Digital Picture Quality

[kram 2.0]

Hey,

I have a digital camera (Sony DSC-P71) and I've been taking a lot of pictures with it lately - specifically, 93 pictures onto a 128 MB memory card. The camera takes pretty good resolution pictures - it's at 3.2 Mega Pixels which is decent. The pictures, when taking them, come out to be around 2048 x 1536 - pretty big. When I reduce it, the quality tends to disappear.

Now every time I take these photos and do a minor revision with Adobe Photoshop Elements 2 or even just rotate the picture, the file size decreases from 1.3 MB to 700 KB. I'm wondering if this is a picture quality decrease or just something Adobe does. And also, for pictures, is JPEG extension the best way to go for the most details? I want to load these 93 pictures onto my web server but 112 MB will kill it so is there the simple way of reducing size, but have little effect in quality?



Thanks,
kram

[kram 2.0]

Anyone, any suggestions?

Thanks,
kram

[Mac Medic]

Originally posted by kram8806 Hey, The camera takes pretty good resolution pictures - it's at 3.2 Mega Pixels which is decent.

Actually, the camera is taking photos at a pretty good size but I imagine the resolution is only 72dpi.

Originally posted by kram8806 Hey, The pictures, when taking them, come out to be around 2048 x 1536 - pretty big. When I reduce it, the quality tends to disappear. Now every time I take these photos and do a minor revision with Adobe Photoshop Elements 2 or even just rotate the picture, the file size decreases from 1.3 MB to 700 KB.

Instead of changing the size of the photo, change the resolution from 72dpi to 150-300dpi. This will in effect reduce the size of the photo but increase the printable resolution making for a crisper image.

Photoshop, by default will try to save a jpeg with medium quality, you need to choose the save options and set the quality to maximum.

[kram 2.0]

If the camera is only taking pictures at 72dpi (dots per inch, I presume), how would I be able to change it to a higher more compact resolution? 2048 x 1536 is a fairly large size - a little bit on the grainy side, if you see it at that size, though. All I really need is 800x600 as long as it comes out at a decent picture quality and is a considerable size (in other words, not 10 MB per picture). What I've done in the past is to take these pictures, FTP them to the web server as their huge picture size, and then had HTML reduce them like this:

PHP Code:

<img src="image.jpg" width="400" height="300"> 


It worked to give me good picture quality, but often took very long to load. Any suggestions? Thank you verrryyy much for the reply though, oem_guy

Thanks,
kram

[glc]

Try using Irfanview to resize/resample the raw jpg to the resolution you want - resample is higher quality than resize, and the slower the resampling filter you use, the better quality you get. Resample it to the size you want to post it on the Web as. Then do a save as - and adjust the compression to give you the best compromise between filesize and quality. Don't use HTML to reduce the displayed size, that makes for larger file sizes than optimum.

[Hi Ho]

Does your camera have size options? My camera lets me choose the resolution when I take the picture. I can choose from 1600x1200, 1024x782, 800x600, and 640x680.

[kram 2.0]

Originally posted by Hi Ho Does your camera have size options? My camera lets me choose the resolution when I take the picture. I can choose from 1600x1200, 1024x782, 800x600, and 640x680.

Yep - it allows me to choose between these resolutions: 2048x1536, 1600x1200, 1280x960, 640x480. However, I haven't found a way to have this resolution reduced, while still maintaining quality...so the quality on the 640x480 only gets good when it is reduced to the size of a pea .

By the way, thanks glc - I'll see about that program and see what I can do to keep the resolution and stuff like that up. Have a big task in front of me - 93 pictures on that .

Thanks,
kram

[kram 2.0]

Originally posted by glc Try using Irfanview to resize/resample the raw jpg to the resolution you want - resample is higher quality than resize, and the slower the resampling filter you use, the better quality you get. Resample it to the size you want to post it on the Web as. Then do a save as - and adjust the compression to give you the best compromise between filesize and quality. Don't use HTML to reduce the displayed size, that makes for larger file sizes than optimum.

This is working verrryyy nicely - thanks glc! The picture quality is maintained when I reduced the size from 2048x1536 to lets say 800x600 - the size that I'm going to FTP it onto the server. What I'm probably going to do is save just one file of each picture as 800x600 and create the thumbnail using the HTML I just listed above. Then if they click on it, the 800x600 pic will show!


Thanks,
kram

[Hi Ho]

I have used Picture It Digital Image Pro to save about 50 pictures at once using the batch editing feature. I reduced the size for the same reason as you and set it to high quality. They all turned out nice. It's faster than doing it one at a time.

[glc]

No, do not use HTML to thumbnail an 800x600 - it will still have to load the full image. Use the thumbnail maker in Irfanview. You can thumbnail an entire folder in one shot and even create a HTML page with all the thumbnails linking to the full size images. Then just edit the code the way you want to set up the page to your taste and upload the whole mess. You have the all-in-one tool there - just learn to use it!

[Mac Medic]

Not sure if the windows version of photoshop works the same as the Mac version, but I use the batch processing built into photoshop. It will perform any action you need (resize, resolution, thumbnailing etc), I have droplets set up to make it even easier. Photoshop will also created a web page for you based on a number of templates. It may be worth a shot to avoid doing each photo individually.

[kram 2.0]

I guess I'll fidle around with Irfanviewer for a few hours - it seems like a neat program. And just noticed one thing - when I resample the photos from 2048x1536 to 640x480 I think, the photos get blury - something I don't get when I resize the photo in Photoshop and Elements. Anyone know the solution? I went through every photo one by one and resampled them, by the way.


Hope that helps,
kram

[glc]

You probably need a better resampling filter than Irfanview offers - but try the other options, there are several.