Welcome to this week’s installment of The Never-ending FAQ, the constantly evolving adjunct to our Submission Guidelines and general-purpose unfocused Q&A session. If you have a question you’d like to ask about Stupefying Stories or Rampant Loon Press, feel free to post it as a comment here or to email it to our submissions address. I can’t guarantee we’ll post a public answer, but can promise every question we receive will be read and considered.
We seem to have a lot of questions about artwork in the mailbag this week, so let’s get right to them. Beginning with:
Q: Where in the hell did you get that spot-on image for today’s story?
A: Thanks for noticing! Yes, that is a pretty nice illustration for “Outside,” isn’t it?
The short answer is that we got it from the Adobe Stock library, and specifically from the portfolio of an artist/photographer who goes by the name of Philipp.
All the artwork we use on this site comes from either stock art libraries, public domain image libraries (e.g., NASA has some great libraries of space art, and since the American taxpayers have already paid for it, most of it is public domain and free to use), or in a few rare cases, directly the artist or photographer themselves.
For example, this photo, that accompanied Andrew Jensen’s story, “Waxing Crescent,” was kindly supplied by Andrew Jensen himself.
Q: How did you find an image that fit “Outside” so perfectly?
A: It wasn’t easy. Sometimes we get lucky and find an image that’s perfectly suited to a given story. More often, we spend a lot of time searching, comparing, and figuring out if one of the candidate images can be made to work, given some small adjustments.
We look at a lot of artwork that is just plain beautiful, but won’t serve its primary purpose, which is to entice people to read the story. For example, the illo at the stop of this column—
—is one candidate we considered and rejected. It’s a beautiful, colorful, and enticing image, yes, but it doesn’t suit the story. If we’d used this one, people might have read the story, but we felt there was a strong possibility they’d get to the end of the story and be disappointed, and consider the illo to have been deceptive advertising.
Here are some of the other illustrations we considered and rejected for “Outside.”
Too bleak and realistic.
Too trippy.
Too schmaltzy.
Too anime. And we need a forest scene, not an urban scene.
Great picture, but wrong aspect ratio.
The images we use on the site must have a 4w x 3h aspect ratio. It’s hard-coded into the template and we can’t change it. If we deviate too far from the 4x3 ratio—in pixels, that’s 640 wide by 480 tall, or more often, 1280x960—the auto-generated thumbnail images that are used all over the site come out looking skewed, compressed, or bloated.
Q: You mentioned adjusting the artwork. Can’t you just fix that in Photoshop?
A: Within limits. We don’t use Adobe Photoshop anymore. The license got too expensive and Adobe’s decision to make Photoshop a web app made it too slow and hard to use. We use Corel PaintShop Pro now for most of our image processing. It’s cheaper, runs locally, and does everything Photoshop can do, plus has the sentimental advantage of being descended from JASC Paint Shop Pro, which was the product of yet another local (in Eden Prairie) startup software company that got assimilated and obliterated.
I knew some people who worked for JASC. I hope they have jobs now.
And yes, most of the images we use on this site are adjusted in some way. Sometimes we’ll tinker with the tinting or depth of field. For example, this photo—
—which was used with “Feline,” by M. Legree, is a public domain photo of Neville Chamberlain unveiling the world’s funniest pre-war joke, but we sepia-tinted it to make it look older.
Almost everything we use on this site is at least down-sampled and cropped, to fit the 4x3 aspect ratio limit and make the image file quicker to load. Sometimes this takes a bit of creativity. For example, the original file for the illo at the top of this column was 2688 x 1536 pixels and a 1.11 MB JPEG file, so after we licensed the image we down-sampled it to be a 1690x960 PNG file—which actually made it a larger file, but PNG files are more portable and less lossy than JPG files—
—and then cropped it to our preferred 1280x960 dimensions.
In cropping it, we lost some details we’d have preferred to keep. Sometimes it’s possible to get clever with the cropping and resizing and add bands of blank space at the sides or on the top and bottom, to end up with the size we need. Usually the added space is white or transparent, but to illustrate the point, this time, it’s fuchsia.
In truth, though, the more time we need to spend adjusting the image to make it work, the less likely we are to use the image in the first place.
Q: That’s surprisingly interesting. I have a story under contract with you and coming up for publication, and I have the perfect image to go with it. Can I send this image to you?
A: Yes, but—we must know the source of the image you’re sending us. Everything we use on this site must be either properly licensed or provably in the public domain, or else created by you. Too often people send us images they “found” on a website somewhere, and then, if we’re lucky, it might be something for which we can find a source and obtain a license, but more often, it’s not.
[Nb: For example, images found on deviantart.com are rarely usable, for licensing reasons.]
We appreciate your willingness to help, but please: if you’re going to suggest an image to use with your story, let us know where you found it.
Q: You asked me for an author’s photo to go with my story. What are your requirements?
A: First off, the author’s photo is optional. If you don’t provide us with a photo to use with your author’s bio, we won’t leave the space blank, we’ll fill it with something else.
Secondly, any photo will do, as long as you feel it represents you. We’ve published professional studio portraits, cell phone snapshots, childish caricatures, photos of the author’s favorite cat, public domain publicity stills of old movie stars…
The one thing we cannot use is a social media thumbnail. We’ve had authors send us their 32x32 thumbnails from one site or another. Those are too small to use.
We don’t have a maximum file size limit for author’s photos. We used to have one, but that was a function of our old mail server. Now, send us what you like. If it’s too large, we’ll down-sample it.
Just, one favor, please. If you send us an author’s photo, have the courtesy to rename the file to your name! You would not believe how many author’s photos come in with the file name “headshot.jpg,” or “IMG20241214.JPEG,” or something like that.
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Any more questions? If so, you know where to send them.
See you next Wednesday,
Bruce Bethke
Editor, Stupefying Stories
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