Resizing digital images

[seth_js]

What do you guys use to resize your digital images? I currently use Picasa to shrink and gallery my pictures (for website viewing), but I don't think it's got that great of a compression method or something. A lot of the pictures lose significant quality.

-Seth

 

[flyingwil]

I use Macromedia's Fireworks 8. It has an uncanning resemblance to photoshop.

 

[BKCowGod]

for the mac, there's a cool program called photo Drop which creates dropboxes that will do any of a dozen things to a photo. Much faster than p'shop and it can do whole folders at once. I'm sure there's something similar for PC, but I try to avoid touching evil.

 

[cshontz]

Evil has Irfanview - a really, really nice, lightweight graphics file viewer and converter. It should be a staple of the typical web-surfers diet.

http://www.irfanview.com/

 

[photoleif]

Evil has Irfanview - a really, really nice, lightweight graphics file viewer and converter. It should be a staple of the typical web-surfers diet.

http://www.irfanview.com/

second the vote on iview. i use it for all my day-to-day viewing, and leave photoshop alone until i need it. also, iview has a nice feature that lets me set the DPI of the image, whereas that feature in PS simply resizes the whole thing...a different function altogether. PS may well offer a non-relative DPI reset, but i've not found it yet.

i've used irfanview almost since its inception, and it's never let me down (except for one buggy release and the recent releases that don't allow color-manipulation while in fullscreen mode). oh well, for free i'm not complaining.

 

[paulj]

I'm another Irfanview user. I have various other tools, either from the web, or that came with my camera(s), but Irfanview is a nice combination of viewer, and manipulator.

Keep in mind that there are two things that you can control - the size of the image (in pixels), and the compression (for jpeg images). With both you are going to loose detail - you can't get away from that when you reduce a 2 to 4 megabite file to 100k or less for posting.

Perhaps the best way of minimizing the loss of detail while reducing the file size, is to crop - posting just the part of the image that matters, while cutting out most of the background.

paulj