wake

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When I am just taking some pics for emailing to friends, I always reduce them for fast loading.

My camera has 2meg - 4 meg - 6 meg settings. Should I always use the highest res and reduce them a LOT? Or would the final result be better if I used the 2 meg setting and reduced them a little?

All in jpg format by the way.

thanks
wake

~

DonaldG

Hi Wake
Welcome to the Photographer's Corner

I think it is a matter of personal choice. I am assuming the settings are Mega-pixels.

6mp will have more detail than 2Mp.

I would shoot at highest setting. That will give you margin for cropping. Then reduce them.

However, what you need to do is set your camera up and take identical photos of a scene or object at each setting. Use the 2Mp image as a standard reference image, then reduce the 4 & 6Mp down to the same size of the 2Mp. Then compare each one and see which is best for you.

One of the joys of digital photographs is that you cane experiment to your hearts content. Pictures that don't make it can be deleted and no one will ever know!

zuluclayman

I would always shoot at the higher settings then resize a copy for the purpose you want to use them - that way you have them at decent size should you want them, and my feeling is that they will look better resized than small images from the camera.

I shoot at the maximum settings of my camera then after downloading use Irfan View, a good little freeware viewer/batch converter (link in my signature) to bring selected images down in size for emailing or whatever purpose I need smaller file sizes for. I set up a folder named "smalls" within the folder containing the images and save them to there. Irfan is fast and allows other adjustments to batches as well - cropping, brightness/contrast, lots of others.

@ DonaldG - beat me to it -I'm a slow typer - your post wasn't there when I began typing mine

Shane84

Hello Wake,
I agree with the others. I always shoot everything at full 12bit RAW on my Nikon D300 with file sizes coming out around the 15Mb mark. I even up it to 14bit RAW for landscape work that I intend to rework heavily because you just can't have too many bits when you're doing extensive post processing.

The problem is, you never know when a photo opportunity will arise where you will want to post process / enlarge / crop. So ALWAYS shoot at max quality. You can always chimp the LCD and use the delete button if you want. Pixels, unlike film, are cheap. But you can't add detail back in that's not there.

As for taking pixels out. I can reduce several hundred 15Mb Raw files to email friendly ~50kb JPEGs in minutes with a Photoshop Batch Process. So it really pays to go for quality when shooting.

You may think that your work doesn't need the extra quality but if one day you want a holiday snap blown up to 8x10" for your wall then you'll appreciate the extra pixels. If you find that max quality fills up your memory card too quickly then buy more memory cards. Many, many more if necessary. I never leave the house without at least three.

That's my $0.2

DMA_Dave

I agree with always shooting at maximum resolution, then downsizing when needed. A handy resizing tool I've found and like is FastStone Photo Resizer. It's free, and very easy to use.