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This may sound like something quite easy to some but can be a daunting task to someone new to computers and the internet. So here is a small tutorial that I hope can help people reduce the size of the pictures they post on the web (be it on a website, forum, etc…). You can greatly increased the viewing speed for other people, reduce bandwidth while keeping the same image quality...well at least to the human eye when viewed on a monitor. I tried a few free photo manipulation programs out there and some are really more complicated than they need to be for our needs. I finally found two. One is pretty basic and the other is a picture viewer that has the ability to do what we want plus a few more neat little tricks to enhance the pictures. Professional photographers wouldn’t dare show their work without using a little digital optimizing first so why shouldn’t we? The other thing I would suggest is building a light box as you can see on the tutorial section of my website. You’ll see an amazing difference in picture quality with it. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SIMPLE Ok let’s get down to business. The first application we are going to use is PIXresizer 2.0.4 from http://bluefive.pair.com. It’s a pretty barebones image resizer but what we like about it is that it is SIMPLE! Here is the download link: http://bluefive.pair.com/PIXresizer.zip Download, install and launch the program. They even numbered the steps how more simple can it be? 1. Load picture: Just what it says, load the picture you want to resize 2. Select new size: I like to use 600X800 most of the time. Don’t forget to click on “keep aspect ratio” if it is not already selected so that you don’t mess up the height to width ratio. 3. Select file format: I suggest JPEG. I won’t go into why it’s too complicated. Ok, truth is I don’t know, it just works fine for me. ;-) If you click on the button to the right of JPEG that says “Joint Photographic Experts Group” you’ll get a compression option. The more you compress the smaller the size of the image file (not the image itself) but the tradeoff is that it degrades the quality. Set it to something like 80-90% and you should still get decent picture quality. You can try different settings and see what you need. 4. Save picture: rename if needed and save. That’s it! Hopefully you now have a resized and compressed version of your picture that is but a fraction of the original and still looks almost the same. A LITTLE MORE COMPLICATED Now that we are professional resizers (is that even a word, resizer?) we may want to go a little further and spruce up our pictures a little while keeping things simple of course. For that we are going to use a free picture viewer named XnView http://www.xnview.com You can download it from there and install. Once you launch the program, you get a convenient picture browser to find the pic you want to modify. Just double click on the picture you’ll get a bigger version to work on. Now there are many manipulations you can do with this, but since I am no expert especially at trying to explain to others how to do things, I’ll just explain a couple of the easier and more useful ones. After you get comfortable with the program you can experiment at will. (Remember Ctrl-Z will undo the changes you just made so it’s easy to try one thing at a time). First thing that is very useful is the cropping function. Just left click somewhere on the picture and while keeping the mouse button held down, drag the cursor to the opposite corner. When you release the mouse button you’ll see you have created a “box”. You can use the small tabs on the corners or on the sides of the box to resize and stretch the box and also move it around if you click in the middle of it. Once you have the box setup the way you want to crop the picture, just click on the 5th button from the left on the upper toolbar. Second useful thing is the 11th button from the left on the toolbar named adjusts Brightness/Contrast/Gamma/Balance. Once you click on it you’ll get a split window with before and after views of your picture. Again I won’t tell you what does what but you can easily play with the settings and see what improvements are possible. Once you are happy with your changes you’ve made just click on “apply to image”. Again Ctrl-Z will undo any changes you are not happy with. We can also resize our picture like we did with PIXresizer. For this we need to do shift-S. You get a popup window with the actual size of the picture. Just resize to your need and click OK. Now we need to save our picture. For this you use the FILE menu left on the top toolbar and click on SAVE AS. You get a window where you can rename your picture as you want and more importantly a button named OPTION, click on it. This is the compression ration we’ve seen in our first program. You set it the same, 80-90% and click ok. Now just save and voila! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I hope that this will be helpful to some. I won’t say email me if you have questions because this is about the extent of my photo manipulation savoir-faire. But if you have any suggestions to make this better or just easier to understand (I am no writer and this may actually only make sense to me) don’t hesitate to send me an email. |
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