losing quality please advise

[brandname]

Fireman musicians, When I edit a picture i bring the highest quality jpeg into photoshop then I enlarge the picture to 100%. next I resize to 900X585 or something close to that. Then I click save as and choose quality level of 3 or 4 to get the jpeg from 2 megs to 166 kb. The quality is suffering very bad as the firemans faces are very clear in the original but blury in this pic.


Can anyone offer any advice before I upload and more crappy pics?

[brandname]

i can save pictures in paintshop without losing quality but there are no options to correct the picture so I would rather use PS :D

[robbobo]

I usually use the image resizer program downloadable from www.microsoft.com
Look for Power Toys for Windows XP. It's on the right side of the screen about 2/3 of the way down.

You can resize by right clicking on any image or series of images to
640 X 480, 800 X 600, or 1024 X 768 or you can enter custom settings. The default setting creates a copy of the original. I don't the know the compression setting, but the images look decent to me. Check it out. It's free.

[nwpoland]

After you've resized in Photoshop do you still have the image quality you'd like? If so, then you're losing quality when you save it. You mentioned selecting a 3or4 quality from the slider which is really low. I imagine that you would be losing quite a bit of clarity/sharpness.

Here are some questions that come to my mind:
- What's your intent? (web or print)
- What parameters are you changing when resizing? (resolution, document size, pixel dimension)

My guess is that you're going to be using these for the web b/c otherwise you wouldn't want to be shrinking them down as you'd want the highest quality possible. If that is the case, then try using the "save for web" function. That gives a lot of options and you can see immediately how they affect your image. (Tip: zoom in on any particular part of the image as you are trying different options so you can see clearly how the image is affected)

Don't know if this helps...but hope so. If not, post some more info and you're sure to get more help.

[brandname]

After I posted here I read on a photoshop forum about the save for web. I can get a 2.5 meg picture down to 98kb and still looks pretty good. Some of these photography sites have 80kb as the highest you can use which doesnt make sense because when you have people look at your pictures you want them to be at the highest quality.

so for now I can live with saving the picture for web and choosing jpeg. :D

Thanks for the 2 responses i think we are on the same page now.

[brandname]

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