Photoshop

If you carry an iPhone or an iPod Touch, you also carry a great platform for displaying your artwork. While photographers such as Scott Bourne claim that they sold artwork straight after showing it on their iPhone, this has never happened to me. But I’ve shown my images in a number of casual settings, often by accident, since the topic just came up. Thus, it pays (literally and figuratively) to be prepared.

So how do you best showcase your artwork on an iPhone? Here are some tips:

Resize your images: The iPhone’s native resolution is 480 x 320 pixels at 163ppi. Since it allows you to zoom in, I resize my images to 960 x 640 pixels at 163ppi. You could make them even bigger, but since the iPhone’s storage space is limited, there’s a tradeoff between better resolution and more images.

Create portfolios: Similar to any showing of your artwork, create portfolios centering around subjects, trips or events, then pick only the best images. Store these as separte portfolios, then transfer them to your iPhone. When you show your artwork in a more ad-hoc or casual setting, people don’t have the time to look at 300 pictures. Thus, I typically pick between 10 and 20 pictures for a portfolio.

Adjust for the iPhone screen: The iPhone screen is not color-calibrated and to my eye, it’s very contrasty. Thus, I have to adjust my images, so they display at their best on the iPhone. Unfortunately, this is a manual process – there’s no one-setting-fits-all slider, button or action you can use in Photoshop. However, if you use a sequence of images in a portfolio that were all taken under similar lighting conditions, Photoshop, Aperture and Lightroom make it easy to apply adjustments to a set of images, so you do not have to do this manually for every single image.

What other tricks do you use to best show your images on an iPhone?

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