In addition to all this advice about photo editing software, I thought I
should point out that the easiest (and cheapest) solution would be to use
the lowest resolution setting on the camera.
Most digital cameras have a basic low quality setting of 640x480 pixels,
with JPEG compression at a high ratio (low quality). Images at this setting
should almost certainly come out smaller than 100K. No editing or additional
compression needed.
Since all images out of most cameras are automatically JPEG-compressed to
some extent (yes, I know, some cameras can save uncompressed TIFF or RAW),
additional JPEG compression applied in an image processing program can
severely degrade the quality*, even of a picture taken at a high-quality
setting. IMO you would be better off (for the most part) using the low
quality camera setting with no post-processing, for images intended for
eBay, general web use, or email transmission via dial-up.
*JPEG compression is a "lossy" algorithm, It removes the details that it
considers will be the least noticeable, in order to compress the image size.
In general, it should NOT be applied more than once to the same image file,
since the second time through it has no choice but to remove or simplify the
detail that it considered important on the first pass (to anthropomorphize a
mathematical process).
I hope this helps. FWIW I have been working with digital images since before
the JPEG algorithm was invented.
on 2/15/03 3:01 PM, Barrie Robinson at barrier@bconnex.net wrote:
> I have found that photos are very handy for corresponding with listers. So
> I bought a Canon Power Shot S200 digital camera. Loaded the software and I
> already have an item on eBay complete with photo ...BUT.. I had to use a
> long complicated process to get my image off the camera to a100K size
> requested by eBay. I also need to get them smaller to send to listers. My
> Canon ZoomBrowser EX and a stupid program provided with the camera called
> ArcSoft (terrible!) have no facilities to reduce file sizes. How do you
> chaps get your pictures down to transmittable sizes?? What I mean what
> program do you use?
>
> Regards
> Barrie
>
> Barrie Robinson
> barrier@bconnex.net
>
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