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OT: Help with reducing photo file size


Synthoid

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Over the years I've come across digital pictures online with a small file size (and DPI) that still look fairly sharp. However, when I reduce a picture in PhotoShop, it becomes fuzzy and pixelated.

 

How do professionals shrink a picture and still maintain such detail? :idk

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I think you're doing something wrong in Photoshop.

 

Keep your stuff big, vector format if possible, then shrink at the last minute with File->Save For Web.

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I owned a digital imaging/photography business, but now I'm retired and It's been a number of years, and my memory is sketchy at best. I remember using a program called Graphic Converter for this purpose. Plus there are degrees of compression when saving files as JPEGs. The more compression you select, the smaller the resultant file size. This is different from image size, and usually results in maintaining decent resolution (and less pixelation) for most purposes. Remember, JPEG compression is considered 'lossy', meaning once saved as a lower res JPEG, the information is lost, and will not be recovered when re-opened. I always saved images twice when I needed to downsize a file. Once at full size, like a tiff for printing, and then again, as a JPEG for lower file size purposes, such as web use.
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Yea, I keep them pixel'd up and reduce only when needed, keeping the original.

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It sounds like you might be reducing pixel density while keeping the original proportions. Constrain proportions (to change along with pixels) when you change the file size and see if that helps. Also, it's not impossible that you're experiencing a "View" issue rather than one with the file itself. Reduce the file size and then click on "View" and choose "actual size" (or "100%") and see if that helps.

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Keep your stuff big, vector format if possible, then shrink at the last minute with File->Save For Web.

 

Digital pictures are in a bitmap format, not vector.

 

 

It sounds like you might be reducing pixel density while keeping the original proportions. Constrain proportions (to change along with pixels) when you change the file size and see if that helps.

 

I'm reducing both DPI and proportions at the same time.

When an eel hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's a Moray.
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Can you post an example?

 

I don't know if I still have anything on the hard drive. For now, I'll try the "Save for Web" option. Thanks. :)

 

 

What's the final use of the photo? Is it going to be printed? Or used on a web page? Viewed on your phone?

 

Final size varies, usually just a few inches square. Never for printing, just for web or phone viewing.

 

 

When an eel hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's a Moray.
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Ok. Since you have Photoshop just try exporting or saving as a JPEG. Then you're given a choice of how high you want the quality to be. Try a few settings from least to best and see what your happy with as far as file size to quality.

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You can easily do it in paint: resize, pixels, maintain aspect ratio. If you print to paper or with a driver to another format: fit to page.

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Ok. Since you have Photoshop just try exporting or saving as a JPEG. Then you're given a choice of how high you want the quality to be. Try a few settings from least to best and see what your happy with as far as file size to quality.

Yep. But remember, saving as a JPEG discards data. Always keep the original saved as a psd or tiff document also, so you have that as a file to go back to for comparison. As I said earlier, once you 'compress' and save an image as a JPEG, you've lost some clarity, (how much depends the level of compression you've chosen) and you don't get that back when opening the file.

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Save for web is the best option in Photoshop and you have several compression options and can preview the result side by side with the original to see how far you want to go.

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A couple of things here:

 

Resizing:

Photoshop offers different algorithms for resizing images, each giving slightly different results. If you find the resized (downsized) image is a little blurry, try apply an unsharp filter to bring some of the detail back.

 

Saving:

As others have noted, saving to JPEG strips away information from the original image. While Photoshop does offer some options to adjust the compression ratio, and side-by-side previews of the final output, I actually prefer to save to PNG first, as this format utilises lossless compression (i.e. nothing is stripped away from the original data). Then I use the excellent "RIOT" programme (Radical Image Optimization Tool) to convert to JPEG with great fine-grain control over compression, subsampling, encoding, metadata etc. It also offers a side-by-side comparison with zoom, allowing you to strike just the ride balance between quality and filesize.

 

If I'm working with logos or transparent images for online use, I stick with PNG, but process the file using the PngOptimizer tool to squeeze a few more bytes out of the file. I cut my computing teeth on the Amiga with 880k floppies, so old habits die hard when it comes to optimising file sizes and memory usage. ;)

 

I hope this helps.

 

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James

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