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Helpful Trick for pic threads!

M

MAME

Banned
Hello all. I enjoy the pictures everyone posts here and I think many of them are very interesting. But I have noticed something for far too long and I believe it should be changed.

Now, I have broadband and I don't care as much as some other people, but the pictures posted are simply too big in size. Instead of cropping them or changing the resolution, I have a perfect fix that does not reduce image quality or size! Simply open the picture (JPEG and GIF only I believe) in MS paint, save it as a new name and bam, it's done. ~50% file compression with NO image quality loss.

Take the following picture for example (from this thread). 1.39 megs.
http://pics.bbzzdd.com/users/meanmeosh/colorado_river_2.jpg

Now here's my version of it. No quality difference but it's only 516 KB!
http://pics.bbzzdd.com/users/forthemame/new.JPG

Compressing your pictures before posting will help both the server that it's hosted on and all the users on ATOT. Please try this next time! Thank you!
 
Originally posted by: rh71
MS Paint ? Hmm... Save For Web in Photoshop works great too.
Click to expand...

I agree that photoshop has a great range of compression and such, but this is very quick and everyone has it. I urge everyone to please try this if they get a chance! (not only for the web but for their own digital camera pics on their computer)



Originally posted by: RossMAN
Good suggestion. Why do people post pics taken at 3MP just for online viewing?

Before you post the pic, resize it to a lower resolution using Microsoft Power Toys Image Resizer, it's quick, easy and free.
Click to expand...

Thank you for the helpful tool! This is another thing that gets pretty annoying. You don't need a 60,000 x 40,000 pic of your cat's head. But if you insist, at least reduce the 14 meg pic first!
 
MS Paint does reduce quality quite a bit. IrfanView lets you adjust how much quality you want to sacrifice. BTW, digital camera pics should be resampled, even if to nearly the same size - it will make a big difference.
 
Originally posted by: CTho9305
MS Paint does reduce quality quite a bit. IrfanView lets you adjust how much quality you want to sacrifice. BTW, digital camera pics should be resampled, even if to nearly the same size - it will make a big difference.
Click to expand...

resampled?
 
Originally posted by: CTho9305
MS Paint does reduce quality quite a bit. IrfanView lets you adjust how much quality you want to sacrifice. BTW, digital camera pics should be resampled, even if to nearly the same size - it will make a big difference.
Click to expand...

Do you see ANY quality difference in the above pics?

I personally have never noticed a difference. Not saying there isn't one but if you can't tell then just go for it.
 
Originally posted by: bleeb
Don't do it dawg. Some people use those pics to make "Own3d" or "Pwn3d" pictures.
Click to expand...

How does making a picture smaller in file size effect that in any way?
 
Originally posted by: MAME
Originally posted by: CTho9305
MS Paint does reduce quality quite a bit. IrfanView lets you adjust how much quality you want to sacrifice. BTW, digital camera pics should be resampled, even if to nearly the same size - it will make a big difference.
Click to expand...

Do you see ANY quality difference in the above pics?

I personally have never noticed a difference. Not saying there isn't one but if you can't tell then just go for it.
Click to expand...

Look carefully at the trees. I'm not saying MSPaint is always bad... but on some pics, it really does a poor job. In this case, I wouldn't notice without the 2 side by side.
 
Originally posted by: MAME
Originally posted by: CTho9305
MS Paint does reduce quality quite a bit. IrfanView lets you adjust how much quality you want to sacrifice. BTW, digital camera pics should be resampled, even if to nearly the same size - it will make a big difference.
Click to expand...

Do you see ANY quality difference in the above pics?
Click to expand...

Actually... yeah. First thing I thought was "I'll click the second one and identify a compression artifact"
I clicked it and... damn IE image resizing. I then disabled it in the options menu because I knew it would make comparison difficult

All I had to do was glance at the image to see a glaring artifact on the horizon.

"OK, now click the other picture and use ALT + LEFT and ALT + RIGHT (Back and Forward shortcuts for those with touchpads 😉) to compare"

I was using a touchpad with "tap to click" enabled and wasn't sure that I clicked the link. I was pretty sure I hadn't, but I didn't want to try again or else I'd risk having to press ALT + LEFT + LEFT and ALT + RIGHT + RIGHT to compare. So I switched back over and looked at the image.

"Where'd they go?" I immediately thought. Then I noticed that the back button was enabled, so I had clicked the image.

Case in point: The difference was immediately noticable. I identified that the image was different immediately and without any knowledge of it changing.

I've always been scared to edit low-quality JPEGs in MSPAINT for fear of just such quality degredation, but I never bothered to check. However, it is a nice quick way to compress the image on virtually any PC without installing a utility.

See? (In uncompressed BMP format for zero percent additional quality loss enlarged 200%)

EDIT: Well I'll be damned... Enlarging in Windows Paint performs some sort of filtering on the image. Who knew? The artifacts are still apparant. I wish I would have just left it at normal size and never edited my post with the enlarged version but it's gone now and I'm not starting over.
 
After staring at them for a minute, I can honestly say I don't see a difference

BTW, your link doesn't work
 
Originally posted by: Colt45
PNG owns jpg
Click to expand...

^^^

are there any digi-cams that save in .png format?

we are looking to buy our first one (well, i had one of those super low res ones way back) and they seem to all use .jpg
 
Photoshop has a nice utility called "Save for web" rather than just "Save".

It'll give you four views of the item saved at different quality settings.

 
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