I have been asked by many of my friends and family if I would teach them how to edit photos for various uses. I do NOT profess to be an expert, and there are MANY things that I just don’t know. This is probably going to be a rambling, but I to avoid a lot of that…
Picture size:
In general, I have been taught to always take pictures with the highest setting that my camera can take. Then edit down depending on the use. And as long as you have the space on your camera or phone this is a good rule to use.
HOWEVER…. there’s always a but…. There are issues that should be taken into consideration if you are going to ALWAYS follow this rule.
- First, as I stated in the rule, High setting mean large files. If you have a 1 gig SD card in your camera, and you do not have time to download the pics; taking a lot of 10 or 12meg pictures will limit greatly the number of pics that will fit on that card before you need to delete some.
Or if you have a nice size card, but have not downloaded all the pictures in over 3 years you may need to delete something to get that special picture when the time comes. Ask me how I know this, ugh…. - Typically saving those large files will take some time. The camera has to write that to its storage devise. If your taking pics at your sons first little league game, and you take the first picture of him running down the third base line. You may miss the pic of him crossing home base while the camera saves the first picture.
If your taking pictures of the perfect rose growing in your garden, you can probably wait to take the next one. - Then there’s working with those monster files. Computers are much more powerful these days, but sending this files in email is just inconsiderate and posting them on websites and blogs can make a page load REALLY slow.
So why do you want larger files?
- The pictures are typically clearer, both on the screen and in print.
- There is more detail captured in the picture – hair on dogs, stitches are clearer on my quilt pics, and the colors are just brighter!
- And my favorite, you can always edit out detail, but you can NOT add it back in.
- If your printing 5x7 and 8x10 prints – the larger the file the better. And remember, anytime you crop or resize your picture you are reducing not only the size of the file, but you are deleting some of the detail.
NOTE: If you delete enough detail, the print will be fuzzy, grainy or both.
What are these “settings”? I don’t know if I can do this justice, but I will try to keep it simple.
Resolution: this is the number of pixels per inch (or “dpi” dots per inch) The higher the resolution (more dots per inch) the larger the file, AND the more detailed the file will be.
Dimension: size or the file saved by your phone or camera
Quality: the amount of data compression or optimizing
Online / Email Pictures
If you’ve made it this far congratulation, because this post is putting ME to sleep…..
My rule of thumb is to keep pictures that will be emailed or posted online to between 72 and 180 dpi. But this is not going to help if the pic is 3000 pixels (dot) wide. You will scroll to see the right and bottom. So the dimension I use is a relative width of between 500 and 600.
Examples: ?
picture at 180dpi – dimension 750 x 563 (158 kb)
pic 500 x 375 at 180 dpi (86 kb)
If you need the detail above but want the picture to fit crop out the portion you need to 500 x 375 and leave the resolution at 180 dpi. (96 kb)
finally 500 x 375 at 72 dpi (86 kb)
I have Adobe PhotoShop that I use to edit my pictures, but it really is overkill for most people. With this application I can define the image size by changing the resolution and/or dimensions to create these test.
Simply resizing a pic by a percentage, is very confusing especially if you don’t know what the settings are to begin with. But there are a lot of free or shareware application out there that can do simple editing .
Here is a site I recently found to resize pictures for free. FREE is good!!!
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