Boys Just Love Their Dollies

[kiltedLaddie]

[Betty]

Thanks. Why didn't you post them directly on the boards through our servers with just a few clicks, rather than go through the trouble of uploading them to an image server & linking to the image here? It seems like it would be a lot easier & faster.

We limit the file size to 60kb per picture, & no larger than 600x500, but you can post up to 6 pictures per post as long as the total file size of all the pictures in a single post don't exceed 90kb. In the snow gallery, with some of the smaller lower resolution images, I was able to cram 6 of them in a post.

If the images exceed ours or others limits, they make a free, incredibly simple, quick image management & slideshow program that's been around for 20 years that does an incredibly nice job of compressing images with file sizes to large, without actually shrinking the image itself.

It's irfanview at, http://www.irfanview.com/

Nothing fancy, but does well to manage the basics for posting, & simple processing of images. When you click to save an image with it, click to save in jpg, then if you select a quality setting of 75 it will compress it just to the point nobody would notice the difference on the web. It about the same compression that most web & image servers use for images when set to high quality. Setting to a quality of 70 will start to make the compression slightly noticeable. By 65, compression is obvious but still produces an acceptable picture for posting while reducing the file size a little more.

By a 60 quality setting, compression artifacts border on annoying, but still passable for those who don't want actually make the actual dimensions of the image smaller to save on file size.

But you can shrink the dimensions too. Just remember to check the "preserve aspect ratio" so you don't flatten or stretch the image. By reducing the dimensions by only 10-25% you can dramatically reduce the file size. Combined with a quality setting of around 70, you may be able to get the file size down much below half it's original KB.

It also has an excellent "no frills" slide show app. You can set it to play your images or folder randomly or in order by size, or date automatically at any timing intervals, or by the mouse click. You can also select to view all slideshow images in full screen or in original size, or all to fit the screen, or only shrink images to fit that are too large for the screen.

It also has a built in media player to play weird or old formats nobody else supports anymore, but won't play a lot of modern HD video formats.

It runs smooth without crashing consuming little resources... even on a 400mhz machine with 128kb of ram.

Below, I took your picture at 105kb put it through irfanview at a 75 quality setting, & reposted it in the same size but at about half the file size.

[Betty]

Here it is at a quality setting of 65 in irfanview, compression is more noticeable but don't look bad.

[Betty]

To reduce the file size more than that I shrank in down to only 500 pixels wide, at a quality setting of 65. It doesn't look too small.

For the one right below it I shrank it down to 400 wide. Still not tiny, & useful if you're restricted to tight file size or bandwidth limits, at about 1/4 the original file size.

[Betty]

If you have software for cropping you can also crop out irrelevant parts to save on file size, while highlighting the subject in the image. Then with some grain or artifact filtering, enhancing, & line re-scaling you can blow up the image to see more detail of the subject without a large file size.

Here, when I cropped, I left the dolls, & the tree in the picture, so the mood wasn't lost, but eliminated the pixel-sucking clutter.

[kiltedLaddie]

Thanks Betty, I've only been using Photoshop for a month or so, and  I've yet to explore image quality by using different settings etc. I'd rather process everything in one application if I can rather than have to save it in Photoshop and then do more processing in Irfanview.   

Regarding cropping I agree there can be a lot of what I call redundancy in a picture and I liked the way you cropped that image of the 'boy' and his dolls. 

[Betty]

There is no Swiss army knife of software that does everything, quick, easy or well. The is no "one size & model fits all".

Irfanview is great for easily doing what most people need an image processor to do quickly for personal or web use. It's free, & will run on any windows machine made in the past 20 years. It also has a simple but fun slideshow viewer & creator.

I use 2-4 different programs to processes most images, because there's no single program around that does all I need it to do well. As far as reducing file size through more compression, or resizing/rescaling an image, irfanview does it better with less loss of quality in the image than the rest.

On almost any other software, if you try to reduce the file size by more than just a tiny bit, while keeping the image dimesions the same, the finished compressed picture looks terrible. Some software compress images better than others.

[Robyn Jodie]

I can vouch for IrfanView; been using it for years, and I think it was Betty who told me about it.  For simple tasks like resizing, cropping, rotating, etc., you can't beat it, especially since with standard plug-ins you can crop and rotate jpeg images "losslessly" -- that is, without degrading the image.

[Betty]

And it don't take months of classes, with 1/2 dozen thick books to read, just to barely figure it out.

I consider myself a pretty handy person, & able to figure most stuff out, but photoshop is the most user-unfriendly, buggy, & resource hungry software I ever used. Aside from it's complexity, just they way it's laid out, type of icons used, how features are labeled or found (or hidden & buried), they couldn't have made it more difficult to learn & use if they deliberately tried to make it difficult.

Plus every version is an evolution or devolution of the previous versions, so if you haven't used & learned the previous versions, you'll be lost. It's like tuning in a soap opera you never seen before. You can't figure out what's going on unless you saw all the previous episodes.

I've never seen anything made by adobe that was made well, & was safe or secure. It's all backwards, difficult, bloated & buggy. Like, how many more decades is it gonna take for adobe to just get PDF & flash right?

[Robyn Jodie]

Photoshopping images to make a boy appear girlish or add a boy's head to a girl's body isn't as easy as it looks -- as you may already have found out.  If the angle is wrong, or the sizes even slightly mismatched, it looks "wrong," even though you  can't always say exactly why.