Wikipedia:How to improve image quality
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
When we include images in Wikipedia, it is nice when they look good. When they do, an article appears more professional and is more pleasant to read. When they look amateurish, the article looks amateurish.
Here are some things that should be kept in mind when uploading images.
- Make sure the white balance is correct or fix it afterwards.
- Correct the brightness/contrast if it's needed (use a 'levels' dialogue or equivalent for this, however, as the equivalent brightness/contrast command will often introduce further problems to the image).
- If there is excessive image noise (from a scan or low light), try using a noise removal program such as Noise Ninja (commercial), Neat Image (commercial) or GREYCstoration (open source).
- Select the optimal image resolution for Wikipedia. If people might need this image in hi-res, upload a better version. If the image is bigger than 100Kbytes you may need to upload it to Commons.
- Check that it's not very blurred and that there are no visible JPEG compression artifacts. If there are, try reducing the image size.
- If the image is made on the computer and is not a photograph, painting, or scan, it probably shouldn't be in JPEG format at all - see How to keep image file sizes as small as possible: Why you should not save diagrams as JPEG and the tutorial at [1]
- Make sure the perspective is correct or fix it afterwards.
- Check the composition of the photo. Crop the image to remove useless or irrelevant parts of it.
You can use most image editing software such as the free GIMP to do this manually. Many programs also have facilities for semi-automatic image enhancement (Ulead PhotoImpact 10 [2] is good), so that you only need to mindlessly click on thumbnails until you find a modification that improves the quality.
If you are inexperienced and can't improve the quality of an image, but you clearly see that the image needs improvements, upload it anyway and then ask anyone for assistance on Village Pump, Requested pictures, on this article talk page or elsewhere.
