OT: Digital pictures

[LegendRider]

I'll try to keep this as close to bikes as possible... I recently purchased a Sony DCS W5 camera upon the recommendation of a friend. This forum restricts picture size to something around 150k. How do some folks get such clear shots of their bikes within that constraint??? I have to set my camera to the "crudest" setting and my pictures turn out blurry. What am I missing? Thanks.

[Frank]

Think my friend Dave Thompson made mention of it on this site, so he is to blame for my bike pics being attached to my notes ;-)

The Mihov Image Resizer allows you to take your regular size digital pics and "shrinks" them down so they will fit some of the formats that restrict picture size.

It is free, easy to use, and works great!

http://www.imageresizer.com/

Frank

[dirtdigger88]

If you use Outlook you can always email the pix to yourself- Outlook will ask if you want the pix the original size or make them smaller- make them smaller then do a save as- I have found i get better results by taking the original at a lower quality (1.5 or 3 meg) rather than using my 8meg option- the pix retain a better quality

Jason

[Skrawny]

I just resized my pix using the software that came packaged with my Cannon digital, I told it I wanted it 800 pixel width (it calculated 600 pixel height to keep the aspect ratio) and that gave me a file that would fit nicely on the website.

http://forums.thepaceline.net/showthread.php?t=6612&highlight=trigger

-s

[victoryfactory]

Legend:

The trick is to shoot the photo in the best quality your camera can do.
Then bring the photo into Photoshop (or other similar program)
Crop, use auto levels a great tool in PS, (that usually makes it look better)
use the brightness/contrast adjustment to bump up the shot (this makes
your photo pop when it is viewed on line) Make it a little brighter even than
seems natural.
Now, set the image size to around 3 inches on the longer dimension.
set the dpi to around 300
Save as a JPEG. when you do that in Photoshop, you can choose
the level of compression, (the final file size)you get a screen
that shows you what the size of the final photo will be. Just move the
slider until the size reads around 150k

Presto:
http://www.victoryfactory.com/atlanta_05.jpg

VF

PS: if you don't have Photoshop Elements, you can get it free with many printer and other hardware, you may even have it in a stack of discs and
manuals somewhere.

[BumbleBeeDave]

. . . down. I have Photoshop 5.5 and shoot with a D100 on the regular quality setting. Then tone and resize in Photoshop and often lighten up the shadows a bit by selecting them with the magic wand, then feather the selection and use Curves to lighten it up a bit. You have to watch it with digital though, because if you lighten up shadow areas too much you get real funky artifacting with JPEG’s.

Just remember that it’s much easier to shoot larger and size down with Photoshop or one of the other programs that can resize than to size up. Digital images are made up of square “pixels” that are best created at the time of the original exposure. Imagine you have an image that’s 400x400 (160,000) pixels and you want to size it up to 800x800 (640,000). You still have only 160k pixels --so the program moves them apart, creating 480,000 “empty” pixels between the 160,000 original ones. So it has to create 480,000 “new” pixels to fill those spaces. It does this through analyzing the adjoining pixels and creating new ones based on the algorithms in the program. Photoshop has very sophisticated algorithms and the newest versions use fractals to achieve incredible results. Some other programs are not as sophisticated and do, well, not as good a job.

But as a rule, it’s best not to size up too much. If you’ve ever seen photos in the newspaper that look “pixelated”--all blocky--then it’s most likely someone inexperience or in a hurry took a photo--like something they took off a web site--and sized it up too much. Or they cropped a smaller portion out of a larger photo and sized that up too much.

Expose the original properly. Fill the frame. Size down in Photoshop or another image editing program.

BBDave

[vaxn8r]

VF, what are you editing out? The garage door?

[victoryfactory]

I thought the raccoon tails on the seat rails weren't PC.

VF

[LegendRider]

Which Adobe Photoshop product is appropriate for the casual photographer?

[dirtdigger88]

I have Adobe 3 and I am really a weekend warrior

Jason