For many auction bidders, a good image is worth more than a thousand words of description. Many of the eBay denizens who scour auction categories searching for unusual, rare, or simply oddball items already know what they want. They scan the description primarily to determine about an item’s condition. They pay close attention to the images that accompany the auction listing, however. The more images you have and the clearer they are, the better your chances of getting bids. Unless you’re selling something that’s rare and eagerly sought-after, you’ve pretty much got to have one or more images to go along with its sales listing on eBay. There’s really no excuse for not creating those images, even if you’re the proverbial techno-phobe. Digital cameras are becoming more affordable and easy to use. You can also call on friends and photo labs to provide you with computer images if you need to. Digital imaging is well within your ability, however, and this article will show you how to create good-quality graphics that help you gain top dollar for what you want to sell.

Capture Those Images The term capture probably makes it sound like you need to go out and rope a wild animal. But obtaining images that you can publish on the Web is much easier than that. By “capturing” an image so you can use it online, I mean that you have to create, save, or obtain images in the form of computer files in other words, digital images. Once you have a digital image in your computer, you can get it on your Web page. In the process of capturing a digital image, a scanner or digital camera turns the image into very small squares, known as pixels. Each pixel in a computer image contains one or more bits of digital information. Digital images that consist of pixels are called bitmaps. Bitmaps are images that have been saved in a format that makes them easy to display and transmit online. Scanned photos on Web pages should be clear, small in size, tightly cropped, and compressed so they appear quickly in a browser window. TIFF (Tagged Image File Format), PNG (Portable Network Graphics), GIF (Graphics Interchange Format), and JPEG (Joint Experts Photographic Group) are all bitmapped image formats used in computer graphics. JPEG and PNG are used to present photos on the Web, so you need to save your digital photos in one of these two formats. eBay Picture Services only supports JPEG, however. Are you keeping all of these technical details straight? You won’t be quizzed on them. The least you need to know is this: you need to get images of your sales items into your computer in JPEG or PNG format. How do you obtain (or “capture”) digital images of your auction merchandise? You’ve got four basic options:

- Take a digital photo The most practical and affordable option is to use a digital camera to take a photo of what you want to sell. The camera saves the image directly to computer disk. Digital cameras like the one shown in

- Scan the image Scanners are less expensive than digital cameras you can find them at Buy It Now prices of $40 to $60. You can also rent time on a scanner at a branch of Kinko’s Copies. Or you can borrow a friend’s scanning device. Simply take a conventional photo of an object with a camera and scan the image to convert it to the computer file.

- Use a photo lab You can take a conventional print or slide photo and have the photo lab return the images to you on computer disk instead of as prints or slides.

- Capture a digital video image of the object Digital video cameras take still images that you can save directly to disk. Plus, you can take high-quality video of your family, too. The option you choose depends on how many auctions you plan to conduct, on your budget, and your level of comfort with technology. If you only plan to put a few auctions online once in a while, you can take photos with a conventional camera and have a photo lab convert your images to digital files, but this can quickly get expensive. You can use a scanner, but these work best with flat objects such as magazines, and their size is limited by the size of the device’s scanning area. Your most economical option is probably to use a digital camera, as described in the following section.

Use a Digital Camera Digital cameras bring a new level of convenience to capturing images that can be viewed and edited on a computer. My own experience tells me that this is how the majority of eBay sellers take their auction images. There are so many digital cameras on the market that this article isn’t going to attempt recommendations at which model is best for you to buy. Rather, it assumes that you already have a digital camera and you’re looking for some tips on how to use it to capture auction images. Most digital cameras give you two ways of composing images. You can look either through the viewfinder (the little window on the back of the camera) or the Liquid Crystal Display (LCD), the miniature screen that lets you preview images. To my mind, the LCD is preferable because it’s more precise. But don’t depend on the little framing square that’s supposed to indicate what’s going to be in the final image to be perfect. Leave some extra room around the edges when you frame your images. Digital cameras give you the ability to preview images and simply throw them out and redo them if they aren’t the way you want. Virtually all digital cameras allow you to zoom in on your subject as well. As a general rule, the closer you are the sharper your image. You should try to get as close as possible to your subject before taking the photo.

Purchase a Scanner If you consistently sell printed material such as postcards, stamps, or historical documents, you should use a device that’s specially designed to capture those images in the form of computer files a flatbed scanner. A scanner is computer hardware that digitizes a single object by moving an optical device much like a camera across it. There are different types of scanners around, but the most practical and easiest to use is a flatbed; its name reflects the fact that the bed on which the photo or other image is placed is flat. Scanners are sometimes advertised as having very fine resolutions. While this is important if you intend to scan images for printed booklets, if you’re scanning for eBay or the Web you only need a resolution of 72 dpi (dots per inch), and any scanner can scan at that relatively coarse setting. But it’s a good idea to scan at 144 or 300 dpi and then reduce the resolution using an image editing program in order to get better detail.

Scanning, Step by Step After you buy a scanner and set it up, you won’t find it that difficult to use. However, some rules of thumb can ensure that your objects turn out clear and sharp:

1. Pick a good image. Remember that your images won’t appear in print; they’ll be seen on a computer screen. You have to account for those shoppers who have old, murky monitors. Select high contrast images images that have a clear difference between light and dark areas.

2. Use your scanning software. All scanners come with some sort of software that lets you scan the images and save them in various formats. Sometimes, scanners come with programs that act as plug-ins (programs that work within another graphics program like Adobe Photoshop).

3. After you install the software, following the instructions that come with your scanner, start up the program, turn on the scanner, and make a preview scan of your first image. A preview scan gives you a quick idea what an image will look like after you do the actual scan. Look for the button that says Preview, such as the one in the lower-left corner of the DeskScan II window.

4. Once you have the preview scan on screen, crop it. Cropping an image means that you select the part of the image that you want to appear in the final version and leave out parts of the image that aren’t essential.

5. Select an input mode. An input mode tells the scanner how you want the information in the image to be captured. For most auction images, you’ll choose the Color option. However, if what you’re scanning is a black and white photo, you can reduce the file size dramatically by choosing grayscale mode. On the other hand, if you’re scanning line art, a signature, a cartoon, or another drawing, use line art mode.

6. Set the resolution. Since you’re scanning auction images for the Web, choose 150 or 300 dots per inch (dpi). Since computer monitors can display no more than approximately 72 dpi, reduce the resolution to 72 dpi in a graphics program.

7. Make adjustments. All scanning software comes with brightness and contrast controls that you can move to see if the image improves. You can do this later using image editing software, but why not save yourself the work by making improvements at the scanning stage? When you’re done with all the preparation work, you can press the Scan button and finally scan your image. It’s a good idea to calibrate your scanner before you start making scans. Calibrating means that you match the scanner to your monitor so that your image previews are accurate. the exact procedure differs from scanner to scanner. But in general, you make a test scan of an image. Next, you use your scanning software’s calibration controls. The exact menu options vary depending on the software used.

You Can Scan More than Just Paper A scanner can be great for scanning flat objects for the Web, but you can also scan some three-dimensional items, like watches or almost-flat toys. Just drape some black cloth or clothing over the object so it covers the glass and you’ll have a clean background behind what you’re scanning. If a scanner is all you have, you can use it to scan items that are bigger than the scanning surface (such as LP-record albums) in pieces and then reassemble them using an image editing program (see “Choose a Graphics Editor” later in this article). You can also find scanners that do more than just scan they function as color copiers and fax machines as well. They, too, are becoming more affordable all the time and they regularly show up on eBay for Buy It Now prices under $200.

Set Up Your Photo Studio Most eBay sellers who take their own digital photos (in other words, most eBay sellers) set up a miniature photo studio in their home. It’s easy enough to set one up, and not that expensive, either. Here’s a shopping list for what you’ll need:

- A table I’m talking about a moderately-sized table on which you can place and light your sales items. Things that are too large to fit atop the table can go in front of it.

- Lights Make an effort to obtain professional studio lights. I say more about this in the section on lighting that follows.

- Tripod A tripod like the one show below is a stand with extendable legs on which you can place your camera. A tripod isn’t just to hold the camera still while you snap the shutter. In a photo studio, a tripod enables you to position the merchandise and the camera just right and adjust the lighting as well. Once you point your camera at your table, you can leave it there from photo to photo.

- Power supply Instead of having to replace batteries every few days, purchase the rechargeable variety.

- Display stands If you’re selling jewelry and other items that consist of multiple pieces, you’ll do well to purchase a display stand that includes a riser something that makes the items stand up so you can photograph them better.

- Fabric A solid, seamless background is a must-have for good photos of auction merchandise. Go to the local fabric store and get several lengths of four- or six-foot wide fabric in several solid colors. Black is pretty much required for light items; also get a light neutral color such as white, gray, or beige so you can choose the color that makes the item look the best.

Give Your Piece a Chance All the lighting, backgrounds, and even the best digital camera in the world can’t make up for forgetting to do some basic things when you actually take your photo. For instance:

- Whip out the Windex Be sure to take a towel and wipe off what you’re selling. Brush the cat hairs off those clothes, polish that silver, and wipe the dirt smudges and fingerprints off those plastic slim-line phones. But remember to take care not to wipe too hard or use too strong a cleaner or you’ll damage what you’re trying to sell.

- Move in for a close-up Most good digital cameras have powerful zoom lenses; use them to get nice and close on your item before you actually take the photo. If you’re too far away, you’ll lose detail and your item might even look out of focus.

- Clean up the area A smudge on a wall or a stray toy on the floor can distract attention from what you want people to look at.

- Clean your lens If you’ve been using your camera outdoors or if you have forgotten to put on the lens cap recently, wipe off the lens (with a clean, photo-quality lens cloth rather than a shirtsleeve or paper towel) so you don’t obscure your image.

- Check your focus The autofocus feature on many digital cameras doesn’t work perfectly all of the time. Take a good look through the viewfinder or LCD and adjust the focus manually, if necessary, before you click. One of the many nice things about digital cameras is that you can take as many photos as you want, erase the ones you don’t like, and save only the best. Don’t be reluctant to photograph an image from many different angles and with many different levels of zoom. You can publish as many photos as you want with your auctions though I never seem to see more than six or eight at any one time. Don’t limit yourself to one or two.

Studio Lights If you need to take lots of images, and you’ve been plagued by dim and deeply shadowed images, you might consider a drastic upgrade and buying studio lights for your eBay images. The problem is that the built-in flash on a digital camera comes from only one direction and is apt to leave shadows around the edges of what you’re photographing. Two or three good studio lights with umbrellas to diffuse the light, will do the trick.

Let the Sun Shine You may want to take your photos outdoors in order to avoid the problems caused by homemade backgrounds and shadows caused by indoor spot lighting. (As an alternative, you can place your item by a window that catches the sun and put a white cotton cloth or bed sheet over the window to diffuse the light.) It can be tricky to take photos outdoors, because the sun can produce shadows that actually make merchandise more difficult to see rather than easier. But on a bright cloudy day, the lighting outdoors is even and very good. Steve Brothers of Silk Road Trading Concern (User ID: silkroad) shoots all of his merchandise outdoors in Nepal. He says: “We use a digital camera to photograph our items. I prefer to shoot outdoors in indirect light. Taking product photos is something one gets better at over time. The clients will guide you in terms of the necessity for auxiliary detail photos. We only ran one front view in the early days, and people would e-mail us asking for extra shots.We eventually realized that some items such as statues or paintings often require multiple shots side views, back views, or close-ups.”

Choose an Image Format Whether you use a digital camera or scanner to save your images to disk, you need to choose a file format in which to save them. The file formats that are especially designed to process photos on theWeb, JPEG and PNG, process digital information in an image and compress files to make them consume less disk space. All Web browsers can open and display files in these formats. Of these two, eBay recommends that you save your image in JPEG format. Both GIF and JPEG images display correctly on eBay auction pages. JPEG, however, is generally a better format for photographic images with lots of colors, while GIF generally works better for line drawings. If you pay extra for a photo lab to create digital images for you, you can tell the service to save the files as JPEGs. Otherwise, you can do so yourself by using the software that comes with your scanner, digital camera, or other hardware device. Usually, you save in JPEG format by choosing File | Save from the program’s menu bar and then choosing JPEG from the list of formats that are available. You also need to save the file with the file name extension JPG (or, on aMacintosh, JPEG). JPEG compresses image files, but it provides you with several different levels of compression from which to choose. The higher the level of compression, the smaller the image file. At maximum compression, however, you lose some information in the image, and the image doesn’t appear as sharp as it can if you use a lower level of compression. If you’re not sure which level to choose, try High or Maximum compression to keep the file size as small as possible.

Create Images that Sell You’ve got a snazzy new digital camera, you’ve read the instruction booklet, and you’ve even taken a few test images. You probably think all you need to do now is point, click, and upload to get your photos on the Web along with your auction descriptions. You can do that, and it’s even possible that some of your photos will come out perfectly the first time. Remember, though, that I’m trying to provide you with instructions for running a successful eBay business. An important part of consistently selling at auction is coming up with a system for creating good images that attract attention and help people decide whether what you’re offering is a good match for what they need. The fact is, most of the time, the images you take of your auction items are going to need some adjustments before you put them online. If you devote a few minutes to brightening your images, cropping them, they’ll show your objects in their best light (and I mean that literally). You’ll separate your images from the ones I see on all too many eBay auctions that are too large, take too long to appear, and are dark and fuzzy to boot. You’ll have another way to show your prospective customers that you are a professional and serious about selling on eBay.

Choose a Graphics Editor Often, images aren’t good if you capture them straight from your scanner, digital camera, or other input device. Instead, after you save your image in JPEG or PNG format, you can then edit (or, in photographic terms, retouch) the image in a graphics program to improve its appearance. Personally, I like a program called Adobe Photoshop Elements which, you’ll be happy to know, comes bundled with many digital cameras. If you get this software along with your camera, you’ve got a great deal. Here are the kinds of things you should adjust with Photoshop Elements or another graphics program:

- Adjust contrast and brightness The contrast of an image is the degree of difference between its light and dark tones. Brightness refers to the vibrancy or energy of the colors or shades of color in the image. Images displaying adequate levels of contrast and brightness are easier to view on a monitor.

- Resize images Resize images so that they’re smaller than originally scanned and fit well on the eBay auction Web page. (Look through your graphics program’s menus to find a resize option.) Generally speaking, an image that’s two or three inches wide and perhaps four to five inches tall is a good size. File sizes of 20 to 30K or less are also desirable.

- Zoom in on what’s important Cropping refers to the practice of cutting out unnecessary details and keeping a certain area of the image on which you want to focus. It makes the image size smaller so that the photo fits better in a Web browser window. By making the image smaller, you also make the file size smaller. An image that’s, say, 12K in size appears on-screen much faster than does one that’s 100K in size.

Keep File Size Small You can’t depend on your bidders to have relatively fast cable modem, DSL, or other fast connections. You don’t know whether they’re viewing your images on

Other Graphics Editors Photoshop Elements (and its “big brother” program, the professional graphics editor simply called Photoshop) are terrific programs, but they consume lots of memory and disk space. (Photoshop Elements 2 requires 128MB of RAM and from 150 to 350MB of hard disk space.) I also like the simplerWindows program Paint Shop Pro, by Jasc, Inc. (http://www.jasc.com/pspdl.html). If you are a Macintosh user, and you don’t want to invest in a complex program like Adobe Photoshop Elements, Thorsten Lemke’s GraphicConverter is a great shareware ($35) graphics program. You can download or purchase it from http://www.lemkesoft.de/us_index.html. iPhoto is a free program that runs on anyMac that uses OS X: find out more at http://www.apple.com/iphoto. an old, slow computer or a speedy new one. Your goal is to make your images consume as little memory as possible, so they appear in the browser window right away. These are simple tasks that you can perform in virtually any graphics editor to optimize your images for quick viewing.

Crop Those Photos Simply scanning an entire photo from edge to edge and putting the entire photo on yourWeb page usually results in an image that takes up more space than it should in terms of physical size (height and width) as well as disk space. Cropping a photo does two things:

- It concentrates the viewer’s eye on the most important area

- Makes the file size and the image size smaller Cropping an image is important and you should do it whenever possible. The smaller an image file is, the quicker it will appear on your bidders’ computer screens. You do this by clicking the cropping button, positioning your mouse pointer just above and to one side of the image, clicking and holding down your mouse button, and dragging your mouse down and to the opposite side of the image. Release your mouse when the subject of your photo is outlined with the marquee box. Cropping photos whenever possible literally reduces the number of bits of information in the photo. A 196×232-pixel photo might contain 13K (13,000 bits) of information; reducing it to 120×142 pixels reduces the size dramatically. It’s important to keep photos small in size to ensure that they fit within the smallest computer screens. Remember that although a minority of Web surfers have 21-inch flat-screen monitors; many others have 17-inch monitors that are actually only about 12-inches in width.Within that space, a user may configure aWeb browser window to be only 7 to 10 inches in width. Smaller photos aren’t that hard to see clearly on Web pages because people typically sit very close to their computer screen. Keeping your images 3 to 6 inches in width is a safe measurement that most people will be able to see in their entirety.

Set the Resolution Earlier in this article, I mentioned that scanned images are made up of little bits of information called pixels. Those dots are small, but they aren’t always the same size. When you scan an image, you have the option of making the dots really small so that the image appears extra smooth. This is called setting the resolution of an image. The size of the dots is expressed in dots per inch (dpi). The higher the number of dots per inch, the smaller the dots are, and the finer the image will be. Setting the resolution is a simple matter when you are preparing images for eBay. Scan at 300 dpi resolution, then reduce the resolution to 72 dpi when you edit the image in a graphics program. If the image seems dark or “muddy,” adjust the brightness and contrast. In most scanning programs, the brightness and contrast controls are sliders that you can move either to the left or right. Try them out and see if the image improves. If you’re happy with the image as is, leave the brightness and contrast set to zero.

Create Thumbnail Images You can use a graphics program to create a thumbnail or miniature version of an image to a larger, more memory intensive version. The smaller version (which takes up only a small amount of memory, and appears on screen quickly) gives the viewer a glimpse of what the full image will look like, and the chance to decide whether to view the full image in greater detail. Clicking on the link brings a larger, more detailed version of the image to screen (which is larger in size, and takes longer to appear on screen).

Take Time With Your Presentation The way you present your merchandise has a big effect on whether people will pass them by or make a bid. If you have clothing to sell, or if you regularly sell watches or jewelry, by all means invest in some mannequins on which to mount them. They’ll look much better if people can visualize how they look on a human body, rather than laying flat on a table. Where better to find mannequins than on eBay itself? Don’t be reluctant to include lots of clear photos with an item, no matter how “unpicturesque” it might appear. For instance, how many photos can you take of an old hat? mrmodern included so many good close-ups in this listing that, if the hat would have fit me, I would have bid on it myself.

Upload an Image

1. From any eBay page, click the Sell button in the toolbar.

2. Choose the category in which you want to sell you item.

3. Log in with your eBay User ID and password and click Continue.

4. Fill out the Sell Your Item form. The Basic Version of Picture Services appears by default. Click Browse to locate the image file (or files) you want to add. Locate the file on your computer, click Open, and the image is added to the list of files to upload when you create your auction listing at the end of the form.

5. However, if you use a Windows computer, click the link Try our full featured version just to the right of the Basic Picture Services. If a dialog box appears asking if you want to download an ActiveX Control or Java Applet, click Yes. (You need these mini-programs to use the other version of Picture Services.) The Full-Featured Picture Services appears.

6. You can upload an image using Full-Featured Picture Services in one of two ways. Click on a box to select a photo file on your computer. Or, you can click on a photo file stored on your computer and drag the file to one of the picture boxes in the Add Pictures page. Full-Featured Picture Services works only with Windows computers; Basic Picture Services works with Macintosh or Windows.

Other Photo Hosts It pays to shop around when looking for a Web server that your auction images can call home. After all, if your images don’t appear reliably and quickly, your bidders might well leave your sale and bid on someone else’s items. Another consideration is the software you use to get your images from your computer to the Web storage space. You may have to use a special program that does the transfer by using a special set of instructions called File Transfer Protocol (FTP). Other services (such as AOL) provide such software to you. If you use one of the auction management packages mentioned in Article 6, you don’t have to install special software, either; the transfer utility is provided as part of the service’s user interface. The following list describes some of the types ofWeb hosts that you can use to make your auction image files available online:

- Your own ISP The first place to turn is to the company that gives you access to the Internet: your Internet Service Provider (ISP). Providing users with access to the Internet and hostingWeb sites are two different functions, certainly, but the same organization may well perform them. Many ISPs provide you with use of at least 10MB of Web site space at no additional cost to you.

- America Online (AOL) AOL enables subscribers to create and publish their ownWeb pages or to place simple image files on theWeb. (As mentioned in Article 7, you get as much as 14MB of Web storage space with a basic AOL account.) AOL is quite popular with sellers on eBay and other auction services.

- A Web hosting service The same Web hosting services that publish your Web sites give you space that can be used for posting images and Web pages alike. See Article 7 for suggestions.

- An auction management service Most services that help you manage your auction sales, such as ManageAuctions.com (http:// www.manageauctions.com) and AuctionHelper.com (http://www .auctionhelper.com) make it easy to upload your image files.

- A photo hosting service A few Web sites specialize in providing space where eBay and other auction users can publish auction images to accompany sales listings. PixHost (at http://www.pixhost.com ), for example, enables you to host two images on its site for free; after that trial usage, hosting images costs 50 cents each for 30 days, which is far more expensive than eBay’s own Picture Services. However, you can upload files using your Web browser. If you use Adobe Photoshop Elements 2, you have the ability to move files from your computer to storage space with the online photo service Shutterfly (http://www.shutterfly.com ). You can even upload the files after you edit them in Photoshop Elements, without having to use a special file transfer program. Mac users can get 100MB of storage space through Apple’s .Mac subscription service, which costs $99 per year after a free 60-day trial period.

Linking to Your Image After you create a digital image and add it to your host site, you add that image to your sales description by specifying the URL for the image on the eBay Sell Your Item form. All ISPs provide customers with instructions on how to figure out their Web page URLs. Call the Customer Service section of your ISP, or check the company’s FAQ. A common convention is to assign a URL that looks like this (this example is for a JPEG image, which has the filename extension .jpg) After posting an image online, verify that it actually appears on your page. The most common cause of a broken image or question mark icon appearing with your description instead of the image itself is an incorrect URL. If you’re typing the URL from scratch, you must get it right exactly: A single blank space, capital letter, or typo in an URL can prevent a Web browser from locating the image and displaying it on-screen.

Upload Your Image to the Gallery You can also specify whether to place any images that accompany your listing in the eBay Gallery as well as displaying them on the auction Web page itself. If you put a number of your images in the Gallery (at 25 cents per image), you can create your own photo gallery. If someone searches for your items and clicks Gallery View, they can see them all at once. The Gallery is a collection of images that auction sellers submit of items they’re currently offering for sale. Buyers can browse through the images and click one in which they’re interested; clicking the image takes them to the auction sales page where they can read a description and place a bid if they so choose. The Gallery doesn’t display all the images that accompany auction listings only the ones for which sellers pay the extra 25-cent fee for extra exposure in the Gallery. (You can splurge and pay $19.95 to place your image in a featured area of the Gallery as well.).