please help resolution issues

[bruceella]

My wife and I are very new to digital photography. After looking around quite a bit we bought the Canon Powershot A80, for a balance of cost and versatility.

what we would like is to be able to take photos at the best resolution so that they can later be printed off if there is one we would like to frame. For everyday / album purposes we would like to store them electronically on CD. (the ideal would be to have a copy that looks good on screen (or for emailing, with the high resolution also stored in case we want to print/enlarge)

Thus far we have been using the highest resolution on the 'superfine' compression settings for taking the phots. This produces a good quality image (for our purposes), but when we view this image on the computer screen it is obviously too big (at +- 2500 pixels across, since the computer screen is only around 1000 pixels across). When zoomed out using the windows explorer or using the supplied software (zoom browser) the image looks very fuzzy (eg hair just becomes fuzz, looking very soft). We tried using teh 'resize option to reduce the image to a size that could be viewed at 1:1 zoom on the screen, but this still seems to lack clarity.
Photos I see on the web seem to be clear and sharp on screen.

Is this a software dependent issue to get a good qulaity image of less pixels so that it can be viewed on screen but still look clear.

We would appreciate any advice

kind regards
Bruce Ella

[Scottes]

You might want to try viewing software that does a better job of scaling the image to fit the screen. I recommend IrfanView - it's free and fast, and does a decent job of scaling. Other like ACDSee, and ThumbPlus is a good one for catalogging images. Both ACDSee and Thumbsplus are shareware and cost about $50, but both will also catalog images.

But these products still might not produce the quality you wish - they all scale on the fly using a simple but fast algorithm. You may wish to permanently resize the images to fit that screen. Programs that do this user a longer, slower algorithm but this does a much better job. On the fly scaling may still look jaggie, while a permanent resize should never look jaggie going from 2500 to 1000 pixels. Permanent resizing takes a few to several seconds per image, while on the fly scaling takes far less than a second.

Paint Shop Pro (also shareware) does a great job, and will also let you edit the images (like removing red-eye, or cropping) and does a fine job of printing. It's often called the poor man's Photoshop, but even at the cheap price of ~$80 it may be more than what you wish. I'd imagine that many free or very cheap programs will do simple resizing.

You may also want to consider a program that will resize a whole bunch of photos at once, rather than doing each by hand. Here's a $10 I stumbled across - http://www.icegiant.com/dprz.shtml. Find others by searching for the phrase "batch resize"

Hope this helps...

[Scottes]

Re-reading your message I see that your resizes still look fuzzy. You may need a quality resizer that can also sharpen the image once it's been resized. Sharpening is done using a process called Unsharp Mask or USM. It looks like Paint Sho Pro is what you want - http://www.jasc.com. Try it for 30 days, $80 if you like it.

[CyberDyneSystems]

I second the suggestion of ACDsee,.. it will do for you many things including solving two of your listed problems

1: It will "rescale" the image in the viewer so it will fit in the provided viewing window while retaining a high quality image.

2: It can also be used to actual resize the images itself to make handy smaller res copies for emailing and posting on websites.. it will resize an entire folder of images in one batch process. I hav efound the resized images I make with ACDsee very good,. and rarely do I need to do any further work.

[DaveB]

Irfanview allows you to do batch resizing of pictures.

I like its slide show capabilities too.

http://www.irfanview.com/

For printing, Qimage has been worth the few bucks it cost. Very powerful printing utility.

http://www.ddisoftware.com/qimage/

[srh72]

After reading this post I believe my situation is similar. I take pictures in M1, superfine resolution (1600X1200) using a canon A80. When I open the pics in Canon's zoombrowser ex preview window (33% zoom) they appear distorted. Vertical and horizontal elements of the pics have a jagged, sawtooth appearence. When I zoom to 100% the pics look normal. When I prepare the pics for email (lower the resolution) they also look better. Printed pics look ok. Will these pics appear normal if I use Photoshop Elements to browse them. I can't edit a pic that appears distorted when in reality it is ok.

[4walls]

Shooting highest res is a great idea. This way you can crop the picture if you need to and still get a good print or enlargment from it.

If you decide to resample the picture to a smaller format to fit your screen, make sure you sharpen the picture after resampling down. It is also important not to resample too much at once. If you want a good quality picture from a large file, resample down about 33% then sharpen, resample down again and sharpen again. The best way is to experiment with it and see what works for you.