where the creation date might be important. Note that the date is automatically entered in the date field by default, so be sure to delete it if you don't want that information there.) Finally, you can change the font style and size of the banner textjust be sure to choose a small enough font size that all your information will fit within the banner when the gallery is displayed on the Web. NOTE In order for the Titles Use settings to have any effect at all, you must have entered additional EXIF data in the File Browser for the images in your gallery before you start creating the gallery according to these instructions. To do this, open the source image folder in the Photoshop CS File Browser. Click the Metadata tab in the bottom left of the File Browser dialog and scroll down until you start to see pencil icons in the left columns, which . photo (e.g., yourself). You can actually enter any information you wish in any of the Banner Options fields. For instance, I put all my contact information in the Contact Info field, but if I want. don't want that information there.) Finally, you can change the font style and size of the banner textjust be sure to choose a small enough font size that all your information will fit. don't, see the "Optimize Images for Web Viewing" section earlier in this chapter for information on how to do it yourself.) Note, however, that what you'll actually be doing is