How do I optimize a photo?

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boardsurfer

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Joined
Aug 19, 2003
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How do I optimize a photo, so that I can make it less Kb's? I'm trying to get a photo that's 150kb to under 100kb.

Any ideas?

Thanks.
 
I did that...

The original file is 163KB, and when I resize the image (and make it smaller) the image then turns into 341KB.

What am I doing wrong? That sounds odd...
 
It sure does. Maybe try it again. Only think I can think of is you change file types or you accidentally went in the wrong direction.
 
Hmm. I tried it again. I'm not sure what's happening...I'm saving it as a jpeg and I'm decreasing the size from 100% to 60%.
 
That worked. Thanks. Man, I don't know what the heck was going on. I decreased the inches down from 100% to 60% or so, but it didn't work. I don't understand, but hey- the pixels worked at 600 x 400.

Thanks again.
 
If you made the image phycially smaller in pixles but the file size went up this likly means your photo editing program is set to save the image using a lower jpeg compression value. Jpeg is a loseless compression method being that you can adjust the compression level of the image and the higher the compresson level the smaller the file size even if the resolution stays the same. What is confusing is the compression value is reversed so a higher compresson uses a lower number value and a lower compression uses a higher number value. Often changing the compression level by just 2 or 3 points can really drop the image size but the overall image quality is visually unaffected.

Its quite possible you resized the image and changed the compression level to 100% or something like this. That would basicly save every pixle vs droping some pixles that are adjacent to other pixles of the same color. This is a very basic description of how the compression works. If you drop the compression level value from 100 to say 95 or 93 you could see a significant drop in file size and no visual change in image quality.

Another possible thing you did when you changed the image size was you adjusted the DPI of the image. The DPI value tells the system how many pixles to put over a given area ie Dots Per Inch. If you lower the size of the file from lets say 1024x768 to 800x600 but rase the DPI you will effectivly increase the size of the file.
 
My quick and dirty method for producing images for web posting is to right click on the image and select 'send to email recipient". Then I click to have windows make image smaller. When the blank email appears, I then save the small images.

This usually gives me approx 50kb images without much fuss.
 
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