Faith and Web

Friday was a glorious day. As well having perfect autumn weather, a website I’ve been working on for months at last went live. It was a complete redesign for our local Rape & Sexual Center (RASAC).

At first glance I expect many of you won’t connect the dots between a church web diva and a local service agency like this. Nonetheless, the connections are deep and strong. I would never have known of this group if it hadn’t been for my church.

In the early 1990s, ours was one of the many churches torn asunder by allegations of clergy misconduct. Those of us struggling to do the right thing by our faith could find few if any good resources. Into this bleak terrain came RASAC’s counselors. While the congregation’s needs were many, their focus went right to the heart – to those most wounded – to the victims of misconduct. They stood by them and helped the church see what they needed most. They represented one of the few organizations that helped us turn a corner back into a healthy congregation.

More than that, through my church I have learned the importance of social justice. I’ve learned that social justice isn’t always marching in marches. Some of us do that well, while others become ministers or lawyers. Still others teach, inspiring our youth to justice work. And some of us create websites. We grease the wheels of communication – getting the word out to those who need it.

Creating websites is also, inevitably, a learning experience. As I catch my breath, the things I realize I’ve learned from this one are:

1. Be patient. Building even a small website takes time if you want to do a good job. In this case, I unintentionally created one of the longer logjams. The same forces that slowed down this blog also slowed the redesign. But the good people at RASAC were patient and understanding. I hope I was likewise with them.

2. Be appreciative. Their VP of Development & Marketing was the mastermind behind the site, pulling together the content and organizing the structure. She did the crucial work and she did an excellent job – and then sent flowers to me! This was after a small bumpy patch when stakeholders were trying to correct things like word spacing (being in a print paradigm and not realizing it).

3. Express compassion. One of RASAC’s Board counseled me to make the look-and-feel gentle and soothing, so a victim who came to the site wouldn’t be scared away. It’s such a grim subject, but he made me literally see things in a whole different way. And it brought to mind a battered woman whom I heard speak years ago. I’ll never forget her reading Psalm 55 – “Oh that I had wings like a dove! for then would I fly away, and be at rest.” Hence the birds in the upper right corner.

May I help the people who need RASAC find their wings and find peace.

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We’re back from 12 glorious days in Britain. It’s been years since I’ve been abroad and I wasn’t sure what to expect on returning. Would I be overjoyed to see my trusty computers again? Or sad to return to the grind?

Like many geeks, I’m an introvert. My ideal day consists of puttering with code, punctuated by reading and a solitary walk. To my amazement, however, my main reaction to the end of this lovely holiday is delight in reuniting with friends, particularly church friends – be it via email, web, phone or (best of all) in person.

The Nerd Herd Dines

As luck would have it, my first day back ended with a meeting over dinner of the church’s Technology Committee (AKA the Nerd Herd). Granted, I’m a bit dewy-eyed at the moment, but for some time I’ve considered this august body to be a major asset to our church. Today I decided to analyze precisely why.

As you might have guessed, the Nerd Herd came into being to address a crisis. About two years ago, the staff computers were in shambles. The Board was willing to use some of our then scarce funds to replace of all the equipment. But a few of us stomped our feet and said (more or less): “Don’t you dare. It’s not the equipment that’s the problem. That’s a symptom. It’s a lack of infrastructure.”

Fortunately, the Board listened to us. And then a very dedicated, as well as talented, geek stepped up to the plate, saying he’d be happy to chair a technology group.

When we first met, we identified what the problems really were, and then we set out to fix them. We recommended replacing much of the hardware, and while this might look like we were back to Plan A, really we weren’t. We made sure systems were much more secure, we were organized, and we set up ways to keep track of licenses, etc. – gathering documentation in a couple of central places (including a wiki).

There are now eight of us, with a strong presence of large males and beer drinkers. But really it wouldn’t matter if we were twelve drummers drumming, as long as it works. And it does. Here’s why.

Key Ingredients for Successful Church Tech Support

1. An excellent leader. Our chair (shepherd?) is supportive of all members, and very hands on with the staff. We know we’re very lucky, and we’re grateful for his able leadership.
2. Gratitude and respect. The appreciation of our chair extends in other directions. He sets the tone, and we are respectful of each other – laced with a boatload of crazy jokes and laughter. Respect doesn’t have to equate with fear.
3. A clear understanding of our mission. We are there to support the technology needs of leadership, particularly staff. We are reactive, not proactive. When there’s a need, we listen and take care of it.
4. An easy procedure for staff-in-need. Early on, we set up an email address that forwards to all members of the committee. When staff members have a tech problem, they simply email this one address. If email is down, then there’s a prioritized list of phone numbers. To get this going, we sent a marvelously succinct (7 lines, to be precise) memo to staff. It went: “FUUN Tech Help. If your church computer doesn’t work, the church’s Internet access is lost, etc., here is what to do – in priority order….” The remaining lines listed the tech committee email address, followed by phone numbers.
5. Infrequent meetings. We don’t often gather physically – just once or twice a year. Initially we had to meet more to get things sorted out, but that was then. We get it that just because we’re a committee doesn’t mean we have to meet a lot. Some committees (e.g. Nominating) do, but not us. On the other hand, it’s good we meet occasionally. Several people noted over dinner that our meeting is an important part of their church experience. It’s one of the best ways to be in community – breaking bread (and more) with those who share a similar worldview – in our case, a perspective shaped by zeros and ones.
6. Clear and easy procedures, particularly around documentation. The procedures are informal, but they work. Specifically, we have a notebook to gather all of those rabbit-like software CDs and a wiki where any of us can add or update general documentation.
7. Recognition of differing areas of expertise. One of the realities of church life is that once you are perceived as a geek, the average congregant and staff member assumes you can do anything with a computer. Of course this is nuts. But that doesn’t mean people get it. They may in a hazy kind of way, but that’s it. From their perspective, something is wrong and you’re more likely to be able to fix it than them. In fact, that’s true, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay. It’s a classic set-up for burnout. Keep asking people to fix things they don’t know that much about, and guess what. Not only will they stop doing it, they’ll probably stop coming to church. We have overlapping but diverse areas of expertise and respect that. We’re very fortunate to have a network/security expert on our team. Other areas of expertise include email, desktop support, hardware setup, hardware maintenance, programming and web.
8. Great boundaries. We actually keep a very low profile. We don’t want church members to get the idea that we are there to help them individually. Thus, for example, you won’t find us listed in the church directory with the other committees. Also we don’t initiate work. We simply respond when appropriate people ask us to.

If technology at your church is a mess like ours was, I’d heartily recommend looking at the infrastructure and setting up a team like ours. Just be sure to find a great shepherd.

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The other day I got an email from a church webmaster who was embarrassed about the site he manages. I can’t tell you how often this happens, and I’ve been there too. Typically the site in question is out-of-date, both in content and look, or it’s missing critical information. But almost without exception, there’s no need to take on the added burden of remorse.

In fact, I can only think of one exception, and that was a long time ago. Back around 1999, I had to pick up the pieces left by a webmaster who had promised the moon and delivered next-to-nothing. He was inexperienced, so that in itself wasn’t so bad. What made me want to go into scolding mother mode was that he locked the site down, wouldn’t share the password and made it impossible for others to help. Of course, he wasn’t embarrassed at all.

But that’s not the norm. Your average church webmaster is conscientious and doing the best he or she can. Many have been saddled with a site that barely works and looks woefully out-of-date. Often they don’t have a lot of background, but are plucky enough to be willing to do what it takes to improve the site.

So what are the keys to overcoming being self-conscious about a site you manage?

1. Understand to your core that the website is the responsibility of the whole church, not just you. I really can’t say this enough, and chances are you too are going to have to spread this message to others. Church leadership is especially accountable for the site, and often they don’t realize it. This is most obvious when they aren’t getting their content to you, but it’s true in other ways too. For example, the minister of my church is great to work with. While as best I can tell she doesn’t have a tech bone in her, nonetheless she’s appreciative and willing to manage staff on the rare occasions there’s a need for that.
2. Do the best you can. There are always things about the site that need work, so just get organized, set reasonable goals, and get going.
3. Enjoy. Celebrate what you’ve accomplished with others who have helped. It’s a joy to see a new technology you’ve installed work or to overhear a visitor say, “I found your church on the web.”

Having said this, it cuts both ways. When the day comes that your church site is fabulous, you can’t puff and preen and take all the credit. Be prepared to share the glory. In any event, it turns out that’s more satisfying. What better feeling is there than to crow with others who have helped? And what more likely way is there to ensure that the site will continue to be first-rate?

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Yesterday I got a frantic phone call about our church’s website. It was a staff member wanting to know if our new alcohol policy was on the site. There was about to be an event on church property and she needed to let the people running it know our rules. She was delighted to hear it was, and I was delighted she’d called. I had always known having our policies on the web would be useful, and here was a great example.

I suspect it may be peculiar to my faith, or perhaps even to my church, but we are awash in policies and procedures. Give us a good challenge, and we answer it with a policy. Not that I think this a bad thing. To the contrary. I even enjoyed reading Robert’s Rules of Order. Seriously. When difficulties arise, and there’s a relevant policy, things typically calm down more quickly.

However, policies don’t do much good if you can’t get your hands on them. For many years our bylaws said they would be available in the church office. However, few of us had easy access to the office. Then even if we did, 80% of the time it was hard to find the needed document – and that’s assuming you knew it existed at all.

Enter the web. About four years ago, I started one of my major nag campaigns. “We need the policies and procedures on the web,” was my constant refrain. Gradually we started to get few on the site. And then, as luck would have it, I got put on a committee that was making recommendations about minor changes to our bylaws. I bet you can guess where that took us.

Our Bylaws Section 8.1.3 now reads: “A current and complete copy of the Policy and Procedures Manual shall be available from the church office and on the church website for reference by the general membership.”

Of course, as anyone who has been around the block a few times might guess, just having this in the bylaws still didn’t guarantee success. It just gave the web diva more leverage. And now, I’m happy to say, we have a fairly comprehensive set of Policies and Procedures on our site.

We also have developed a good process for getting policies on the web. The Board has a designated person (a past president of our congregation) who vets all policies, reformats them and gets them to me. I then take the original Word documents and keep them in a private folder on the web, while also posting a PDF version.

While even I will never argue that having policies on the web is easy to organize, let alone cool, nonetheless I think it’s one of the best uses of your time. If information is power, then this is a simple and effective way to share the power and promote a healthy congregation.

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Sooner or later, any aspiring webmaster worth her salt is going to come into contact with the .htaccess file. The best response to this is to say, “On Guard!” It’s one tricky rascal of a file to deal with, particularly if you are on a Mac.

You’ll read that it’s powerful. True. And you’ll read that it’s easy. Also true. But that’s only in a limited sense. Among other things it’s easy to hose your whole site with it. I should know. I’ve done it twice in the brief life of this blog. The first time I knew instantly, and probably none of you saw it. The second time was Saturday, and for 18 hours it slipped under my radar. Horrors!

I knew I’d altered the .htacess file and I knew I was playing with fire, but I also double-checked and thought all was well. Wrong, wrong, wrong. The home page was fine. Everything else disappeared, while I blithely went to a wonderful oh-so-Nashville concert and got a good night’s sleep. Yesterday I awoke to an email from a dear friend politely inquiring about the state of my blog. I knew in a trice what the problem was. The dreaded .htaccess file. Fortunately, I was also able to fix it in a trice.

I’ll tell you why I was monkeying with the .htaccess file in an upcoming post, but before that, I think a very brief discussion of what it is, why it matters and why it’s such a slippery beast is in order.

What The Heck Is An .htacess File?

First off, it’s an Apache thing. Most of you (whether you realize it or not) probably are using servers running Apache. If your server uses some other software (the most likely alternative being Microsoft’s IIS), you may happily ignore this post.

Second, even if it is Apache, depending on how the sysadmin (system administrator) has configured your server, you may or may not be able to use it. Usually you can, but in highly secured environments you can’t.

Sysadmins can control the things you do with Apache in other ways, which are more efficient and safe than .htaccess. However, most sysadmins aren’t at the beck and call of your average webmaster. If you are using an inexpensive host (a likelihood for most church sites), then you won’t have easy access to the sysadmins, but chances are they will let you use .htaccess.

So now, with those caveats aside, the .htaccess is a text file that controls the configuration of all the files in its directory and child directories, unless the child, as growing children are wont to do, sprouts its own .htaccess file with a countermanding directive.

Most often, I alter an .htaccess to route users to a more friendly page-not-found message than the standard, bleak 404. I also have altered it to control password access to a portion of a website and to speed up response time.

Sample .htaccess Commands

Now for some examples of the commands you can add to your .htaccess file. These snippets of code take up one line each of the file. All you have to alter are the strings in italics (and be sure not to use the quotation marks).

To Disable Directory Browsing (a good thing to do)
“Options All -Indexes”

Change the Default Page
“DirectoryIndex myhome.htm index.htm index.php”

Redirect to a New Page
“Redirect oldpage.html http://www.domain.org/newpage.html”

Redirect to a New Directory
“Redirect /olddir http://www.domain.org/newdir/”

Redirect to a Customized Error Page (another good thing to do)
“ErrorDocument 404 /notfound.html”

Pretty cool to be able to do all of those things, huh? But….

Why .htaccess Is So Crazy Making, Especially On a Mac

First notice that this file name is in fact only a file extension. Nothing precedes the period – and the period is crucial. Upload a file named “htaccess” (instead of “.htaccess”) and it won’t do a thing.

On a Mac, this means you normally won’t be able to even see the file, much less create it. One way Apple protects its machines from user error is to hide system files, including ones that begin with a period. I usually get around this by using either TinkerTool or the “File / Open Hidden” command in BBEdit. Oddly enough, Dreamweaver can see the .htaccess file locally on my machine, but not remotely on the server. For that I use Cyberduck.

However, not only is the .htaccess file hard to find for many of us, it’s hazardous. It turns out you can do much worse things than I have done, such as set up infinite loops. Read some of the official documentation for Apache 1.3 if you’d like a sobering experience.

Also, unbeknownst to you, programs you use like WordPress may be altering your .htaccess file. If you overwrite them, your site will stop working. That’s what I did Saturday. I accidentally overwrote a WordPress directive.

Precautionary Measures

To avoid the pitfalls, there are four things to do.

First, on your server find the .htacess file in the appropriate directory of your site, download it and back it up before you alter a thing.

Second, be clear on your environment. Know not just if you are running Apache, but what version. And be sure to track down your host’s documentation about .htaccess. It can be a goldmine. See, for example, my host’s documentation.

Third, read up on a particular command before you upload a change to the .htaccess. It’s kind of like getting a second opinion for an illness.

Finally, don’t just double check after you upload an altered .htaccess file. Triple check. Try it in another browser and test several pages in different subdirectories.

While I don’t mean to frighten you unduly with talk of illness and hazard, precaution is the key. Using .htaccess wisely can do many great things for your site that you wouldn’t be able to do otherwise, so get to know it and handle with care.

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I’m of two minds about website Content Management Systems (CMSs). On the one hand, they make getting information into a site much easier. You don’t have to know HTML (let alone PHP, etc., etc.) to use one. On the other hand, they are limiting and (worse) they are seductive.

The idea of a CMS seems to particularly appeal to the people who drive me the craziest in the web universe. I’m talking about those who believe that even though they can’t do a website themselves that doing a website should be easy. Not just that is easy, but that it should be easy. So it’s the webmaster’s fault when inevitably it’s not? A webmaster doesn’t really have that much value?

I’m tempted to go into a major rant here. At times such people have led me to call CMSs the devil’s handmaiden. But suffice it to say, they are even more toxic when they convince others of their position. They will say with great authority in their voice, “All you need is a good content management system.” Ministers and Board Presidents are particularly vulnerable to such authoritative nonsense.

I’ve actually had to back several groups out of CMSs, including one very large one. By large, I mean thousands of pages. It was incredibly expensive for them to do this (much more expensive than the initial costs), and they chose to return to a mostly static site. But two years later they are still happy.

The heart of the issue here isn’t whether CMSs are inherently good or bad. It’s the extremes. As with most things in life, the middle way holds the key. Use a CMS wisely, and it’s a beautiful thing. They can make the difference between having a website or not. Or they can enhance a healthy site. However, I expect I’m preaching to the choir here, since blog software is arguably a stripped down, highly focused type of CMS.

In the final analysis, what really matters is your site and its stakeholders. What will work best for them, if anything? Hint: there are no easy answers.

Why and Whither Drupal?

After doing fairly extensive research, I’ve concluded that for now, for my particular congregation, Drupal would be a helpful CMS to at least augment our website – particularly to build the community that’s already there.

We’ve got a fair number of geeks in the congregation, so if I set it up and am hit by a bus, someone else can continue to do the not inconsiderable backend work – securing and upgrading it in particular. It’s also open source, and the software itself costs nothing.

The other open source CMS I’ve played with is Joomla. I like it a lot too, but Drupal has been around longer, and I gravitate to the greater sense of stability. However, for me the biggest difference between the two is that Joomla starts out with lots of bells and whistles, while Drupal you build out with modules. The core program is quite simple.

Further whetting my Drupal appetite was Dan Harper’s call for “Unitarian Universalist geeks [to] commit themselves to maintaining a subset of Drupal” and Scott Well’s response.

Like Scott, I recently discovered and loved the Geeks and God podcast series about Drupal. I highly recommend them for church geeks considering or using Drupal. Alas, Geeks and God is going on a brief hiatus. But if you listen to later episodes (e.g. the most recent, which is excellent for other reasons), they sometimes have more Drupal hints.

In any event (drum roll) here is My Drupal Playground. I won’t guarantee that it will continue to work, since this is the place where I can be as bad as I want to be. While you could in theory subscribe to the feed, I’d advise against it. Even I’m not subscribing to it. I’m just using the blog to jot down quick notes to myself as I learn the peculiarities of Drupal.

One final note for other Drupal enthusiasts: Drupal 6 should be released in the next month or two. For a project like building a subset, we’d probably be better off to postpone getting serious until it’s out and we can assess it. But I, for one, am eager to get going. So happy Drupaling, y’all, and may some of us build something the rest of us can put to good use.

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A year ago, Church Marketing Sucks posited that Stock Photography Sucks. There was heated (and interesting) debate, plus a follow-up poll on how much congregations used it. The majority fell into the same camp as me: “We use original when we can and stock when we need to.”

Actually, I used to avoid stock photography at all costs. But then one day I found the perfect photo on a free stock art site — and moderated my stance. While I still don’t use it extensively, now I’m glad to have it in my toolbox and use it every so often. I don’t use it on critical parts of the sites I maintain, such as their home pages, but I do use it here and there — including on this blog.

Assuming some day you too will need it, here are my favorite free or inexpensive stock art sites. Enjoy. There are some real treasures to be found here.

• stock.xchng (free)
• morgueFile (free)
• Yotophoto (free)
• iStockphoto (costs a little, but has a wonderful repository)

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In my quest for the best graphic resources for church webmasters, Scott Wells directed me to The GIMP (short for GNU Image Manipulation Program). 36 hours later I emerge – impressed, but wrung out – and with some significant reservations. My one sentence summary is if you can get it to run and overlook its geekiness, it’s a great alternative to Photoshop.

I’m hopeful Scott will blog about it, since it has so much potential for a major niche – i.e., those needing a good graphics program who can’t afford Photoshop. Meanwhile, here are my more detailed thoughts on it.

Installing the Blasted Thing

Installation woes are more than a stumbling block. They basically constitute a “No Entry” sign for the non-geek. I ended up trying to install it on three machines.

On a PC running XP I had to install something called “GTK+ 2 Runtime Environment” (heaven help mere mortals) before I could install the actual application. Then it gave me DLL warnings, which scared the daylights out of me. But it ran. And so far, all my other apps still seem to run (blessings on my stalwart Dell PC). The good news is, as I looked around, I started to fall in love. I found commands like “Zealous Cropping” and “Script-Fu.” I’m a pushover for articulate geeks, not to mention it may go beyond Photoshop in some areas.

Next up was a Mac running OSX 10.4 (Tiger). Forget it. There were, by my count, five different ways to install it – and none of them worked for a time-pressed diva like me. I spent what felt like an eternity dealing with the fact that I didn’t have something called X11 for Mac OSX. I found scads of advice to “just” retrieve it from my OSX installer disk. Well, like many other people I don’t have the OSX installer disk for that machine. Why Apple doesn’t just put the thing on the web for download evades me.

Machine number three was an eMac running OS 10.3 (Panther). By this time I was in high dudgeon and nothing was going to stop me. Who cared if my machines were permanently damaged by these weird pieces of software? Gentle reader – this is an ill-advised mind state for working with your computers. Pamper them. Don’t do as I do. Do as I say – and if you are concerned that software might damage your machine, trust your instincts.

In the end, thank heavens, it didn’t damage my trusty old eMac. In fact I got it to work. If you are running 10.3, you can download X11 here and then get the GIMP app itself from here. But be warned: just because you can successfully install it, that doesn’t mean it runs like other OSX software. You must first run X11, found in the Utilities folder of Applications (where it installs itself without telling you), and only then can you open the GIMP. After that be prepared for weirdness in the way it responds to both mouse and keyboard commands. For example, you have to use Control-Z (instead of Apple-Z) to undo a command.

How It Measures Up To Photoshop

Suffice it to say, I did put it through the paces of my six basic commands, but if you’ve gotten so far as to install the GIMP successfully, I suspect you won’t need my hand-holding to figure out how to do these things. Or maybe I’ll recover in a few days and give you the specifics. Or maybe Scott can.

The Cliff Notes version is that it does do all these things quite well, with the exception of “Save for Web,” which it does well (if obscurely) for jpegs and adequately for gifs.

All-in-All

I have the distinct impression the developers of GIMP are more interested in other geeks than they are in graphic artists or poor-as-church-mice webmasters. If you can get past the major barriers of installing and opening it, you will probably (like me) love it. That said, I certainly can’t use it in my professional life. Just the fact that it doesn’t do “Save for Web” seamlessly creates a workflow issue for me. But in my church web diva life? I think it’s such fun I may just use it routinely – in solidarity with others who can’t afford Photoshop. Maybe I can even influence the developers to pay attention to mere mortals. I suspect it would be a win/win.

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Mr. Web Diva, who happens to be a first-rate photographer, has been using Google’s Picasa for a year or so now and has been quite happy with it. So I thought I’d try it out and see how it would work for my graphic needs as a church webmaster. Specifically I looked at how it would perform the same six functions I covered for Photoshop.

To begin with, I had to use his PC, because Picasa doesn’t run on Macs. I suppose Google’s logic is that Mac users have iPhoto, which covers much of the same territory. However, this in itself rules Picasa out for me. Nevertheless, for those of you on PCs who can’t afford Photoshop, I persevered. Here’s how Picasa performed on basic graphic needs for a church webmaster.

Rotate
To rotate a photo 90 degrees, you simply click the icon near the bottom of the screen. Small adjustments are done using the “Basic Fixes” tab and selecting “Straighten.” As is generally true of Picasa, it’s easy and intuitive.

Crop
Also under “Basic Fixes,” select “Crop.” If you then select the manual mode, you have as much control as in Photoshop.

Resize
Shrinking a photo is done at the point you save it. Click the “Export” button and then adjust with the “Image Size Options.” Unfortunately it only lets you adjust the longer side of the photo. In my example used for Photoshop, I’d have had to guess or do some serious arithmetic to figure out how to get the width to 180 pixels.

Save for Web
In the same export panel used for resizing, there is an “Image Quality” dropdown with five choices (including “Custom”). “Normal” seems to be what I would call web-optimized. “Custom” makes fine tuning possible, but it’s like Photoshop before version 5.5 – you’re flying blind; there is no preview.

Sharpen
If you have a fuzzy photo to start with, before you export it, select the “Effects” tab and then sharpen. Fine-tuning isn’t possible. Also, I gather when you resize a photo (during the export), Picasa automatically sharpens it for you.

Make a transparent background
Picasa is strictly a photo editor. It saves files as jpegs, not gifs, and so it can’t be used for a transparent background.

All-in-all, Picasa is wonderful for its intended purpose – photo management. It’s intuitive and you can’t beat the price. It particularly shines if you want to create a web photo album. However, no church webmaster (whether with PC or without) is going to be able to rely on Picasa for all of their graphic needs. It’s not a Photoshop replacement, nor is it meant to be.

The good news is that in the comments on my previous post, Scott and Lance both recommended GIMP, which is free and open-source. I know Scott and Lance and respect their opinions. GIMP runs on all major platforms, so next up I’m going to give it a whirl in hopes that it’s a better match.

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I use Adobe Photoshop every day — and I love it. While it has plenty of healthy competition that I plan to cover eventually, it’s generally considered the gold standard for photo editing. So, with no further ado, let’s jump in and talk specifics.

Here is a sample photo to work on. It’s from the front yard of my church last winter.

Using this photo, I’ll show you most of the things I do every day with Photoshop. All are easy if you know how. More to the point, you’ll get a sense of what’s a must and what’s safe to ignore when you first start using Photoshop. That’s the hardest thing about it for a beginner — knowing where to start.

Rotate

Usually I use the rotate command to swivel a photo 90 degrees. But every so often, I want to rotate one just a little. In this photo I’d like the right side of the wayside pulpit to be parallel to the edge. The command is the same whether it’s 90 or 0.1 degrees. From the menu, you select “Image,” then “Rotate Canvas,” and then in this case “Arbitrary.” I filled in 2 degrees and checked CCW (counter-clockwise). Here is the result:

Crop

There are two reasons to crop a photo. The first is to focus on the subject. The second is to make it fit in the limited real estate of the web page. In our example I’m going to focus on my church’s wayside pulpit and crop off the part of the building you can see on the left side. To do this you use the crop tool found in the tool palette on the left side of Photoshop. You can also select it by entering “c” on your keyboard. Then you drag your mouse over the portion of the photo you want to keep. You can fiddle after making the initial selection; it only will really crop when you hit return. Here is the sample photo after being cropped:

Resize

Usually this means shrinking a photo. It’s rare that you can safely enlarge a raster image. To make a graphic smaller, from the menu select “Image” and “Image Size.” Then select the size you want. Usually you’re going to want to control the width and let the length be what it will. In this instance, I shrank the photo to 180 pixels wide.

Sharpen

When you shrink a photo, it will get fuzzy. I can’t tell you how often I see fuzzy photos on the web. It drives me nuts. They are just one command shy of a full deck. The photo right above is a great example. So, this is my number one Photoshop tip. From the menu select “Filter,” then “Sharpen” and then “Unsharp Mask.” The default settings (Amount = 50%, Radius = 1.0 pixels and Threshold = 0) are usually fine, though you can play with them, watch the results and pick what looks best to you. Voilà. A defuzzed photo:

Save for Web

This photo is now web-ready — all except for being “optimized.” Optimizing graphics for the web means finding the perfect balance between the smallest file size possible and retaining image quality. This used to be a bear to do, but ever since Photoshop 5.5, it’s been a breeze.

From the menu, select “File” and then “Save for Web.” In the window that pops open, I’d recommend selecting the “4-Up” tab at the top. When you do this you’ll see your image four times. The upper left will have the original image, while the upper right is the default selection. Typically, from the panel on the right I select the dropdown right under the “Done” button and choose “JPEG High” for a photo. Then with another instance of the photo I select “JPEG Medium.” Last of all, I choose the better photo and save it to my website.

Make a transparent background

I use almost all of the same commands for illustrations that I use for photos — plus one extra. That’s saving a graphic with a transparent background. Take this pretty chalice below (created by Inga Johannesen for the UU Church of Chattanooga). How do you make it so it can shift around on a gradient background like the one on the right?

In Photoshop the first thing to do is copy and paste it to a new file, using a series of menu commands. (1) Select / All. (2) Edit / Copy. (3) File / New. (4) Edit / Paste. Over on the lower right of Photoshop, you should see the Layers palette. If you don’t, choose “Window” and then “Layers.” In it, you’ll see two layers: Background and Layer 1, which has the chalice. Click on the eye icon next to the Background layer to make it invisible. Then click on Layer 1, and from the menu choose “Select” and “Color Range.” Click in the dialog box to select the white background and then select OK. You should see “marching ants” outlining the chalice. Choose “Edit” and “Cut.” The white background will disappear and you’ll see a mottled gray background — Photoshop’s way of showing a transparent background.

Then it’s time to “Save for Web.” This time, however, from the dropdown under the “Done” button, select a GIF (e.g. GIF 128 No Dither). GIF is better for simple graphics — plus it makes transparencies possible. You can’t make parts of JPEGs transparent. Once you select GIF, the mottled gray background should show on some of the choices. If it doesn’t, click the Transparency box. If the background isn’t white or close to it, chances are you will have to adjust the Matte box too. Just click on it and select the correct background color. When you enter “Done” you will have a transparent gif, something like the below:

Rest assured: all of these techniques, even transparencies, are easy to do. Of course, not everyone can afford Photoshop. So next time I’ll try doing the same thing in Picasa. Stay tuned.

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