A number of our members are new to computers and have experienced difficulty in resizing their images correctly for submission to club competitions and evaluation evenings. This guide leads you through the resizing and saving process and if followed will ensure that your images are optimally sized for display and are also not so large as to waste bandwidth when being e-mailed. This guide assumes that Adobe Photoshop is being used and screen shots were made from Photoshop Elements 4. However the steps are likely to be similar in other image editors.
After you have finished processing your digital image, scanned slide or scanned negative you must ensure that you save the full sized image. If you have used layers then you should save the file in TIFF or Photoshop’s native PSD format to ensure that you can go back to refine your processing in future. Only once you have safely saved your image should you continue with the resizing steps. We will begin with your full sized image open in Photoshop.
The first step is to resize the image itself. We do this using the Image|Image Size… command on the menu or by pressing the keyboard shortcut Alt+Ctrl+I (Opt+Cmd+I on a Mac).
This will open the Image Size dialog. There are a number of settings that we need to check here. Resample Image must be checked and the resampling mode set to Bicubic Sharper. Constrain Proportions must be checked and if your image has any layers with styles applied then Scale Styles must also be checked. We are simply going to change the pixel dimensions; if your image has a horizontal format then type 1400 into the Width field, ensuring that pixels are selected in the field alongside. If your image has a vertical or square format then type 1050 into the Height field instead, again ensuring that pixels are selected in the field alongside. Click OK and your image will be resized to the best possible size for display on the club’s projector.
Next you are going to save your image in JPEG format, ensuring that the file size conforms to the club’s requirement that image files are no more than 500KB in size. To do this select File|Save As… or press Shift+Ctrl+S (Shift+Cmd+S on a Mac) to open the Save As dialog.
In this dialog made sure that the Format is set to JPEG (*.JPG;*.JPEG;*.JPE) and type your file name into the File Name field. It is not necessary to type in the extension (.jpg) as this will be added for you. Remember to name the file according to the naming guidelines; S, O or E, followed by a 1 or 2, then your name and the title of the image. Each section should be separated by an underscore (_) character. For example, O1_Steve Crane_Rocks. Click OK and you will be presented with the JPEG Options dialog. Our aim with this dialog is to use the best quality (least compression) we can while making sure that the image size is under 500KB.
You do this by first moving the quality slider all the way to the right setting the quality to 12. The estimated file size will be recalculated and will probably be far larger than required. All you do now is slowly move the slider left until the quality changes to 11. Allow the estimated size a moment to recalculate and see if it is still above 500KB. If so repeat by moving the slider until quality is 10 and so on. As long as the quality remains at 7 or above your image will display fine on the projector. If the quality is at 7 and the estimated file size is still larger than 500KB then you need to repeat the resizing step as the image contains too much detail to compress sufficiently without too much degradation in quality. In this case you should click Cancel and repeat the resizing step using smaller values than 1400 and 1050 before trying to save again. It is not necessary to use sizes with standard aspect rations but a few common ones that you could try are 1280×1024, 1280×960 and 1024×768. Even an image of 1024×768 (the standard size for Interclub) will fill about ¾ of the projected area.
Once you have resized and saved all the files you wish to submit, simply attach them to the e-mail but be careful when doing so. Some mail clients will offer to make the images smaller, suggesting that smaller files are more e-mail friendly. While this is true, these mail clients do not take into account that you are not trying to send full resolution photos and have already resized them as you want. You must therefore answer carefully and not allow your mail client to resize the images.
