re-sizing image for email

[marieD]

Hi everyone. I am embaresed to say that for some reason i am confused on how to approach this.

I sent someone an email of a photo and I htought I did it right so that it would not take forever to download, but the pic is huge appearantly. How do I send it so it is small enough? Maybe i am going about it incorrectly, I was sending through the email (saved as JPEG) from Photoshop...Do I just start from ZoomBrowser? I feel like an idoit. This is simple, I have done it before.... Please excuse my ignorance....

[Olegis]

Get a simple program, like Irfanview (http://www.irfanview.com/). Open the image and resize it to, lets say, 600x400 (or something like that, depends on your source image). This can be done by pressing Ctrl-R.
Then save the image as JPEG with quality of 75-80% - and you're done. The final image should be around 40-50k - even users with slow dial-up connection should have no trouble to download it.

[Jesper]

Here is an explanation about how to resize images in Photoshop: http://www.photo.net/learn/resize/

Note that the only important thing is the size in pixels. Forget about DPI (Dots Per Inch) etc. - the DPI number doesn't really mean anything and only makes it seem complicated. Before saving it as a JPEG for e-mailing, resize your image to something like 640 x 480 or 800 x 600 pixels, which are usually good sizes for viewing images on the monitor.

[LazyPhotographer]

The most common mistake people make, when looking at pics in their graphics program, is not paying attention to the display size. It can happen to anybody for a lot of reasons, like - forgetting what the default is, or being new to editing or new to the graphics utility.

The program may display the pic at some random % of its full size so it fits in the window. There's an option in every program to select VIEW or ZOOM to full size, fit to window, or at something % plus/minus. It should even go so far as to specify pixels or inches, etc.

When working on your pics, just make sure to keep an eye on this setting - and check it at 100% before saving and/or sending. It will make everyone happy.

Hope that helps!