- Editing your photos
- Using special effect filters
- Preparing your photos for e-mail and the Web
Preparing your photos for e-mail and the Web
One of the easiest ways to share your photos with friends and family is to send them via e-mail.
However, your newly scanned/edited photos are not ready to be e-mailed. This is because the image files are probably quite large (anywhere from 1 megabyte to 5 or more depending on the resolution you selected when you scanned).
You don't want to e-mail such large files because they take too long to transfer, and many people can't receive big files because of e-mail storage limitations. So the answer is to reduce the file size of your images before e-mailing. They'll still look great, and your friends will thank you for not clogging their inbox with massive files.
Here's how to do it:
- First, reduce the actual size of your image. Since your recipient will be viewing the photo on a computer, it should be small enough so that it fits completely on a computer screen. To do this, open the image file in your image editor. Then change the size -- for e-mailing, the image shouldn't be any more than 600-700 pixels wide.
- In Photoshop, this is done with the "Image Size" option, under the Image pull-down menu.
- In IrfanView, this is done with the "Resize/resample" option, under the Image pull-down menu.
- In Photoshop, this is done with the "Image Size" option, under the Image pull-down menu.
- The last step is to compress the file into a smaller-sized "e-mailable" file. To do this:
- In Photoshop: Choose "Save for Web" under the File pull-down menu, select the JPG format, and set the Quality to 50 (or less).
- In IrfanView, choose "Save As" under the File menu, select the JPG format, and set the Save Quality to 50 (or less).
- In Photoshop: Choose "Save for Web" under the File pull-down menu, select the JPG format, and set the Quality to 50 (or less).
You'll notice that these smaller compressed image files still look great even though they're a tenth of the file size of the original file.
Any images you put on a web site should also go through this process so that your site visitors will be able to download your photos more quickly. But note that many of the new photo gallery web services (such as Flickr) will do the resizing and compression for you. So you can just upload your full-sized/uncompressed images and they'll automatically produce a quick-loading version to display in your gallery. Very convenient!
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