Resizing Question

[JDougherty]

Hi There,
Hoping some of the experts out there can give me some advice on the best way to resize down my images.

Main objective: To preserve as much detail and sharpness for printing (mostly 4x6, but would like to leave option open for larger), while making the file small enough for email and for use on my website photo album so it won’t take forever for viewers to load.

Images are shot at high resolution; dimensions are 3872 x 2592 and they range from about 2.5mb to 4.2mb. Up until now, I have been changing just width of pixel dimensions to 1600, check ‘constrain portions’ and check ‘resample image-bicubic’. I leave everything else the same—height winds up to be 1071, doc size 22.2 x 14.8, resolution stays 72. I realized I may be degrading the quality of images too much by doing it this way. Suggestions???
Thanks very much in advance.
JD

[dj_paige]

In general, I don't think having a file that you can both print and e-mail is a good idea. E-mail usually requires small sizes, print requires larger sizes. I would make 2 separate files.

To print 4x6, you merely need to crop the portion of your photo that you want to print so that the crop has the 4x6 aspect ratio and has 240 pixels per inch, or more. (240 being the number I have heard most often as the number needed to get a good print). One way to do this is with the crop tool, where you select the 4x6 aspect ratio and blank out the dots per inch (blanking out the dots per inch forces the crop tool to select actual pixels -- i.e. no interpolation or extrapolation of pixels). Then see if the resulting image is large enough (4x6 or bigger) at 240 dpi. There are other ways to do this as well, you could search this forum.

For e-mail, you don't necessarily care about the dpi, you just need to make the image smaller, so you could resize the image to smaller number of pixels on each side (this requires some smoothing of existing pixels)

[Karin Sue]

I agree with Paige. You want different versions of your imges for different purposes.

In the Organizer (at least the old versions) you can choose to share via email. If you email client is compatable it will attach it directly, otherwise it will place a copy in a folder you can access from your email. You can set the size, etc.

Save for Web is a good option for preparing for email or web posting. You should reduce to a pixel size that will fit on a monitor. A width of 700 is common. Low to medium compression on the jpeg is usually okay for screen viewing and is appreciated by dialup users. You can always have a link to a larger version for download (or have them email you for it) if they want to print.

Seems to me Yahoo and some other photo sites now let people print from the site, not just order prints. You upload a good printable size, yahoo posts screen versions, then you can direct friends to the site and they can opt to just view, or order prints, or print at home.

[JDougherty]

Thanks to both of you for your suggestions. It really helps!!