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Picture size

When I take pictures with my Panasonic DMC FZ 18 at full resolution which is 8 megs the resulting picture is stored at between 4.6 and 5.6 meg. Yahoo only allows me to upload a 5 meg picture. How can I best get the meg below 5 and keep the picture the same size? or am I making it to hard on myself?

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Posted by Gene Allen Realtor Hampton Roads Real Estate on 05/08/2008 10:14 AM

Comments (13)

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13 Comments on Picture size

MAY

2008

Gene, you are making it hard on yourself. My monitor displays 1440 X 900 pixels at it's highest resolution. That's just less than 1.3 megapixels. What monitor are you aware of that could display 5 million pixels. I would reduce the size down to around 800 X 600 and you'll have a pretty large photo to view on your monitor. It's when it comes to printing that more pixels are necessary.

This photo has been reduced to 800 X 600 and you can see how big it is. That's less than a 0.5 megapixels.

800 X 600

Lee has it exactly right. There is no advantage to uploading a huge file when the montior could not possibly display all that info. If it did, you'd only see a fraction of the photo.

Hi Gene,

You can quickly figure your megapixels by just multiplying your screen resolution height and width. In other words, a screen resolution that's 1024x768 would be .786-megapixels at full-screen. Or, one thats 800x600 would be .48-megapixels. And so on.

Gene,

Use Picasa (free from Google) to tone and export your photos before uploading. This way you can retain a full-res image and then have a tiny file for use on the web.

You can always go down in resolution but never up and more res is always better!

Thomas

There's not much to add to what Lee said except that he's got a very nice shot there. :)

Almost all monitors display images at 72dpi, so you can do a quick and easy calculation. Want your image to be 3" wide on the screen? 3*72=216.

When you do resize your image do try to use bicubic (sharper) sampling if it's available (not sure what image program you are using). This is generally the best possible option for max quality.

Once you've resized the image you'll almost always want to hit it with a little extra sharpening. This make make all the difference in removing some of the softness that results when you resize.

Take a look at the example below, this is a very small image from my commercial portfolio (down from 13 megapixels) with a lot of detail in it. However, with a little sharpening the eye still perceives it correctly. It's looks sharp and clear (at least I hope it does). ;)

Cheers, -B

Lee: That is a awesome picture. I wish I had an eye like that.

I need to keep the file size as big as can be because they are being used for publication. I understand about screen size and downsizing pictures but that is not what I need.

Thanks Sharon. One of my latest listings backs up to the 16th green. I stepped out back and a guy had just hit the ball on the green, so I framed it up and took the photo. I tried to get the ball in focus too, but that didn't happen.

Gene, I see what you need now. Is anyone aware of a compression type that won't degrade the photo? I bet someone could help in this area.

I understood what I wanted but did not make it clear.

MAY

2008

Gene - I know what you want to do, I think; you want to keep the photo the way it is but reduce the file size to upload it to MSL or something that restricts the size. Right?

I have this problem all the time - my camera has 8 mega pixels so the files are huge. I use Photoshop elements to change the size. I don't know if you have Photoshop but a lot of photo editing programs have the same features. I get the photo exactly how I want it then Save As - when I do this it asks me if I want to change the file size from high to low quality. I usually find that saving it to the quality setting of 5 reduces the file size enough to upload it anywhere. The photo is exactly the same but the file size is smaller - no one would notice the difference in quality as the others have stated.

I don't know of any websites that will do this for you online but I'm sure they are out there. Maybe one of the photo gurus can help.

Regarding compression types:

http://activerain.com/blogsview/503525/Squeezing-Images-Compression

Cheers, -B

MAY

2008

Well, Lee I thin it is a great looking shot and the ball looked in focus as well.

MAY

2008

Gene- I also like Picasa for getting files to a manageable size... you don't need to send jumbo files when a downscaled version will also be fine ... Remember to "save as" ... this will keep you from losing that high resolution master file.

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