simple image resizing program options

Hi all,

I'm asking on behalf of my best friend's wife who is the new owner of her first DSLR (T3). She loves it and is quite snap happy. She asked me what the best way would be for her to downsize her images for e-mailing and for social networking purposes. I use Photoshop and Lightroom quite a bit, but that is quite a bit of extreme overkill for her purposes. Can anyone recommend a simple image resizing program; or is there some simple way to do it within the basic Windows software? Thanks.

P.S. - I did mention that she could just downsize the picture quality "in camera", but that if she shot an image that small and ended up wanting it bigger, she'd be out of luck.

I did a Google search for "picture resizing software" and it comes back with lots of hits some that are free others that are shareware. Most of the shareware have free periods so your friend could try them out. One that is free is Faststone. Picasa has resizing when sending in an email, really the list is quite long and all she has to do is pick some and try them out.

Any experience with Faststone at all? I also found a whole bunch, but was looking to see if anyone had any experience with them or not.

What is wrong with using PS? It will produce some of the best results if you want quality images. It is all about mass downsampling.

I was using CS2 at the time (I think) when I first got into digital, viewed some of the spectacular images and tried to figure out what these people were doing. Mine did not look that good. I thought it a sharpening thing which also has a role and then discovered the downsampling thing.

I then went on a quest to find the best approach. Although I had no idea what they did I found all these terms - Nearest neighbour, Bilinear, Lanczos, Bspline, etc. Faststone more than likely incorporates one of these.

http://www.lassekolb.i​nfo/gim35_downsampling​.htm

So I started finding software that used those and other methods. Mard Adamus who is a nature photographer liked to downsize in steps. 5000 (on the long side) to 3500 to 1500 then to 800. He stated it fooled PS somehow and maintained sharp images. Here is an action from Deviant Art I used to use.

http://news.deviantart​.com/article/20250/

I'm not sure what Adobe did with CS5 but the resizing is just wonderful now. Just one pass and the images look great. They don't have that what I called crunched up look. I have no need of any fancy methods any longer.

Sorry for being long winded. This is very important to me since enter on line contests and like to show my bird images in particular with as much clarity as possible. It may not be as important to others if just sharing vacation snaps, etc. Just thought I'd share.

Here is a pretty good video on downsizing.

http://www.youtube.com …4mV3NsLmXw&feat​ure=relmfu

Windows Paint can do this (resizing) easily, and I think there is at least one other built-in Windows photo app, but can't say what it is or does. You can open a jpeg in Paint by right-clicking it, going to Open With and then choosing Paint, or by going to the Start/Run function and typing in "pbrush".

But, she also can check out the Canon software! If she got the disks with the camera, then she can install several apps. Three are of particular interest: ZoomBrowser and Digital Photo Professional (DPP) both have editing capabilities for jpegs, and DPP can process Raw files if she decides to go that route. Some of the DPP features are more advanced than ZoomBrowser's, so it is definitely worth checking out.

What I don't see in ZoomBrowser is a resize utility. But DPP has resizing built into its Convert and Save function as well as its Batch processing function. From Zoombrowser you can open an image in DPP, or of course you can directly open images in DPP using the Browser.

The Canon EOS Utilities app can also be useful. Many folks use it to attach the camera to the computer and directly download their shots (although many of us prefer to use card readers). I believe ZoomBrowser has this ability as well, but with the Utilities you can have your images open in DPP automatically so you can do the resizing, but also you can adjust the images for things like Brightness, Contrast, color corrections, Sharpening and Noise reduction, things which she will eventually want to be able to do!

Plus, EOS Utilities has a tethered shooting utility that has the nice feature of utilizing Live View, very nifty.

If she has the disks, installing these three programs can get her started, but I would advise her to use the second disk and to load the manuals, and get started reading them in her spare time!

If she doesn't have the disks, there are workarounds. Find out an let us know and we can help.

Once she installs the software, it would be best for her to update the three apps and the manuals by going to the Canon site and navigating to the software for her camera and the manuals for her apps.

And then, an app that can really help her to get seriously started is Photoshop Elements! Not only does it have the Resize, and also basic editing functions, but also some very powerful and useful features that eventually she'll want to learn.

Elements is a great buy at less than $100!

DPP can do also.

I am on a few other threads about DPP. Personally I think DPP does a poor job resizing images.

Thanks for all the options everyone! I actually forgot about the software that came with the camera. As for her using Photoshop; she has no interest in something that involved. She is a mom who snaps pictures of her kids with the pop up flash and green box, so anything more than the basics is too much.

digital paradise wrote in post #13135252
I am on a few other threads about DPP. Personally I think DPP does a poor job resizing images.

I know you've brought that up a few times, but you are comparing it to Photoshop. That and the fine-tuned techniques you are referencing, well, they are out of reach to the person in the OP!

So then, I don't know how the other inexpensive options might stack up to DPP, Paint, etc.

I would still encourage her to look at Photoshop Elements! It will actually give her PS tools, including those for resizing, so going in that direction could "kill two birds with one stone" -- a good photo editor and a good resizer!

Good point.