Taking photos

[Dario]

I have an older Panasonic LC40 digital camera
(see http://www.steves-digicams.com/2002_reviews/lumix_lc40.html#specs for specs if you wish)

It has the following resolution choices.

2240 x 1680 (4 MP)
1600 x 1200 (2 MP)
1120 x 840 (1 MP)
640 x 480 (1/3 MP)

For pen photography (to meet the file size limit here)...which resolutionn would you recommend?

FYI, I am leaning towards 1120 x 840 (1 MP) right now.

At first I thought the higher the better. My tests seems to indicate otherwise. Cropping and compressing photos seems to produce poor quality than photos taken at almost the right size (for posting).

I am using JASC Paint Shop Pro Ver. 6 for photo editing.

Am I doing wrong, using wrong software, or is my test right?

Thank you,

 

[Doghouse]

Photograph at the highest always. Then crop / reduce / increase compression to meet the requirements. You can always remove, you can not add to what is not there.

 

[vick]

Just as a note I have found that when your resize(reduce) some photo editing software does a lousy job which causes the picture to look bad. Pay particuliar attention to this step and if it is an issue try different software.

 

[JimGo]

I agree with John (Doghouse). There are a lot of freeware and inexpesive programs that will do the image reduction/cropping, but you do have to be careful, as Mike said. I use Microsoft's Digital Image Pro version 7. The user interface is rather simplistic, but it does a lot of neat stuff, and isn't too expensive.

Are you cropping first, or compressing the image first? I always crop first, then resize the image (scale it) to the size I need.

 

[Fangar]

Dario,

I use a 5MP Olympus. Most of the time I shoot on the highest resolution in .jpg mode which results in a 1.5 MB file size or so. You should be able to get that file size down below about 70 kb when resized to 640x480 and compressed only slightly. All of my photos posted here and for my web page are sized with Image Expert. A free program that comes with many digital cameras now days. Very simple. Some free programs have to be adjusted just right as the compression will cause issues.

I asked a while back, but if you take a photo in full resolution with that camera, email it to me. I will adjust it and send it back to you, to show you how the proper program can make all the difference.

Cheers,

James

 

[Dario]

Thanks James

I'll take you on this offer one day []

One question...you said full resolution...I can take photos at TIFF mode (raw) which is massive file size wise. Is that what you mean?

 

[Fangar]

Dario,

By full resolution, I meant a full photo as if comes out of your camera. The best resolution JPEG would be good. TIFF is great for some stuff, but like you said will result in a very large file size. I think for the pens, it is not really necessary, as they have to be compressed for viwing anyway. Essentially, the difference between a full resolution TIFF and JPEG is th compression.

Let me know when you have one.

James

 

[dubdrvrkev]

I use an old Sony 1.3 MP and shoot normally at 1200x 960(?). I use adobe photoshop for all of my cropping and resizing, which does a great job. After cropping I resize to about 600 pixels wide and I can usually use 100% quality.