Best way to go from Hi-res to lo-res - for websites?

LongOnSilver

New to this forum, and will thank you in advance for your time,

Shooting a Nikon D80, and am learning more every time I shoot. Previous camera was one of the Sony DSC-F707, so the D80 is a big step up. The Sony did have a cool feature, however, which allowed you to shoot in HI-RES format, but it also saved a small 800x600 (approx) copy of each shot so that you could use them on a website without crunching up the pixels on the HI REs shots.

Can't seem to find this feature on the D-80, and I'm unhappy with my current attempts to shrink photos enough to publish them on our website.

What's the generally accepted wisdom here?

Thanks,

Trish323

Hi and welcome to Dgrin:D

Best way I know is to set DPI to 72, but don't resample, save as a jpg. with 10 as compression level.

jfriend

LongOnSilver wrote:

New to this forum, and will thank you in advance for your time,

Shooting a Nikon D80, and am learning more every time I shoot. Previous camera was one of the Sony DSC-F707, so the D80 is a big step up. The Sony did have a cool feature, however, which allowed you to shoot in HI-RES format, but it also saved a small 800x600 (approx) copy of each shot so that you could use them on a website without crunching up the pixels on the HI REs shots.

Can't seem to find this feature on the D-80, and I'm unhappy with my current attempts to shrink photos enough to publish them on our website.

What's the generally accepted wisdom here?

Thanks,

First, if you're putting images in Smugmug, you don't need to resize them at all. Just upload the originals and Smugmug will generate web-based sizes for you automatically.

If this is for something other than Smugmug, what software do you have? In Photoshop, you can go to Save for Web and pick the pixel output size you want and the compression level. So, if you want an 800x600, you would just set that in the desired number of pixels, pick a medium compression level and it will generate a nice size for using on a web-site or email.

Trish's recommendation to change the dpi without resampling doesn't make any sense to me because that has absolutely nothing to do with how it will look on the web or how large it will be on a web-site.

colourbox

LongOnSilver wrote:

The Sony did have a cool feature, however, which allowed you to shoot in HI-RES format, but it also saved a small 800x600 (approx) copy of each shot so that you could use them on a website without crunching up the pixels on the HI REs shots.

That's not really true, because it's still going to take the shot at full res and crunch down the pixels. It's just going to do it in the camera, not in your computer.

A few cameras have the ability to record fewer pixels by essentially cropping the image to its center before recording. But any time you see the entire viewfinder image, it means all of the sensor pixels were used, and getting to a smaller image means they got crunched down somewhere along the line.

BinaryFx

A good link on the topic:

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/image-resize-for-web.htm


Regards,

Stephen Marsh.
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binaryfx/