So my compact 10MP camera produces 5MB JPG picture files. I can email these, but want to reduce them down to something more realistic.
Though I still retain a decent picture for the recipient, unlike the 100KB jobbies usually sent through to me..
Any particular size would be optimal or do I pick an arbitrary figure?
Oh and any specific (cheap) software that does decent reductions, or do I stick to the std free stuff on my PC?
depends what the recipient is going to do with them, really.
If it's just to show snapshots to mates etc then 800/600 or 1024/768 is probably enough.
if you use hotmail you can now upload pics and just email people a link, btw, if you don't use photobucket or similar.
lossless or lossy?
I'm in medical imaging, so quality is paramount and we use lossless compression (around 2.5:1) in the first instance. After a few years, the value of the images drops and we would have thrown out the hard copy images, but now we just apply a higher compression level, which can be as high as 50:1 (plain film imaging of broken bones)
Have a look at [url= http://www.faststone.org/FSResizerDetail.htm ]Faststone Resizer[/url].
It depends on what you think the recipient will do with it. If it's just to view then 800pixels width and 80% image quality will do fine.
If you want them to zoom into them / print them then full size 85%.
Or somewhere in between.
If you drop image size set sharpening to +1 and you'll get a crisper result.
Cheers for the replies.. very sad I've always used % drop, and not throught about piccing a image size.
Gone for 1600x1200 on a test batch (aprox 1mb each), as any photo's I recieve I'd at least expect to be able to print them out