Your Programme Folder (normally given to you at the beginning of each year) contains a wealth of information about club competition rules but here is a quick reminder plus some important extra information in PDF handouts.

Prints
Minimum size of mounts 7” x 5”
Maximum size of mounts 20” x 16”
Note: For entry into WCPF or other external competitions the size must only be 400mm x 500mm.

Monochrome
Many print competitions have a colour section and a monochrome section (often called Black & White). Monochrome means one colour, so prints may be toned (accidentally or otherwise!) in a single tone. Judges are apt to adversely comment on printer-generated colour casts, especially green or magenta, and particularly if the colour is not appropriate to the mood of the photograph, but prints are not disqualified for these tones. Any tone should be applied to the whole image so colour popping or colouring other than a single tone is not allowed under our rules.

Digitally Projected Images (DPIs) for club competitions
Our rules specify DPIs should measure a maximum of 1024 pixels wide (horizontal) and a maximum of 768 pixels high (vertical). If you make a portrait shape it will inevitably be thin and tall, but the maximums given above still apply, so you won’t use up all the width allowable but all the height maximum of 768 pixels. They should be saved in jpeg format at your highest quality setting (10 or 12 using any of Photoshop’s many versions).

The file name should look like this: 1_My Short Title_15 where the first number is from 1 to 3 (the sequence it will be shown in) and the last number is your competition entry number. The underscore symbol must be used in the two positions shown. The underscore is obtainable on the computer keyboard next to the zero key. It must not appear elsewhere.

You may alter your filename on any image at any time by right-clicking on the image thumbnail and selecting ‘Rename’.

There is more information, including easy-to-understand step-by-step procedures for making a DPI on the following printable PDF documents:

	How to Easily Make a DPI Image
	Common Errors We Make in Our DPI Entries

DPIs for external competitions
Many external competitions require a different format form our club ones. The usual format we see is 1400 pixels wide (horizontal) and 1050 pixels high (vertical) maximums. Jpeg compression should be used unless TIFF is specified (unusual these days). The quality level should normal be high – 10 or 12, but take note of the competition rules.

Use of your DPIs as prints and vice versa
We don’t look kindly on seeing similar images over again, even if they are in a different colour or format, but you may want to produce them for other competitions and indeed, we’d like to have them available for inter-club competitions. However DPIs don’t resize well to any other format, even another DPI format as the quality drops appreciably so the best answer is to make several formats at the same time you make the first. Many people don’t do this because they think it takes a long time to do but we have a handout procedure that makes this really easy and quick. Here it is!

A Simple Way of Making Multiple DPI formats Quickly

Colour in DPIs
Many people find that their DPIs look a different colour on the projection screen than they do on their computer monitors. This is due to a number of factors. The most common is quite straightforward – the monitor is normally being used in a lighted room and so quite bright and vivid whereas the projector is being used in a semi-darkened room. There is thus always a major difference between the two. Ideally, you should have a darkened-room set of settings for contrast, colour and brilliance for your monitor if you want to see your images as they may be projected.
There are also two other simple factors: (1) The computer screen is a bright light emission straight into our eyes whereas the projector image is reflected from a nominally white surface that is also being subtly lit by lights and wall reflections in the room. Contrast is thus reduced and a colour cast introduced. (2) The computer screen is most often much higher resolution than the projector and smaller in size as well, thus your image on the computer looks much more vivid and sharp than on the projector screen.

Apart from these simple-to-understand factors there are two rather more complicated factors at work. The average computer monitor has a completely different set of colours to work with than the average projector. Both should be able to reproduce the sRGB colour gamut fairly accurately if calibrated in the correct ambient lighting conditions. However, they both have colours available outside the sRGB range. Sadly the extra colours the monitor has are not those that the projector has. It is thus entirely easy for a Photoshop user to ‘push’ the monitor and projector in different directions. This is even more possible if you are using Photoshop (and perhaps your camera) set for Adobe RGB instead of sRGB. It’s important then to either (1) don’t push any colours (or only push then using experience and skill) and (2) to make sure you match your colour input profiles from camera to Photoshop just as you might match the output profiles. The tools are there in Photoshop, but by default you are probably not using them. In addition, Raw, Stitching and HDR software applications most often remove the colour-space information from the EXIF data – you must correct this yourself in photoshop! This probably explains the over 50% of images that arrive in DPI competitions without a colour space setting at all. See the following printable PDF handout for more information.

Reasons for Missing or Corrupted EXIF file data