Why resizing photos before uploading makes them better quality.
Do you want to share better quality photos within your report? Resize them first!
This forum software has a kilobyte size restriction on attachments, and during the upload process it heavily compresses your photos. Therefore by resizing your photos before uploading, you will reduce the negative effects of this automatic compression, and your photos will end up looking better. More like the girl as you saw her.
The Photos in Your Camera are BIG, Too Big to Share
Your camera shoots big pictures in terms of pixel size. Of course, since when shooting you want to capture the moment in most detail and best quality. When you download the photo to your computer it is still in its best and largest quality format. When sharing the photos with others, unfortunately we still have to consider boring bandwidth and storage limitations.
So when sending your photos to others to see, it is best and polite to resize them first. But resizing your images does not necessarily mean loss of quality. In fact, with the sex141 forums your photos will end up looking much worse if you do not resize them first. Why is that?
The 141 forum tries to compress all attachments to a much lower kilobyte size. Therefore the large pixel size image of your favorite girl is being crammed to a smaller kilobyte size within the same pixel size. This will result in compression artifacts or pixelation of the image, which practically means that your image is still the same size in pixel width and lenght, but your girl looks like she is made up of pixels like Super Mario. Don't do that to her.
Let's Make an Example:
You are a painter with a limited amount of paint (= your 141 kilobytes upload limit) and a small canvas and a big canvas (= pixel size of your image). And you want to paint the same image of a girl to both small and big canvas by using the same amount of paint.
- When painting an image to the small canvas, you can paint the same proportioned image in higher detail because you can use more paint in less space.
- When using a large canvas, you have to spread around your limited paint in order to cover the whole canvas, and have less paint available to paint details in the image. Thus your girl is less detailed.
From this we learn that by first resizing your photo to a reasonable pixel size, for example 800-1000 pixels wide, and uploading it after that, your photo gets more detail and less pixelation. Your girl's skin will look much smoother. Won't you want that for her?
Forum Software Scales Down Large Pictures on the Fly to Fit Your Monitor
This sounds like it's a good feature, but it serves an ill cause as members keep uploading pictures from their camera to reports in their original large pixel size without resizing them, and since the forum is scaling these large images to everybody's screen size on the fly, it just looks like they are normal sized. Most users will not realize that they are looking at large pixel size images that have been scaled down by forum software. You can recognize a scaled image on your screen if you move your mouse over it, and it is clickable with alt text "Click here to open new window".
What happens? Each image attachment uploaded to the forum has some javascript code that checks your computer screen resolution and compares it to the attachment width. If the image width in pixels is higher than 70% of the width of your screen resolution, the image gets scaled down to 70% of your screen size on the fly to fit your monitor.
- Resolution 1024x768, image scaled down if wider than 716 pixels
- Resolution 1280x1024, image scaled down if wider than 896 pixels
- Resolution 1440x800, image scaled down if wider than 1008 pixels
- Resolution 1680x1050, image scaled down if wider than 1176 pixels
- Resolution 1920x1200, image scaled down if wider than 1344 pixels
Since the original pixel size of photographs in your camera is in the range of thousands of pixels width and length, for example 3189x2392, it means that if you attach a photo like this without resizing it first, nobody will see it in its original size in any case. The forum will just scale it down on the fly down to 70% of the user's screen size. So any advantage of a higher pixel size is lost.
Couple this with the lesson that the forum compressing a large pixel size image results to a worse quality image than compressing a resized image, then we'll see the logic that uploading any image with pixel width over the common screen resolution scale down thresholds is a waste. By first resizing your image to around 700-1000 pixels wide and then attaching it will result in a higher quality image that others can actually view in its real size, without the forum software scaling it down.
How to Resize Photos?
Every image viewing software has a selection in its Edit or Image etc menu called Resize. Select that, and set the resized image width so that it comes down close to 1000 or less in pixels. After that, save your photo as JPG file type, which is best for photographs, and upload the photo to your report.
While there are many programs for editing images, almost everyone has Microsoft Paint with their copy of Windows, so let's use MS Paint as an example (as nerds with other operating systems don't need this guide).
- Open you photo in Paint.
- Click the #1 Resize button in top bar.
- Check that 'Maintain aspect ratio' checkbox is selected, as you want to keep your photo in proportion.
- Choose #3 radio button Pixels.
- Enter the #4 Horizontal or Vertical pixel size you want to resize your image to. As you have maintain aspect ratio selected, the other value will be automatically changed in same proportion.
- Save your resized image as JPEG file format, which is best for photographs.
[attach]27776[/attach]
If you want a bit more features than Paint but do not want to start studying Photoshop, I recommend a light (only 1.33 Mb) and free but hugely popular image viewing and editing software Irfanview. It is fast in opening and viewing pictures, and allows for easy and quick editing like cropping, resizing, color correction etc, from easy pull down menus that do not require you to be a graphics designer. If you also install the Plugins/AddOns pack from the index page, then the File menu gets an easy to use Save For Web... feature that allows you to save the image down to the Kilobyte size you want.
Example of Compression Artifacts
The attachment image shows compression artifacts in an image that has been uploaded to 141 in it's original pixel size of 3189x2392 before resizing. The forum software has applied heavy compression, and the 3189 pixel width image gets resized on the fly to 70% width of everybody's screen.
Should this photo been resized to a lower pixel size before uploading, the skin of her legs would look smooth.
[ Last edited by SkinnyForum at 22-8-2010 14:49 ] | |
