I am very new to digital photography. When I submitted my picture this week, many of my comments had to do with the size of my image and the amount of pixels. My problem is this: I don't know how to make my pictures within the limits of this website. To get my pictures down to 150K I am making them to small and the quality is significantly diminished. I was wondering if I'm missing something important or if I am in need of a good photo editing program. Should they all downsize pictures the same? Any advice would be great.
3 things to look at:
1) the resolution of your image. Make it 72 DPI.
2) the size (pixels) of your image - Make is 640 on the longest direction. Most editing programs will bring the shorter side down proportionately.
3) The amount of compression used. I generally try to make my images around 100K or lower.
Ihall asks the important question. What software are you using. But no matter what you are using the above 3 points should be used to get the images down to a manageable size...
Your probably going to need an image manipulation program. I use Photoshop. It is pretty expensive. I know people who use Paint Shop Pro ( //www.jasc.com/products/psp/) with great results and it is $100.
I am unfamiliar with the DiMAGE VU but if it is like Canon's it won't do what you need...
You can also get Photoshop Elements for about $100 -- it does plenty for DPC. If you are on Windows check out The Gimp -- open-source freeware reputed to be powerful (but with some quirks?).
Photoshop and Photoshop Elements II ($99 and think it still has a $30 rebate), both have a Save for Web action. Automatically sizes to 72 dpi (as per Davenit's recent instruction), and then you are able to set the longest size to 640 (or whatever), then you can adjust the quality down (I go 1% at a time) until it is under the 150kb.
Sounds as if you did the same thing I did last week...picked the 150 pixel instead of the 640! That makes a hugh difference in the size of the photo submitted!
