resized photos look bad

[Riverratt]

What am I doing wrong? I take my pictures at the best resolution but when I resize them to post them here they are very small and look blurry. When it asks about compression should it be maximum or not?

[pyro]

Compression is KEY. It's the balance between file size and image quality. It should be at quality level 5 - 6, or at 20 to 25% compression.

Use a good program, like PSP or PSE. MGI sucks.

[jphii]

No compression!

[Rickracer]

I tried it on the computer at the shop, and it works good, especially for free. :cool:

www.irfanview.com

[pyro]

No compression!

Go ahead if you want, you'll have a 200K re-sized photo that you cannot post. If you set quality to 5+ or compression to 25% or less, the photo quality will not be visibly affected.

your camera also has its own "quality" setting that controls how much compression it adds when it takes the pictures, thus also determining how many pictures the memory card in your camera can hold.

Every time you open and re-save a JPG, it adds additional compression that makes that picture look bad. If you're working with photos for printing, don't use ANY compression, and it won't alter the photo when you repeatedly re-open and make changes to a photo. Otherwise, when using compression, only get the original photo from the camera. Only open, re-size and save ONCE.

There's also a cool Win XP tool that you can download, it embeds a new item called "Resize photos..." into the right-click menu for image icons you right click on anywhere. It will automatically re-size the photo to 640 x 480 and save it, or save a re-sized copy with a slightly different name. It goes easy on the compression.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx

http://download.microsoft.com/download/whistler/Install/2/WXP/EN-US/ImageResizerPowertoySetup.exe