Newer digital cameras take incredibly high resolution images now. This is great, but what if you need to send a “smaller” version to someone? I sent this to a friend earlier to help her with using images on her new site, thought it may be useful to other folks too.
First off some terminology:
- Resolution
- Pixel
- Size (pixels)
- Size (file size)
- Lossly
- Lossless
- JPEG
- Progressive JPEG
- PNG
Tools:
EDIT 10/07: I’d previously recommend using Picasa from Google for novice users, but I now believe using GIMP and the links to documentation below will make it very easy to crop and scale images. You also then have the added benefit of a production quality image manipulation suite should you want to do more detailed image editing in the future.
It’s also worth noting that you may already have image manipulation tools installed, so see what you have on your machine first.
Download GIMP: http://www.gimp.org/downloads/
- Scale an image: http://docs.gimp.org/2.6/en/gimp-tutorial-quickie-scale.html
- Crop an image: http://docs.gimp.org/2.6/en/gimp-tutorial-quickie-crop.html
- Save/export an image: http://docs.gimp.org/2.6/en/gimp-images-out.html
General points:
- Always capture an image in the best resolution (size) reasonably possible
- Always keep your original file, make a copy to edit for the site
Basic work flow for preparing images for the web:
- Select original images you want to work with and make copies for editing
- Open these images in your image editing software (Picasa, GIMP or the likes)
- Edit the image as needed (crop/tweak colours etc) <- optional
- Resize the image to a maximum width or height of 2000 pixels (px)
- Save the the picture as a JPEG (JPG) file
- NB: When saving the file, be sure to choose a compression setting of 85-90 (higher is better but bigger file size, 85 is usually fine)
- For large images ( i.e. images of 1000px or more in width or height) choose the “progressive” option
If you ever needed an image compressed but did not want to loose any quality, then save the file as a PNG file. This is a lossless format.
Ok, hope that helps. It’s will be a bit of trial and error but you’ll get the hang of it 🙂
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