Like GarryB, I have a cheap digital camera, and the jpegs it produces are about 300 Kb. Im wondering if someone could give step by step instructions on how to use a program to reduce them. Rabie mentions he uses MS Paint. I noticed also theres a program that comes with my windows98 called imaging. Ofcourse theres probably other good programs that people have recomended here that would be good to know how to use also.
By: Arabella-Cox - 24th November 2002 at 01:53
RE: how do you reduce photos
If the picture is still too big here are somethings I do.
First look at the photo.
Cropping off unimportant features to make the image smaller saves memory.
Reducing the height and the width of the image reduces the file size by 4 times.
Reducing the colour depth of the image is also a good way to make the file smaller, though the quality issue is still there.
(If the image is black and white some memory can be saved by saving it as a greyscale image.)
The number of colours in an image is measured in bits or 2 to the power of a number.
An image with 16 bit colour doesn’t have twice as many colours as an 8 bit image. An 8 bit image has 2^8 colours or 256 colours. A 16 bit image has 65 thousand.
If you are processing an image to get information from it then the higher the bit setting the better, but for display or printing purposes the human eye can only differentiate about 16 million colours so 24 bit should be a limit.
In fact that is probably much more than you need and most people would be hard pressed to tell the difference between a 16 bit and a 24 bit image unless they were placed together.
The size saving is that a 24 bit image uses 24 1s and 0s per pixel to store the colour, whereas a 16 bit image would use 16 1s and 0s.
Of course Jpeg compression greatly reduces this but reducing the colour depth still reduces image size.
By: Arabella-Cox - 24th November 2002 at 01:32
RE: how do you reduce photos
[updated:LAST EDITED ON 24-11-02 AT 01:34 AM (GMT)]The best program I have found is called Irfanview which is available free from: http://www.irfanview.com/
Simply opening a .jpg photo with it and then saving it as a .jpg often halves the size of the file without noticible loss of picture quality.
If you look at the batch processing option under the file menu it will allow you to physically change the size of the photos by cropping (ie cutting) or scaling (ie stretching and shrinking either by percentage or all to a pixel size… ie all 50% smaller or all 500 x 500 pixels).
It can even be used for batch renaming.
It also has a few simple filters too.
The most important point is that it has very good jpg compression… better than Photoshop Elements but image quality seems very good.
(it is also free and can display the following image types:
.ANI, .BMP, .DIB, .CAM, .CUR, .CLP, .DMC, .ACR, .DCX, .DJVU, .IW44, .EMF, .EPS, .FPX, .G3, .GIF, .ICL, .ICO, .IFF, .LBM, .IMG, .JPG, (.JPEG), .KDC, .LDF, .LWF, .PBM, .PCD, .PCX, .PGM, .PNG, .PPM, .PSD, .PSP, .RAS, .SUN, .RLE, .SFF, .SFW, .SGI, .RGB, .SWF, .TGA, .TIF, (.TIFF), .WBMP, .WMF, .XBM, .XPM.
The Following Video Formats:
.AVI, .MPG, (.MPEG), .MOV.
The Following Sound Formats:
.AIF, .AU, .SND, .MID, .RMI, .MED, .MP3, .RA, .WAV.
If you have pictures and movies and sound files in one folder you can open one with Irfanview and use the space bar and backspace key to display or play any of the above file types in that folder.
(some file types do need plugins which are included at the site for downloading).
By: Dazza - 24th November 2002 at 00:10
RE: how do you reduce photos
I use Adobe Photo Shop to reduce the size of pictures, you also have the option with Photo Shop of setting the quality of the image to be saved, a small reduction in image quality can reduce the file size considerably without a greatly appreciable loss in visual quality.
Regards, Dazza.
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November 23, 2002 at 11:46 pm