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Subject:RE: How Much Editing of Graphics Do You Do? From:"Sarah Kampman" <skampman -at- acornsys -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Wed, 6 Mar 2002 13:45:52 -0600
> Without mentioning my own attitudes for now, I was wondering: how much
> do other people on the list edit graphics? Do you crop them? Clean up
> moires? Remove writing in the background that's incomplete? Touch up
> photos? Adjust contrast and brightness? Change their sizes to emphasize
> their importance or improve page breaks? Is editing of graphics part of
> your production routine, or do you just insert them and forget about them?
I'm the sole tech writer, editor, graphic designer, UI designer, and
production department around here, so I do quite a bit of graphics editing.
On the upside, since all graphics are done on my machine, they're consistent
in brightness, contrast, etc., so that's one less thing I need to worry
about.
After taking a screenshot, I crop to the smallest relevant area I can,
change internal or security info, modify the UI pieces I know will be
changing later (e.g., typos, modified button graphics), and then start to
tweaking. Many of our interfaces have a fair amount of whitespace, so I'll
shift elements around so that the screenshot will fit within a text column
but still look nearly identical to what's on-screen. This is particularly
important when I want to present a large area of the screen; for smaller
areas, I just crop.
If major UI changes are needed (e.g., menus are wrong/missing or elements
are in the wrong places) I'll submit the changes and wait until they've been
fixed (or just fix them myself) before I take the screenshots.
-Sarah
...who never did know when to leave well enough alone...
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