Aspect Ratio
Aspect ratio describes the relationship of an image’s width to its height. In other words, it describes the image’s shape.
Aspect ratios are written as a formula, such as 1:1 or 3:1. For example, a square image would have an aspect ratio of 1:1 because the width and height are the same. Whether the image is 500x500 pixels or 5000x5000 pixels makes no difference to the aspect ratio; it would still be 1:1.
If an image has an aspect ratio of 3:1, that would mean the image is wide and only slightly tall. For logos, we recommend an aspect ratio of 3:1 to best fit in the provided space on your ezCater page.
For menu item and banner photos, we recommend a minimum of 1200x800 pixels, which would be an aspect ratio of 3:2.
You can learn more about how we use logos and see examples on our logo help center page. Our page on menu item photos has great examples of photos that both work and don’t work with our system.
Crop
Cropping removes the outside edges of a photo and frames the attention around the photo’s subject.
Our system is built to work best with high-quality, horizontal images at a minimum of 1200x800 pixels. Because our system will automatically crop photos, we recommend providing ample space around the food, like pictured below. The crop can be moved up or down. It can’t be moved side to side and zooming out is not an available option.
A great example of a menu item photo:
How the photo will be cropped:
How the photo appears when uploaded to a menu item:
Below is an example of a menu item photo that’s too zoomed in. You can see around the red frame that a good portion of the burger bun would be cropped out.
Want to know why vertical photos don’t work well with our system? You can learn more about that in this section of the ezPhotos Help Center page! We also have a section that explains how our banner crop works and another section that provides great banner examples.
Exposure
Exposure describes the amount of light that reaches the lens of your camera. Light is a very important element in photography because it can determine how bright or dark your photos appear. Whether a photo is overexposed or underexposed, the quality and details of the photo become lost.
If a photo is overexposed, that means there is too much light.
If a photo is underexposed, that means there is not enough light.
A photo that is perfectly exposed will have a balanced amount of light and shadows, and its details will be crisp and clear.
Focus
Focus is the quality of having clear visual definition.
Any photos that are submitted for your ezCater menu must be crisp and clear so that the customer can see what they’ll receive when placing an order.
Below is a great example of a photo that is in focus:
Pixel
Pixels make up the element of a photo.
If you were to look at a digital photo on a screen and zoom in significantly, you would notice the photo becomes a grid of rows and columns containing little colorful dots. These dots are pixels.
Below is a photo that shows a magnified portion of how pixels look.
Learn more about why pixels play an important role in the Resolution section below.
Resolution
Resolution refers to the number of pixels in an image. Like aspect ratio, resolution is also used to describe a photo by its width to height, and will include the total number of pixels in a photo.
For example our system works best with photos that are high resolution and must be a minimum of 1200x800 pixels. Larger photos can be sized down to 1200, however, smaller images that are considered low resolution, cannot be sized up to meet the 1200x800 pixel count requirement. This is because smaller images have already been compressed and are lower in quality. Enlarging a smaller image would result in an image that’s highly pixelated and unclear.
For example, this image below was originally a resolution of 6000x4000 pixels and has been sized down to 1200x800 pixels. Because this image is still high resolution, you can see it’s crisp and clear.
The image below was sized down to approximately 400x266 pixels, then was sized up to 1200x800 pixels. Because the image was initially sized down to a lower resolution, resizing it back up causes the image to lose a lot of quality.
