Saving Digital Pictures to PC

[Midge]

Bought my first digital camera last week (Canon Ixus 40) and have been having a play with it. So far so good, and have saved pictures from the camera to the PC.

Picture resoloution is set the the highest quality on the camera, and when the pictures are originally downloaded they are approx 1.6mb in size. However, after playing around with them in Paint Shop Pro, when saving again with the changes, the pictures are only approx 250k in size, and obviously are no where near the quality they started out.

Any ideas as to what's going on or what I'm doing wrong?

Thanks

[GarethH]

Well, the two main levels that could have been altered by PSP are the resolution and the compression of the image. Not sure how to alter those in PSP as I use photoshop.

[DB2k]

erm try using the SAVE AS button in the file menu maybe, and then when it comes up with the flie name box I think theres an ADVANCED option in which you can select the level of JPEG compression used..? try setting it to as little compression as possible.

[Midge]

erm try using the SAVE AS button in the file menu maybe, and then when it comes up with the flie name box I think theres an ADVANCED option in which you can select the level of JPEG compression used..? try setting it to as little compression as possible.

Will have another look tonight, but pretty sure I've tried that already and there was no option for size/compression etc.

[emeyedeejay]

You should never really open and re-save your pics in a photo editing application.

You should make a copy of your original file and use that as your working copy...

What is happening here is your photo editing software is recompressing them using JPEG algorythms and reducing the quality of the pictures. This won;t be all that noticable on screen unless you look carefulyl but may affect print quality...

[emeyedeejay]

Will have another look tonight, but pretty sure I've tried that already and there was no option for size/compression etc.


Size/Compression option is mostly called quality and is usually a slider on the options parts of save as dialogues once you have set the output file type to jpg/jpeg...

Typically, this is set to around 70 by default which will give yuo a huge difference in picture size (bytes) but as I say in my previous post will reduce the quality of the output file by compressing your photo...

If you slide the quality slider to the maximum, it will save with (almost) no recompression and maintain the original quality of the pic

[TnT]

As above - there's an <options..> button - PSP will remember the last compression setting used. There's also a run optimizer button after that so you can preview the effects of the compression. NB this is for PSP7 - think it's the same for PSP8.1 but I don't have it on this machine.

[Midge]

Ok thanks for the above. Using PSP 8, so will have another look at trying to find the settings for quality when saving, as want to save them without losing any quality.

[Midge]

Thanks all, got home, had another look and found the option so that pictures are now saved as required.