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Well, These images weren't captured in Oregon proper, but they were taken very close by.
Recently I made my first trip down to Crescent City, CA, and spent a week with my wife sightseeing amongst the redwoods and ocean-scape. As a life-long Oregonian, I was quite ashamed that I had not taken the short journey into this great land before. I have now. It was stunning. I will be going back, soon.
Here are a 2 images from Crescent City, and one from The Trees of Mystery.
Anyone have any sizing tips for me regarding this forum? I've been having to downsize my photos to around 3''x1.5'', 300dpi, 900x600pxl in order to get them under the 550kb limit. They are obviously being blown back up, and it seems like there is a quality loss. What am I missing.
Great looking photos, very nice. Also, plesase note that while we do focus on the Pacific Northwest, we don't mind photos from other places. In fact, we've even got a section in the gallery for photos that weren't taken in the PNW. So don't worry about whether you can see Oregon from where you to the shot.
Anyone have any sizing tips for me regarding this forum? I've been having to downsize my photos to around 3''x1.5'', 300dpi, 900x600pxl in order to get them under the 550kb limit. They are obviously being blown back up, and it seems like there is a quality loss. What am I missing.
DPI doesn't really mean anything on screen. All that matters is the final dimension in pixels. 900 x 600 is a nice size for the forum, they should look fine.
What program are you using?
General suggestions.
1) Maybe go a bit larger, 1000 pixels or so in the long dimension, or even 1200.
2) Often, after re-sizing an image that much, you'll want to run "sharpen" on the image to get rid of the softness that can occur.
3) When saving the jpg, set the compression down a bit to get under the 550k limit. Really, you should be able to get to 200-300 with no trouble. You can set the jpg quality as low as 60 and have them look OK for the screen. They won't print well, but hey, that's an advantage in this case!
As an example, here's the water wheel shot (great image!) I sharpened it a bit, then compressed it to 60% quality in jpg. You don't need to go that low in quality, but I wanted to show that even at a fairly high compression it still looks good.
This version is 171kb. Do you see much difference between the two? I don't...
I compared the two in photoshop, and the only visible difference I could locat is a subtle loss of smooth blending in the deep blacks of the waterwheel. Even that wasn't visible until I zoomed in to double magnification.
The requirements for viewing on screen aren't nearly as rigorous as those for printing. You can easily get away with compression here that would degrade your quality when printing a large image.
So, I'd go for about 1000 pixels on the long side (10 inches at 100 dpi if you prefer) and set the compression to somewhere around 70 to 80 for most work. Should be just fine.
I do notice that the image you re-worked, seems to be a lot sharper. It's really evident if you look at the end of the water trough/spigot thingamajiggy.
If you have CS2, I think you have the function "save for web". If you do, use that, and set the quality level to "high". That should work to get you below 550k, if not, then step down to "medium".
Yes, all I did was choose "sharpen" in Photoshop. I don't recall, but often I'll then go back and fade the sharpness just a bit, say to 80% but that's a matter of taste.
What's not a matter of taste is that you'll need sharpen after re-sizing. Personally, the last thing I do is sharpen. Some folks sharpen initially, and then do it again when they're done re-sizing. I feel that runs the risk of over-sharpening. But there are varying opinions.
Great Images....I love that area. It's so lush I forget it's California. Go about 45 miles south of there to Gold Bluff Beach. Great photo ops and Fern Canyon where they filmed Juriassic Park 2 is about a 2mile drive away. It closes for visitors in Sept. Tho...as far as posting I use photobucket and I can resize easily. Use the direct link from photobucket here and choose to post in the image option in the tool bar.
I think I'm getting the hang of it, finally; posting quality images here... MUCH thanks to you, Bob.
I replaced the originals, up top, with the re-worked images. Better, I think.
Thant link to the sharpening post was extremely helpful. I upload all of my images from my camera to Iphoto, then work them out in CS2. I wasn't aware of how to sharpen in Pshop. Now that I am, the first few I have done look great! It's all about sharpening as the last step, agreed. It's amazing how much progress I have made in the last month or so with all this help. Good karma headed your way, Bob.
Christena-
Pretty incredible down there, eh? We actually did the Fern Canyon hike. Gorgeous. I was unaware that Jpark2 was filmed there... cool! Unfortunately, I was having an off day taking pics, and didn't have my tripod with me. They were shaky to say the least. Oh well, it's a good excuse to go back...
REMATCH!
Thanks again, all.
leaps and bounds, leaps and bounds, wheels are turning
Thanks Tobiah, that's what the forum is all about.
Learning all of this stuff is difficult, and some stuff is only obvious after it's been explained. Sometimes the order you do stuff in matters a lot, other times it doesn't make a difference at all, it depends on what's being done.
Knowing which steps matter is the tricky part, and hopefully we can help one another learn.
My street smarts and basic intuition haven't gotten me very far with digital photography. So to have something like this forum, is invaluable to say the least.
I've currently been working on digitally cataloging our old family photos... from the last 30 or so years. Our scanner is broken, so I'm ctually re-shooting the old physical photographs with my XTI, as they are set up on stands in my diffusion tent. It works pretty well... and with some of the tips I've taken from y'all, they're turning out fantastic.
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