 | By Ian “Gizmo” Richards Modern digital cameras take great photos, but the multi-megabyte size of each digital image often makes the photos too large to send as e-mail attachments. Free software can work just as well as commercial tools for reducing the size of the photos and, with just a few mouse clicks, can prepare hundreds of images for easy e-mailing. |
Resizing photos is easier than you think
If you talk to anyone deeply involved with photography or digital imaging, you’ll learn that resizing digital images is a complex business. That’s because there’s no perfect way to reduce the size of an image. All such techniques are just compromises of one sort or another.
The digital experts will further tell you that these compromises produce results of widely varying quality among different image-reduction programs.
The experts are technically correct. The more-advanced image-reduction programs offer a wide range of options, including a choice of compression algorithm, output resolution in dots per inch, and degree of compression of the resulting reduced image. All these factors affect the final, visual quality.
Here’s the good news: Most of these options don’t matter much when all you want to do is e-mail some photos to family and friends. Sure, there can be quality differences between different programs and compression algorithms, but the variation is important mainly to digital-imaging experts.
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