Tutorial: Resizing a Photo
As the prices of digital cameras continue to drop and become more affordable, many people are buying and using digital cameras as a way to capture photos. Many of these affordable cameras are also getting more and more “mega pixels” and as a result, people are ending up with large photos.
Large photos are good for printing, but a pain for people with slow connections to receive. This lesson is intended to explain how to decrease sizes of photos before you email them to people or post them on web sites. This tutorial assumes the following skills:
- Downloading a program
- Installing a program
- Selecting / Opening a file
- Saving a file
- Using Windows
Before we start, you should download the following files for this tutorial:
IrfanView – This is a free image utility program. It is about 818K. It will take between 2 to 4 minutes to download this program using a dial-up connection. You can download it from this site by clicking here. If you want to download it from the official site, go here: http://www.irfanview.com
Lagoon photo – This is a photo we will use in this tutorial. It’s about 444K. It will take 1 to 2 minutes to download this photo using a dial-up connection. Right click here and select "Save Target As...". Download it and remember where you saved it.
Install the IrfanView program. During the installation, you may want to associate all image files to this program (3rd step).
1. Run the IrfanView program, and open up the Lagoon photo.
The Lagoon photo is a 3.3 Mega pixel photo. A photo this size are usually about 1,500K, which takes about 8 to 10 minutes to download using a dial-up connection. The lagoon photo’s dimension is 2048 pixels wide and 1536 pixels high. (Some compression has already been done for this photo.) Depending on your screen resolution, you will probably only be able to see the left upper part of the photo.
2. Click on the IMAGE menu, then select the Resize/Resample submenu (see example below).
3. You should see an options window. Select the 640 x 480 Pixels option located on the upper right area of this options window. This will resize the 2048 x 1536 lagoon photo to the 640 x 480 size. If you are sending a photo to a friend, you only really need to set it at 640 x 480 Pixels – if you want it slightly bigger, select the next one up. The larger the size, the bigger file it will be. Click on OK and this will close the resize options window and resize the image.
(Note: You may want to resize your photo to a different size depending on how the photo is taken. If you decide to do that, just make sure the "preserve aspect ratio" is checked on the resize options panel.)
4. You should see a much smaller image now. We should save this image as a different name, so click on the FILE menu, and select the SAVE AS sub-menu.
- Specify a different name for this photo. For example, Lagoon_small (see #1 in the example below).
- Specify a file format in the “Save as type:” section – for photos, we should save it as a JPG file. (see #2 in the example below).
- Specify the quality of the photo in the “Save quality:” slider (see #3 in the example below). To increase the quality, click on BEST. To decrease the quality, click on LOWEST. The difference between the original photo and a quality setting of 80 will be barely noticeable, so I recommend the quality to be set at 80. You can change this to your taste. The quality will also determine the file size of your image.
- Click on "Save" and save the photo. The new photo will only be about 70K, which should only take a few seconds for anybody to download and receive when you send it out.
I hope this is useful for you. If you have any feedback or suggestions, please send me an email at glin (at) planetneptune (dot) com – replace (at) with @ and (dot) with . Please place “PN: Image resize” in the subject line.
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