Question on digital photo's

[Ken Park]

A-lot of web sites ask you only submit photo's of a max 150 kb. What I've been doing is using my adobie photoshop 6 and reducing the size to get down too 150kb. I know other people are doing this differently because when the upload the photo's they are full screen size. Mine are about 1/3 screen size.

So whats the method? or do I need another program other than my adobi photoshop 6 to do this?

I know Tom Hastie can answer this! Help teach an old dog a new trick!


PS: Apparently another Orville was sold to someone in the Ottawa area.
Att from my best guess there should be 4 in Ottawa, 1 in Ajax.

[cgroves]

There isn't too much you can do to a digital photograph that you can't do with photoshop. I use CS2 at work and for web graphics and photography and it is simply amazing.
The ratio of the size of the image file has a lot to do with what is in the image (lots of detail, less detail, easily compressed repeating patterns) and the format the file is saved in. TIFFs and BMPs while being what are called lossless formats have very little effective compression, but you never loose any of the image information. JPEG has very good compression at the cost of some fractal artifacts that show up at higher compression levels. GIF has relatively poor compression for photographs but compresses constant tone graphics very well so it makes a great choice for web page backgrounds, etc.
Most of the time a JPEG saved with relatively high compression is the best choice for web use where you aren't going to be modifying the image any further (I hate receiving compressed JPEGs which need to be manipulated further before being used. The results are almost always terrible). Use the preview function and gradually increase the compression testing as you go. The effects will be a little different for each image.

[Tom Hastie]

Hey Ken,
I
For a couple years now, I've done most of my simple picture jobs with a program called PolyView. I started using it long before I got my hands on a copy of photoshop, and I still do use it for alot of stuff because A) I've figured out how to use it...
and,
B) It's fast and pretty easy.

It has a really simple/handy batch coversion function that will let you convert a whole bunch of photos from one format to another at once. That function is really handy when you have 100 photos that you need to convert. It also has some really nice browsing tools that have been made less useful now that Windows XP will let you view thumbnails, but they still get used by me occasionally.

You can download it here: www.polybytes.com. The trial version is free. You just have to click an extra dialogue box when you exit, and some of the printing functions are disabled. Like I said, Photoshop will do everything this program will (and more), but I know where the buttons are in Polyview, and it does the cropping, resizing, and compression that I need it to do, so why wait an extra 30 seconds for photoshop to start up ;).

In polyview if I'm posting on Calmdays, I typically open the JPEG in question and then do an export. In the export dialogue, you can leave it as a JPEG, and change the "JPEG Quality" - this is the compression setting corey was talking about. IMHO, for most web applications you can go down to 30-40% before it gets noticable. This way the resolution will still be high (making the image appear large on the screen when viewed), but the file size will be manageable. If you can't get the image small enough with just the quality, you have to reduce the image size (dimension in pixels) slightly and try the quality again. It's fairly easy to find a balance between Quality and Image size that looks okay when posted on the web.

In addition, RCGroups recently upgraded their forum software to make it even easier on us. The forum application now does the compression for you, so in my Orville thread on RCGroups, I just uploaded the raw image as it comes out of my camera (~2-3megs, 2048x1536 pixels) and the forum compresses it as needed.

Calmdays is just still behind the times (:P) and you have to do your own compression.

Tom

[skiprc]

Hi Ken:
Change the resolution to 72 pixels/inch, reduce the size to 600 pixels by 400 pixels (or thereabouts) and save the file as a JPEG with 30% compression.