In this portion of our tutorial we are using an HP Photosmart digital camera. You can use any digital camera you like although the software may be a little different, the concepts will be the same.For the most part we have found that the Adobe PhotoDeluxe ships bundled with most digital cameras, scanners, and color printers.

As with any photography subject it is always best to get as good a picture as you can at the onset, rather than try to work with pictures that are too dark or too light, or the wrong color later on in the process. Many programs are available that will allow you to edit the picture after the fact but the tried and true best solution is to get a good clear picture of the car you are trying to sell from the beginning. After all we are trying to make a living selling cars, not being a photographer or graphics artist.

It is probably also best to consider the surrounding area when taking the picture. Try to avoid other objects in the background that would distract the viewer from the subject matter, the car! Many times you will want to take the picture outside. A good clear day generally makes for good lighting conditions but we should be aware of things like shadows and hot spots when taking the picture.  Many times a slightly overcast day will produce better results because the lighting is diffused by the cloud cover. Avoid taking pictures in the early morning as they will tend to look blue and close to sunset they will tend to look red. These color deformities can be corrected with some image processing software such as Adobe PhotoShop if necessary. Let your eyes be your guide. If it looks funny to your eyes it will probably look funny in the picture as well.

The screen shots that follow demonstrate how to get the picture from the digital camera and onto your computer. Many of these steps are suggestions and you may wish to modify the process slightly as you become more familiar with it. For this demo we are using Adobe PhotoDeluxe. This software or software very similar comes bundled with most digital cameras, scanners, and color printers available today.  By following this tutorial you should be able to learn the process of prepairing your pictures to be uploaded to the NJLakes Automall.

Prior to taking this tutorial you should make sure that the software for using your digital camera of scanner is properly installed.

1. The first thing we suggest doing is create a directory structure on your hard drive to hold your pictures. Click on Start, programs and Windows explorer.
2. Make sure that you have selected your C: drive on the left side of the Explorer window.
3. Right click in the blank space on the right. (Please make sure NOT to right click on an existing file or folder.) Select New then folder from the dropdown menu.
4. Note that the New Folder has been created and the Name New Folder is highlighted. Type a new name for this folder, like CarPictures for example.See the example as shown on the right. Press the enter key when you have finished typing the new folder name. Note: you may wish to acquire a zip drive at some point if you find that you need more storage space.
5. At this pint we should have a new folder we just created named Carpictures. As an option you may create subfolders under that one to further organize you car pictures. For now close windows explorer.
6. We will now open the Adobe photo software by clicking on Start, programs, Adobe, PhotoDeluxe and select the AdobePhotoDeluxe from the program menu.
The software will be accessing  your digital camera to retrieve the pictures via an interface called TWAIN. TWAIN stands for a rather interesting acronym. "Technical interface Without Any Intelligent Name. As we go through this demo or if you are using another similar image processing software package you will probably come across this terminology.
7. You will get to a screen similar to the one displayed on the right. Make sure that your camera is turned on. Many times the battery operated cameras will shut themselves off in order to save the batteries. The TWAIN interface will not find the camera if it is not turned on though and you will receive an error message. Click on the Get Photo button to open the Get Photo window as shown on the right.You should also click on the Get Photo tab to display the choices shown.
8. Click on Cameras then select your camera from the list that appears and click on OK.
9. The software may advise you that you have chosen a camera to use. Now we will click on the Cameras button again and we should see the software for the camera open a window.
10. Click on the camera button to access your camera. Make sure that it is powered on first.
10. Double click on the thumbnail picture that you want to work with and it should be transferred into the Adobe software automatically.
If you see a display like the one shown on the right it means that either the camera has shut itself off to save power, or perhaps the cable is not plugged in or there is something else wrong. You will have to resolve this problem before continuing if that is the case.
11. You may be prompted for a name for this picture. If so give it a name for now. Then click close to close the TWAIN camera interface. As an option you could transfer more than one picture at a time to the Photoshop prorgam if you like. For now we will just do one at a time until we become more proficient.
11. We now should have the picture available to us within the Adobe software program. There is a lot of things that can be done with the Adobe software that is beyond the scope of this tutorial. We encourage you to experiment with the software as time permits. One concept to keep in mind is this. If you save a picture, or a copy of it, then you can always feel free to experiment with the copy because you will still have the original saved. If you make a mistake you can always re-load the original picture and start over.
The singular most important thing we need to do to prepare this picture for uploading is to consider the size of the picture and the size of the file required to display it on your web page. The web site is configured to automatically resize the pictures so they will fit properly and look pleasing to the viewer. If you do not save the picture in a format that is within the acceptable size range then the pictures may become distored and will not properly display on your page. Therefore we are taking the time now to stress this important point.
12. Double click on the pixture to open it in an editing window as shown on the right. After that you can click on the X in the My Photos window to close that for now, leaving the main window open with the larger picture showing on the screen as shown in the next panel below.
13. Here we have clicked on the Touch Up tab to open the menu that will allow us to resize the picture.
14. Click on the steps: Adjust Trim Resize In order. You may make any adjustments you need along the way. The most important adjustment here is the size adjustment.
15. Click on the Photo Size button above.
16. Select pixels from the size dropdown list.
17. Type in the new width size of 320 pixels. The height size should automatically adjust to maintain the correct ratio of height / width. Click on OK to continue.
18. The picture will resize on the screen. Note that the display size in this example is set to 50%. If you want to see the actual size of the picture you may click the dropdown arrow, located next to the size to increase the display view to 100%. This does not effect the actual picture size, only the size it is being currently displayed  on your screen.
19. As shown on the right we have reset the display size to be 100%. In this example we also resized the display box to accomodate the larger picture.
20. Now we have to save our picture. Click on File, then select Send To from the drop down list. This is an important series of steps coming up here. We want to be sure to save this file as a specific file type.
21. The Export File Save dialog box opens. THis should look fairly familiar to most Windows users. There are 3 Important things we need to do correctly here: Navigate to the correct Directory to save the file Specify the correct file type. In this case we will be saving the file as a jpeg graphic file. Give the file a unique name that you can use to identify the file later on when we will be uploading it to the web site. Calling them picture1, picture2, etc may not be descriptive enough to identify them later on when we are uploading them to thje website. The details of these steps follow below:
22. Navigate to the directory we created earlier in this tutorial.
23. Select the .JPG file type.
24. Give the file a unique descriptive name. Note that here we are saving in the C:\Carpictures directory and that the file has a .JPG extension and that we have given it a unique identifiable filename Having made sure of those three critical items we can now click the Save button to save our picture file.
We would simple repeat this same procedure for each car picture we wish to prepare for uploading to the website.