Not a chance of imaging (stellar) again tonight so I turned my camera on the water. I have never tried a night terrestrial image before. 1000D iso 100 f3.5 10s.
This is Pittwater a couple of minutes ago.
Would anyone know why it pixelates when downloaded. I have only just dropped the size in PS and nothing more. Is it because I had to push the iso hard?
Frank - I'd recommend resizing it first (longest side being no longer than 1024 pixels), and then compress it to under 200kb. Can you EMail me the original file? I'm happy to have a look for you if you want. PM me if you want.
The following procedure is not what I use because it strips the EXIF information (exposure details) from the file, but, this should suffice:
In Photoshop, resize the image to say, 800x533 (which is what I typically do for web if the length/width is in a 3:2 ratio) and then go to File > Save for Web and Devices.
Click one of the settings there so that you have a 4-up display of images. Then, I typically choose the top right, and change the quality setting, click in another text-field and look at the size of the file under the image. If it's below 200 KB, I then up it a notch, and then click in another text field, and re-check the file size. If it's above 200 KB, do the converse, nudge the quality slider down.
Once you've got a size that's under 200 KB for this forum, click Save, et voila!
I use GIMP to do much the same as Humayun. (Runs on Linux and Windows and is free.)
I scale the maximum dimension to around 1000 pixels.
Select to save as a jpg, and adjust the quality slider until the image is no larger than 200KB. If the quality is below about 85%, go back and make the image smaller.
If you can save it at 100% and the size is less than about 180KB, you can go back and make the image larger.
Every image will need different compression. If it has large areas of similar hue it compresses much more than if it changes a lot.
I just uploaded a 2000x662 pixel image (1324000 pixels ratio 3:1), scaled down from 8521x2820. That worked because it was taken at night.
H mentions stripping the EXIF (image data headers) - Photoshop's save for web option does this. If you want to avoid it, you can do file > save as, select jpg and a quality level. If you're posting on IIS, then you'll need to keep it below 200kb in size (and the longest dimensions no greater than 1024 pixels).
Thanks for the information everyone. This is very close to what I do but I do not change the quality settings which I have done in this image. I changed the quality setting from low to high.
