Astronomyman

Hi all well a friend of mine was struggling with sending some very big pictures her camera had taken. Because of the increase in pixel size of cameras the files sizes have increased as well. A JPEG photo on a DSLR camera can be around 6mb to 10mb in size with the CR2 version of a picture being around 18 - 20mb in size. Now if you wanted to send these across the net in an e-mail your going to struggle and even uploading to a site like flicker can take some time. You could try zipping a file but zips are not really designed for photos as the way things are zipped is mainly optimized for programs and text based files. So how do we get a round this problem.

Well lets take this example.  I'm going to show you the original photo in JPEG format that is  4147 x 2765 pixels in resolution. Now compare this to my monitor resolution which for my 24 inch monitor is 1920 x 1200 pixels, and a 1080 HD tv is 1,920 x 1,080 pixels. As you can see unless you are planning on sticking a massive big poster on your wall or maybe showing it on a big screen via projector you really do not need the photo to be as big as 4147 x 2765 pixels.

Ok now to start getting this resolution down you need to open a graphics editor (if you don't have one their is a free one at http://www.gimp.org). This procedure is shown in gimp but most graphic editors will work the same way.

First here is a screen shot of the original picture it looks a good size on the screen but this is because the viewer has scaled it down for display but the picture is still at original resolution. Please notice in bottom left corner of the image next to pixels and where the cursor is pointing it says 8.2mb this is the size of the photo currently not so good for e-mailing and may take a while to upload to flicker or facebook.



Next we open it up in Gimp. and I have zoomed in to 100% using the box in the lower left hand corner. Now you can see how big this photo actually is.



Next we select Scale Image From the Image Menu.



Then in the picture below you will see two numbers under image size. width and height we are going to change these to make them smaller.

 



I have now changed these numbers from width 4147 to 1076 this will then automatically scale the height down as well to keep the original ratio the same.



In the picture below I have selected percentage instead of pixels this may be easier than choosing the pixel size you can then reduce by a percentage instead.

 



I am now choosing save as from the file menu.

 



Name your file and make sure you select JPEG Image as your file type when saving for smaller file and then when it asks you for quality setting choose 100%.

 



This is the final Picture at full size after scaling. Please notice in the bottom left corner of the picture next to word pixels it shows 662.0kb we have now reduced a 8.2meg file down to just over 0.6mb. Your picture is now ready for e-mailing or uploading.

Stumble It!