How do you do it?

[chris ma]

Hi,

I am wondering what kind of cameras people used to take such good picture and yet the picture is big but the size of the file is small enough for posting here?

http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=252565#post252565

If I scan my postcard size pictures the file size is like average of 23M, and if I use photoshop to reduce the size the quality of the final version is very poor with the change from 23M to 83k.

How and what is the norm to play with jpg files?

Chris

 

[Netlist]

Chris,
Found something for you at Jason's site:
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/601
Didn't take the time to read, but maybe this can help you.

/Hugo

 

[AudioFreak]

My advice would be to read that article, choose a graphics editor and then practice, practice, practice. After a little while, you'll start to get a feel for what works best with what kinds of images.

 

[wintermute]

Hi Chris,

It depends a lot on the initial image. Images with lots of fine detail don't compress as well with jpg. I just did an experiment. I got a photo I had previously scanned (It is a test photo, I shot while evaluating a new 20mm lens). It is scanned at 4000dpi off the negative. original scan is around 125MB in size 5600X3868 pixels.

I resised in photoshop to 800 X 533 using bicubic resampling, the saved as a jpeg with quality level 7. too big at 158kb.

So I resaved at quality level 5, now 95Kb which is within the limit (just). The quality on this looks ok to me. I also saved with quality level 0. This then got it down to 44Kb but artefacts are pretty apparent. The only other thing I did was manually adjust the levels a bit. Unsharp masking if done properly can also enhance the image

I'll attach the image which is nothing special (basically the view out the front of the camera shop). I did nothing more that what I have said here. No smoke and mirrors just a bit of trial and error.

Regards,

Tony.

edit: this was taken on a nikon F80 with nikon 20mm lens. using fuji presspro 400 film.

 

[roddyama]

Hi Chris,

I took all my pics from last years CES with the bottom of the line Sony digital camera.
http://dlison.dyndns.org:10004/RoddYama/index.php?currDir=.
I set each file for 1024X768 at about .5Mb jpg. Than I used Adobe Photo Deluxe that came for free with my scanner to size it and save it as a smaller (<.1Mb) file. As AudioFreak says, "practice, practice, practice".