Mitch, How did you compress your photos?

neilm · Joined: 12 Dec 2004 Posts: 388 Location: Kodiak, AK

I noticed the Gallery Photos load really fast so I looked and they are only 50KB each. I cannot replicate that in PhotoShop without poor quality. How did you do that?

Neil

AgentJibber-411 · Posted: Tue Apr 12, 2005 4:50 pm Post subject:

You should probably PM him, i dunno his screen name but i would imagine its "Mitch" or something, but i have no idea how to do it but the pic was probably super high resolution and size

Mitch · Posted: Wed Apr 13, 2005 7:03 pm Post subject:

Yes, the Slopetyle Comp TelePark photos were shot with our 6.3 mega-pixel digital SLR, so we started with pretty his res images, then just cropped, resized and color balanced them using Paint Shop Pro... in the back of the van on the way to Mammoth the other night, as a matter of fact...

Paint Shop has a little JPEG compression slider tool, you just keep moving the thing up, increasing file size as you go, until you find the setting that results in a clean image with the smalest possible file size.

In the case of the TelePark photos they probably compressed s well because of all of the sky and white clouds as background. JPEG compression works by finding large areas of repeatable patterns to the pixels, blue sky, snow, and white clouds are perfect. On the other hand, a background consisting of trees and lots of other detail does not compress well at all.

vtRat · Joined: 06 Dec 2004 Posts: 542 Location: Vermont

Neilm,

In addition to Mitch's comments on cropping, resizing, etc..

I've found that Photoshop doesn't compress JPEG files as much as some other applications. I'm not sure why this is. I notice that if I make a thumbnail that's 100px on the longest side and save it as a low-qualiuty JPEG, it's 32k. Pretty rediculous. If I use another app (Right now it's the freeware EzThumbs) I can get them to 1k, 2k, or 3k depending on subject matter.

While I love working on photos in Photoshop, I'll do my final web compression using something else.

-Ben

neilm · Joined: 12 Dec 2004 Posts: 388 Location: Kodiak, AK

Thanks. Ya I tried it with PhotoShop with the same results. Well I have PSP so I'll do a comparison test, thanks. It just seemed unsually small filesize and extra nice quality so was wondering what software you used.

Neil