Hallson Gardens

Who can help us novice photographers to reduce a picture to the required forum size.

i`m sure myself and other members would post more pics if we knew ho to do this
How about some tuition George and Herb maybe
Regards irkwater [Brian]

Hi Brian,

Depending on which version of Photoshop you have, set your image size at about 8" high or 8" wide using a dpi of 72 (do not use anything higher for the web, those are only needed for print), then you can select either Save As... or Save for Web... Then choose a quality or compression setting of Medium (30 to 50%) or a setting of about 4 or 5. (These things will all depend on your particular program). Following these easy steps will always get you within the 150 kb file size limit, plus give a picture that is easy for people to load and easy to view on any monitor.

Hope that helps!

Chris

Hi Brian,
If you cannot follow that tell us what the problem is and we will try to help, Herb is a whizz with photo shop he should be on here when he see's your post.
George.

O.K., here's trying. If anybody would like more explanation, please say so.

First thing to remember is that a limit on "size" measured in kilobytes is not a limit on the size - in the sense of the dimensions - of the picture. It's a limit on the size of the file that holds the picture.

Consequently, you can have a picture that's 800x600 pixels wide but it may be in a small file, such as 50kb or a big file such as 500kb. Big files can hold a lot more detail, while small files hold less. If the file gets too small, the picture that you see loses quality.

I don't use the latest version of Photoshop, but I'm guessing that the later versions work like mine (Photoshop Elements version2). Here are the two screens that I use in Photoshop to change the dimensions of pictures - I think they may be self explanatory -

http://www.pbase.com/mtu_fulani/image/117275823

http://www.pbase.com/mtu_fulani/image/117275836

Changing the size of the file holding the picture on the other hand can be very much hit-and-miss. I've found that by far the most convenient and easy way to reduce file size is to use the program called JPEG Optimizer.

Here are a couple of examples - the first picture is recorded in a file that's about 433kb - http://www.pbase.com/mtu_fulani/image/117275472

Now, here's the same picture in a file that's been reduced by JPEG Optimizer to only about 44kb -