scrub boy wrote:By the way, how do I reduce the size of images below 1MB so they can be posted?
This depends on the software you have available to you, but essentially there are two things you can do:
- Scale it down to a smaller size (and therefore fewer pixels)
- Increase the compression
With JPEG images (which most people use for photography), you can reduce the quality of the picture (which increases the compression). You can actually reduce the quality down a LOT before it will be terribly distorted to human eyes. For JPEGs, this can result in a vastly smaller file size, for a slightly lower quality picture. The quality option for JPEGs is usually available during the saving process for most image applications. Most applications default to about 80% quality. Try 50% quality and see how much difference that makes to file size (and viewable quality).
NB: When dealing with JPEGs, avoid saving, then opening, then saving, then opening then saving, etc. Because JPEG compression is lossy, every time you save the file, the saved file may be lower quality that the one you opened. Successive open/saves could cause successive losses in picture quality. So always start with the original when possible.
(You can still save as often as you like along the way while doing various image processing steps, but don't save, then close then open to continue your work).
This doesn't affect non-lossy image files, such as PNG.
Posted: Wed 28 May, 2008 1:53 pm
