Need help regarding resizing pictures for posting

[Moggeh]

Hi all, I am having problems.
I take photos with my digital camera and get them into photoshop, I can adjust the contrast and colour balance and everything just fine. The thing that buggers me up is resizing it so that I can upload and keep the image under the 100k limit. I have tried a few things, changing the quality when I save, changing the image size in photoshop. All of these work as far as getting the picture under 100k but then the quality suffers big time and I end up with really grainy and pixelly looking pictures which I think is lowering my ratings. At the moment I have no minis posted because it was bugging me that they were all looking so horrible.. looked like I had painted some lego men rather than minis.. they were that pixelly! I would really really really appreciate it if anyone can give me some advice on how to get my pictures under 100k and maintain as much quality as possible. Thanks in advance guys and gals

Moggy.

 

[Dragonsreach]

Ok Welcome to the forums and what a question to start off with.

My basic advice is to make sure that your camera setting are allowing you to take a picture with a resolution which shows up in Photoshop as around 300 dpi.
Then resize the pics to 600 dpi. (Save as a copy) shrink the picture to approximately 5-600 picels wide. (Save as a copy again)
Then got to File> Save for web. That should reduce the size of the image file to a reasonable level.
Saving as a web image sometimes screws up the size of the picture so you may well have to adjust the image size down to around 450 picels wide to allow it to post and be viewed reasonably on here.

Good luck and if you have any more problems just ask.

 

[Spacemunkie]

How do Moggy!

*Ahem*

You\'ll find most digicams shoot at 72ppi, they are just MASSIVE pics! There is no point adding resolution if the pic is for web use only (interpolation is pointless anyway...).

All you have to do is:

Image > Image Size: Pic should be no more than 500 px high and 600 px wide to fit neatly on screen.

File > Save For Web: You get a \'before\' and \'after\' thumbnail, showing you the effect of your compression. Set to JPEG, and move the slider left and right until you nail the image at just under 100kb. You will lose almost no \'on screen\' quality at this size of image. It will not alter the physical dimensions of the pic either, just the compression.

Easy huh?!

 

[No Such Agency]

What Spacemunkie said

I find that I can always get a satisfactory front-and-back-shot image around 400-500 px wide and 1000-1200 px tall for under 100 kb using \"Save for Web\" in Photoshop. For instance, this image is only 95 kb!

 

[Spacemunkie]

And a quality 95kb it is too!

Hadn\'t seen that finished NSA. Very nice indeed!

 

[Einion]

You can\'t go far wrong with Spacemunkie\'s advice, but just get used to working at 72ppi and sizing images in pixels only and you\'ll soon get the hang of things. As the FAQ tells us, maximum image width is 600 pixels wide and you know what the file size limit is, so once you\'ve resized your pic to the width you want and save as a JPEG, when the JPEG Options screen comes simply pull the Quality slider across to the left until the size (shown at the bottom of the window) is below 100k and you\'re set. In addition to No Such Agency\'s example, this one from my gallery is 323x1800 pixels but only 79KB in size.

If you try these tips and things are still not looking right there are still a couple of areas that might be giving you trouble. The first thing you might want to check is in Photoshop\'s preferences (Ctrl-K on the PC, Command-K on the Mac) near the top is the popup menu for Image Interpolation. I can\'t remember what the default setting is but you want this to be Bicubic, from what you\'ve said about your images being very pixelated it\'s possible your copy might be set to either Bilinear or Nearest Neighbour.

The second thing is just related to the amount of reduction of the image, so this will vary somewhat depending on what you\'re doing each time. For example, if you crop down to the centre of one of your photos and then resize this to 600 pixels in width it won\'t look as good as if you resized the entire image - this is simply a matter of the number of pixels the software has to work with. Also, some ratios are better than others - exactly halving an image will give better results than reducing by some random amount because Photoshop is mapping pixels in a more regular manner - but generally speaking if you are reducing a lot you don\'t need to worry about this much.

Last tip, in case you\'ve not read it before always sharpen you picture as the last operation before you save the JPEG for posting online, not on the full-size image. Use Unsharp Mask as this is the best default sharpening filter; try settings of 300, 0.3 and 5 from top to bottom, this should give you decent results for model shots of around the size we\'re talking about. If it looks too sharp for your taste reduce the Amount slowly.

There, that was more information than you really wanted wasn\'t it?

Einion

 

[Moggeh]

Thanks for all the feedback guys. I\'ll give it a go this week sometime and re upload my pics. Cheers again and thanks for the warm welcome.

 

[vincegamer]

One last trick I learned is to save a copy as a .tff file.
Then reduce the .tif to the size you want, then resave as .jpg
You get less distortion that way.

 

[Moggeh]

Right, using some of my old photos I tried a few of these things and it works like an absolute charm I didn\'t notice how blurry the pictures were until I used that unsharp mask And now I see I can have a few different angles of a mini and stack them on top of each other so they will post correctly! Although, now I am going to take some more photos using the blue to white backdrop technique because the ones i have already just have a lot of random stuff in the background (paint pots etc) and they are a bit distracting. So as soon as I get this done and get them up, please feel free to have a look and leave some feedback on not only the paintwork but wether or not I have used the right amount of sharpening and lighting etc Thanks again for all your help folks, I really appreciate it