Quick and Easy Image Editing For The Web

Nifty

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Friends,

I'm curious how you all edit your images. What software applications do you use and what do you do. I'm not as interested in photo editing for print as I am for editing to put on the web. The difference is that for web images you must find a good balance between image size (in kb) and image detail / size (in pixels).

This came up because I was editing some chicken pictures (for this page: http://www.nifty-stuff.com/hatching-chicks-from-eggs.php ) and I noticed that no matter what I did the size for some of the images was still pretty big. I changed the color depth, image size, compression, # of colors, etc. etc. etc. but I couldn't get the image to shrink. I figured I was just stuck with relatively large images... that is until I got an email from my brother.

His daughter had just got some pics for her 18th birthday and he sent them out to the family. They were medium size, but the detail was really sharp. I expected them to be at least 150 kb, but they were only 38 kb each... CRAZY! I jumped on the phone and asked what he used, I needed his secret. He said he right clicked the image, did "send to mail recipient" and then Outlook asked if he wanted to resize and he said yes. This wasn't the answer I wanted, but at least I know it is possible to have a very clean / sharp image that is relatively small in disk size.

I've been using irfanview, which is free and quick to load. I'm wondering if my problem is just an issue with this free application and its limitations. I opened my bro's image and mine and the color counts, dimensions, etc were all similar, but my image was five times bigger in disk space.

Well, I'd love some feedback. Even if I figure this out, I think it would be good for the community if we shared what programs we use to edit images.

Oh, by the way, my brother said he's a big fan of Adobe Photoshop Elements.
 

panos

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I use the legendary Paint Shop Pro 7.04 (well, legendary is my word). The fact is that the application is blazing fast, ultra small and does thrice more than I'll ever need.

Rob, PSP and of course Photoshop have special tools for image compression optimization. My own trick for sharp images is to resample (resize) the image using the Bicubic algorithm and then use the JPEG optimizer to save the image at maximum possible compression without noticeable loss. This is exactly the technique I've used for my avatar image.
 

BlasterQ

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Rob, the arcsoft's photo studio that comes bundled with my canon powershot s1 is is a good software. you have the option to resize your originals to any percent you want, and save it on jpeg on any quality you want.
Also, ACDSEE is a good software too. Not only does it include basic photo editing, it does a good job at organizing your photos and graphics too.
 

panos

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One may also wish to try the free Gimp. For things like photo editing, it is great.

It's major drawbacks are the bizzare interface and bad font kerning.
 

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