StarDestroyer.Net BBS

I use Paintshop Pro (demo version) and I use it to edit my pics to a managable size since my digital camera makes such huge pictures. But I can never seem to edit the pictures down to a managable size for emailing or posting. They always end up being thouands of K's in size when I see folks whipping out 50K pictures and the like. Is there any advice for a photo editing noob that would be helpful in chopping down overall picture file sizes without reducing a pic to postage stamp size?

Well what file are you saving it as? For photos, i'd say jpg is the best, and you shouldn't have the quality at the highest point, just lower it some could really help the file size. I use photoshop myself, so i don't really know how it works on PSP =T.

http://www.chami.com/jc/

A good online JPEG compressor. Also, The Gimp and MS Photodraw are the utilities I use for image manipulation in general.

Irfanview. Set the Compression Ratio to 75% and it'll make really good high-quality Jay Peggs (or GIFs, or PoNGs) you couldn't tell aren't anything but raw BiMPs!! Also, you can fix up bad images with color correction and gamma, brightness, saturation, and contrast sliders. Needless to say, I have it set as my default image viewer!

Plus if you get all the plugins, it'll play DivX movies and MP3s.

If it's just for emailing the first thing I do is shrink the picture down. Re-size the picture to 600 pixels high or wide at the most, I normally go with 500 or 600 pixels on the largest dimension. Remember to check the box that says "keep proportions" or something like that, that way when you change one dimension the other changes automatically to keep the length & width proportional to the original. After that, save it as a .jpg and set the quality somewhere on the bottom 1/3 of the scale, again, you don't need photo-realistic quality for online images unless you're entering a photo contest or something. That should do the trick.

Image>Resize>640*480 for example. Or do the percentages thing. Remember that what you see in psp is only real-size when it says 1:1 on the top of the picture.

Thanks guys!! It's been very helpful

the best thing to do is delete paint shop and burn the cd-rom and get a copy of photoshop.