Digital photo

[Rafael]

hello everyone!

I am new with digital photos so please bear with me. I am wondering how can I reduce the size of the pictures below 100k. All the pictures I take with my new (used) D30 are all over 300k. I want to send some using email and those files are too large. By the way, after taking the first picture with the D30 I have decided to go 100% digital and I am asking myself what took me so long to get this D30. I will be getting rid of my Elan II, and ofcourse I will be keeping my 17-35 2.8, 50 1.4, 70-200 2.8 and 550 ex :-).
I will be asking many questions on this great forum.

[Roger_Cavanagh]

Rafael,

Your best bet is to make the images smaller, say 800x533 pixels or quarter-size, which is 540x360. If you then save images in JPG format at less than maximum quality you should be able to get down below 100k.

The method will depend what editing software you have, so without knowing that I cannot be more specific.

You will find that the reduced images will look perfectly acceptable when they've been emailed to your friends.

Regards,

[Swat2]

You can make your file size anything you want with your editing software. Careful!! Resizing alone will not reduce your file size if you don't make sure that you maintain or reduce your ppi (pixels per inch). Some programs have a 'Maintain File Size' button that will drive you nuts if you don't click it OFF!

For viewing on a monitor, you don't need a ppi higher than 72, and with a nice resize to 3x4 or 4x6 with a medium jpg compression, you should be well under 100K while maintaining excellent viewing quality.

Good luck!

Don

[john_houghton]

Swat2 wrote:
For viewing on a monitor, you don't need a ppi higher than 72 .....


The ppi resolution setting of the image has no bearing on the way the image is displayed in a web browser. It is only of relevance when printing. The pixel dimensions determine the size displayed on the screen. E.g. if the image size is 400 by 300 and the screen resolution is is 800 x 600, the linear size of the displayed image will be half that of the screen. If the screen resolution is 1280 x 960, then the image will be a third of the size. If the image dimensions are larger than the screen resolution setting, you will need to scroll the image to see it all. (Internet Explorer V6 will scale large images to fit the window).

John

[Swat2]

You're correct, of course, John. I expressed it the way I did because the new guy was interested in getting his file size as small as possible, and I wanted to discourage him from sending email photos of 300 and 600 ppi as so many in my family do!

Don

[soumya63]

The last trick is to reduce the color depth from 16 bit per channel to 8 bit per channel or better still make it websafe. You can do this in photoshop by choosing "Save for Web" option from the File menu.

So your steps should be

1) Open your picture in your photo editor
2) Reduce the color depth to 8 bit per channel
3) Resample while maintaining aspect ratio to 800x600 or smaller size. Ensure DPI should be 72 while resampling.
4) Save as jpeg for with quality setting to medium.

If you do all of this, then you should be able to get a file as small as 40 to 80 kb (depending on the picture)

You can use Irfanview, an excellent free graphic file viewer to do all of these without even opening photoshop.