AboutLizaL Expertise I've used Photoshop since the release of version 2. I taught college commercial art and graphic design for 10 years, and within that realm, taught Photoshop at every level, and with each successive product upgrade. My experience with Photoshop is thus extensive and well-rounded, from photo retouching to color adjustment to incorporating Photoshop and ImageReady into Web design. I am primarily a Mac user (since 1985), but am also PC-savvy.
Experience I've been a graphic designer for 22 years, was a national magazine art director, a designer for the Department of Defense, a college art instructor, and have my own freelance Web and graphic design business, LittleWorks (www.little-works.com). I've also worked for several printing companies, in both prepress and art.
Awards and Honors PICA award (Printing Industry of the Carolinas Award for the design of a media kit that accompanied a magazine I was art directing at the time)
Question Hello and thanks in advance.
I have over 130 high resolution digital pictures that I want to continue to be able to zoom in to see details. But I want to have them as a smaller file than they are currently without losing too much/any details. (I will be working them in Illustrator and then saving them as a JPEG to put in PDF formate.)
Currently they are 14.1 M pixal dimensions; width 2560, Hight 1920,document size width 35.556, hight 26.667; resolution 72.
What do I need to adjust to make the file size smaller without getting it to pixalize? Can it be done to find common ground between file size and detail?
Photoshop 7, Illustrator 10, windows Xp profession 2002.
Thank you.
Answer Hi Robert,
I need a little more information -- you say you're working with the photos in Illustrator, and saving them from there. What are you doing with them in Illustrator? Why aren't you saving them in Photoshop?
Another question: What size do you want to reduce them to?
One last question: What is the destination of these pictures? Are you printing them, or using them on the Web?
If you can tell me these things, I can help you much better, but it's hard for me to tell you what to do when I don't know all the info.
So please post back and let me know these things, and I'll try my best to help you.
Unfortnately, JPEG compression uses an algorithm called "lossy" compression, which means you will lose some detail, somewhere, at some point. Usually when saving as a JPEG, the lossy compression will reduce things that the computer sees as redundant, or unnecessary (such as large areas of sky, water, etc.). And of course, the more you save as a JPEG, the more you lose -- it's sort of like making Xerox copies of a copy.
Now, if you're planning to use these pictures on the Web, you can use the Save for Web function in Photoshop, which is found under the File pulldown menu. But this is for optimizing graphics and pictures for use on the internet, so those are the algorithms used when compressing this way.
However, you can give it a try and see what happens, even if you're not using these photos for the Web. Under the File menu, select Save For Web, and then you'll see a dialog box come up. If you see only one image, click on the tab at the top of the screen that says "2-up." Then you'll see the original image on the left, and a copy of it, which is the one you're going to optimize, on the right.
Select JPEG from the little pop-up menu on the far right side of the dialog box, and adjust the settings as you wish to reflect Low, Medium or High quality JPEG, and make sure you check Optimized. You can also manually adjust the quality with the slider underneath the Optimized box.
It's pretty intuitive -- as you can see, you can also make it progressive if you like, as well as add a little blur or a matte color, and you can embed a color profile too.
But those things aren't the big issue here -- the big thing is, look at the bottom of the dialog box. On the left, you'll see the original file size, and on the right, now you should see a size that is greatly reduced.
This file measures 1900x1200 ppi, and the original file size is over 6.5MB -- and using Save for Web, the compressed version is 178K, without changing the physical dimensions.
Now, I don't advise using this as a method for saving your pictures for printing, unless it's for your own personal use; I'd never do this for, say, a freelance job. But you could try printing an optimized version, and see how it turns out.
And in terms of Web display, leaving your files at the huge dimensions they are as originals is a bad idea, too. You have to consider that people who have slow connections, or even dialup, can't and won't take the time to wait for a huge picture to download.
So that said, let's go back to the beginning! If you post back and tell me the additional info I asked about, we can go about resizing your picutres more conventionally! This is, admittedly, a "down and dirty" method!:
