How to solve downsizing dilemma?

[Bob32]

I have recently commenced downsizing photos from my digital camera in order to post them to an online forum. Forum requirements are that the longest side of the photos be no more than 900 pixels and that the size of the photo be no more than 150 KB. I am using PSE 6 for Mac to accomplish the downsizing of my photos which are created by a Nikon D200. I successfully downsized several photos to conform with these requirements. For your information, after downsizing these images and sharpening them I clicked File/Save As and in the JPEG Options dialog box I set a Quality value that would give me a size less than 150KB. The Quality values ranged from 4 to 8. I noticed that the size indicated under the Preview box overstated the actual size by about 10KB.

However, I have encountered some images where I had problems. With these images I had great difficulty producing downsized images that were 900 pixels on the longest side and had a size less than 150 KB. For example, with one image I had to reduce the longest side of the photo to 490 pixels and set the Quality all the way down to 1 to produce a size of 142 KB. A strange fact was that the size of the photo indicated under the Preview box was only 88.1KB.

With another photo I had to reduce the longest side to 590 pixels and set the Quality at 1 to produce a photo size exactly 150 KB. The size indicated under the Preview box was 82.6 KB.

I am at a loss to explain why certain photos are giving me these problems and what I need to do to remedy the situation. I will greatly appreciate help on this issue.

Please excuse the long post, but I wanted to provide enough information to define the problem.

Bob

[Diana]

Hi Bob,

Try File > Save for Web. It gives you more control over filesize.

Diana

[Bob32]

Diana,

I understand that the Save for Web procedure wipes out the photo EXIF data, which I would prefer to avoid. Is there a solution that would allow me to continue to use the Save As route?

I still don't know why this problem is occurring on some photos and not on others. Any idea?

Bob

[genevh]

File size is going to depend on how much data makes up the photo. Different photos, even though they may have the same pixel dimensions, will end up having different file sizes. For example, a color version of a photo and a B&W version of the same photo will vary greatly in file size due to the color information being removed from the B&W photo. You don't have much control over that, unless you are resizing, etc. and trying to meet the requirements for whatever you are doing. A quality level of 1 is pretty darn low, though.

[Bob32]

Diana,

Thanks for the suggestion to use Save for Web instead of Save As. I tried it, and it worked great. I'll likely do it that way all the time from now on. Loss of EXIF data seems like minor issue compared with hassle of using Save As to save certain images.

Bob

[clemsonjim]

when you do a Save for Web it does not delete the orginal so you will have the EXIF data, but the forum folks will not.