Quote:
Originally Posted by water
I,as usual,have not read properly/absorbed the size rules for Pixalo.In photoshop I simply: save as-copy-jpeg and save a copy of medium quality for general purposes.Then I open a wee programme called 'A smaller Image' and smash it down to dimensions of approx 640X480,roughly about 60kb.I do find your method above ,for me, quite complicated so will try my method keeping the long side to 1000 and total to add up to no more than 200kb. Cheers all  |
No wonder your pictures are looking soft if that is what you are doing Water. If you have Photoshop, why would you want to save a picture and then open another program and save it again when Photoshop can do it all for you so easily?
A couple of things you must remember:
- Each and every time you save a jpg, it is compressed again, losing more detail (becoming softer!) every time!
- If you size a picture to, say, 640x480 but choose then to show it as a larger photo, it will then be lower resolution and will appear more soft and pixellated. For example, if you have 640 pixels along its width and then choose to make it 12" physical size for viewing purposes, it will now be 640/12=53 pixels per inch resolution. You are effectively zooming in on the picture.
- Your screen usually shows 72 dots per inch so if you only provide enough file information for 53 of those dots, the computer has to either show it smaller so that it is 72dpi or put in extra dots (interpolate) by duplicating some of those pixels to make it fill the space. That will make a picture look soft and even distorted.
- Please note, it makes no difference whatsoever what resolution you save a picture as: the picture has a finite number of pixels. Hence when you show that photo at different sizes, you are seeing it at different resolutions. As you zoom in (same as making the picture bigger) it starts to look blocky.
All I can say is the process of resizing really is VERY easy. I laid it out step by step to make it easy to follow what I was doing but once you have done it a couple of times you'll realise it really is just a couple of simple steps. I deliberately did it that way because that way people who are learning Photoshop can learn the process for converting ANY picture to ANY size and quality so that what they learn is of general use, not just specific to saving for Pixalo.
Crushing a picture down to just 60kbs and then showing it larger will always make it look soft. The reason Pixalo has a limit of 200kbs is because that is ample to allow you to see most pictures in plenty of sharp detail without publishing a high res photo like certain other forums insist on so that they can then let other people take your pictures and print them out for whatever purpose they want! Printing out a low res picture is pointless as it won't look anything like as good as ity did on the screen :o)
Investing a few minutes to learn a process will be rewarded many times over when you use it again and again effortlessly in the future :o)
Cheers,
Rob