Whats the best way to reduce scanned document size?

[imported_Ziggy]

I have a bunch of JPG files of black and white text that I scanned. They all amount to about 9 megs, how do I reduce it to a more emailable size?

 

[WannaFly]

save them as tiffs

 

[imported_Ziggy]

I have photoshop btw

 

[Concillian]

Best as in best image quality or best as in easiest for an end user to do with some compromise in quality.

Reducing size is a tricky issue, and why LCDs often don't operate well at non-native resolutions.

For quick reduction you can download something like irfanview (freeware image viewer that will also resample/resize) and just take whatever it gives you for quality for the different image pixel sizes.

For more quality use photoshop and convert it to a raw or 24bpp TIFF format, then experiment with the various lossy methods and quality levels to find what suits you best. In Photoshop, with jpegs you can set various types of jpegs (decode time vs. file size) quality level (umm quality vs. file size) and overall image size. You can tailor to what suits you best.

 

[drag]

Jpgs are going to be smaller then tiffs, I am pretty sure. The thing about tiffs is that they are a lossless format so everytime you modify and save them they don't loose information, everytime you modify and save a jpeg it gets a little bit more crappier.

Just make the image smaller and increase the compression on the Jpegs. A change from 90% quality to 80% quality can have a huge impact on file size. It shouldn't be too hard to get them down to a manageable size. And if they are black and white you can probably reduce the color palete to make them even smaller.

It'll take a little bit of experimenting to get them to the right size/image quality balance.