Photography Question

cgmblade

cgmblade

Joined
Jun 4, 2009
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I have a Sony Cyber-shot 7.2 mega pixel camera. In the image size selection screen it has a number of options including, from lesser to higher quality: VGA, 2M, 3M, 5M.

For taking my knife pictures I've been using the 5M setting, but then afterwards I have to crop and resize the image to get it to an acceptable size for posting to BFC. I use PSP (paint shop pro) to edit my images.

I've noticed that when I resize the images that the resolution/sharpness decreases. It's most noticeable around the edges of the knife. Sharp lines become somewhat blurry or seem to be less focused.

Should I lower the image size I use to take the pictures so I don't have to resize them later?
 
I'm not all that familiar with PSP anymore, as I use Photoshop. But there should be a few options when you go to resize a photo. The options are along the lines of "Nearest Neighbor," "Bilinear," "Bicubic," etc. You may have multiple options for sharpening along with the BICUBIC option. Anyway, for reducing the size of an image you definitely want to use the BICUBIC - SHARPER option if it is available. If only BICUBIC is available, you will need to do a bit of sharpening of the image after resizing it. Use UNSHARP MASK with setting of something like 0.3 pixel radius and 80% sharpening. It should get you pretty close to a nice looking image.
 
I should note also that I find I get better images by using the highest MP setting of my camera and then using software to resize and sharpen the image. The in-camera VGA setting uses WAY too much compression and the images look terrible for the most part.
 
CGM, I was just using my m-i-l's DSC-W80, and it has an option to shoot pics in 3:2 format. The images come out in about 2.7 MB but the cool part is that they are already in a print-ready size, so I only need to crop if I want to select a certain section of the image. My new DSC-TX1 also has it, though the images come out at about 5.5 MB each (the TX1 has a 10.2 mega pixels sensor, while the W80 has "only" 7.2). Maybe yours has that option too?

Vege-Taco, I saw your sig some time ago and was also wanting to congratulate you on your effort :thumbup:. Since November 16th I lost 15 kg, so I'm very much aware that what you have lost was no walk in the park :cool:. I still have 7 kg to go, and ideally I have to be done by February 1st, but these last 10 will not go as easily.
 
I normally use the 3M setting on my camera and don't touch the photos. My Photobucket is set to 1024x768 max size and with the higher resolution the pics look pretty good posted online. I used to resize them before I uploaded but I found that they came out looking far worse which makes me believe that Photobucket compresses them a lot.
 
LUW said:
CGM, I was just using my m-i-l's DSC-W80, and it has an option to shoot pics in 3:2 format. The images come out in about 2.7 MB but the cool part is that they are already in a print-ready size, so I only need to crop if I want to select a certain section of the image. My new DSC-TX1 also has it, though the images come out at about 5.5 MB each (the TX1 has a 10.2 mega pixels sensor, while the W80 has "only" 7.2). Maybe yours has that option too?
Click to expand...

Mine does have the 3:2 setting. I'll try it and see how the pics come out. Thanks.

BlackHills said:
I normally use the 3M setting on my camera and don't touch the photos. My Photobucket is set to 1024x768 max size and with the higher resolution the pics look pretty good posted online. I used to resize them before I uploaded but I found that they came out looking far worse which makes me believe that Photobucket compresses them a lot.
Click to expand...

If the advice given by LUW and Vege-Taco doesn't solve the problem I'll try the 3M setting. I've used it in the past and gotten some pretty good pictures, but because I was just learning how important lighting was a lot of those pictures came out poorly too. With all the variables involved it's sometimes hard to know where to point the finger of blame. But today I took some outdoor pictures of a new knife (Sage 1) and before I resized them they were crystal sharp, but afterwards not so impressive.
 
cgmblade said:
But today I took some outdoor pictures of a new knife (Sage 1) and before I resized them they were crystal sharp, but afterwards not so impressive.
Click to expand...

I wonder if part of the problem isn't your editing software or the settings on it. If it's an older program it's possible it could play a part.

Gimp is a free download. It will do probably 90% of what Photoshop does, according to my friends who have both. I've used it to resize a lot of pics and never noticed any degradation in quality. All the bells and whistles can be fun to learn but you could just use it to resize the pics and not worry much about the rest.
 
BlackHills said:
I wonder if part of the problem isn't your editing software or the settings on it. If it's an older program it's possible it could play a part.

Gimp is a free download. It will do probably 90% of what Photoshop does, according to my friends who have both. I've used it to resize a lot of pics and never noticed any degradation in quality. All the bells and whistles can be fun to learn but you could just use it to resize the pics and not worry much about the rest.
Click to expand...

The software could definitely be a big part of the problem. I hadn't thought about it, but I checked and it is version 4.12 from 1996. Maybe it's time I looked for something from this century, lol.
 
If it makes you feel any better I still have PSP 3.11 on mine. :D

I'd give Gimp a try, it does work pretty well.
 
I'll get Gimp and try some of the other suggestions in this thread and post the resulting photos in this thread for comparison. Appreciate everyone's help.
 
Resizing images is not as trivial as it may seem. It's actually a very sophisticated bit of image processing. Many free or low-cost tools just have poor resizing algorithms.

In general, photo editting is best done minimally and with the best possible tools. It's a basic principle of information theory that anything you do which improves one aspect of a picture hurts it in some other way. So, try to take the picture you want and avoid editting.
 
I take pictures with a Canon A530 5MP Digital camera at the highest quality settings. Have the camera on a tripod and set the zoom to where I want the final picture where I want it. That way I don't need to crop the picture. After uploading the picture(s) to my hard drive I use Windows Image Resizer to resize my pictures to 1024x768 which is the Medium setting. It makes a copy of the file thats the size you want. Works good for me and I learned about it here on the forums. :)

Heber
 
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Okay, so I've installed Gimp, but haven't had the time to really learn it yet.

We have a little snow here today so I took some more pictures and using one of them I re-sized using three different methods.

The results are below, which do you think is the best?

PSP has two options for re-sizing: One simply says resize and the other says resample. I'm not sure what the difference is but I tried it both ways.

Pic # 1 is the way I typically have been doing it. PSP - resize
Sage1_psp1.jpg


Pic # 2 is PSP - resample
Sag1_psp2.jpg


Pic # 3 is Gimp - Having spent as little time as I have w/ the software I feel fortunate that I got it to do anything so I don't know any of the particulars.
Sage1_g1.jpg


I think the Gimp picture looks slightly better than the others, but there's not a lot of difference I can tell.
 
Resample looks better than rescale. It's probably doing a bicubic resample, just like Photoshop. The GIMP image looks better yet, but most likely only because it was saved with much less JPEG compression. The file size of the GIMP image is over 3 times larger than the other two.
 
I hadn't even noticed the file size difference. Gimp offered several options for what I think it calls scaling, but since I don't know what I'm doing I just went with the default settings.

I think lighting is still a huge issue for me. Given the daylight and snow those cf scales should just jump out of the picture, but somehow I managed to get the handle in shadow.
 
wildmanh said:
I take pictures with a Canon A530 5MP Digital camera at the highest quality settings. Have the camera on a tripod and set the zoom to where I want the final picture where I want it. That way I don't need to crop the picture. After uploading the picture(s) to my hard drive I use Windows Image Resizer to resize my pictures to 1024x768 which is the Medium setting. It makes a copy of the file thats the size you want. Works good for me and I learned about it here on the forums. :)

Heber
Click to expand...

OP, if you have XP, the above is a tiny program that works quite rapidly. Another option would be to cut down on your initial picture quality so that it doesn't require so much resizing/compression to fit on BF.
 
cgmblade said:
I hadn't even noticed the file size difference. Gimp offered several options for what I think it calls scaling, but since I don't know what I'm doing I just went with the default settings.
Click to expand...

It looks like you figured it out OK. If you want the proportions to stay the same make sure the little chain to the side of width and height is connected (you can click/unclick the chain) and then you only have to enter one dimension before you hit 'scale'.

I agree with Vege-Taco on the order of which pics look best.

Just for comparison here's a shot taken in the 3M setting on my camera, which produces an original size of 2048x1536. I didn't touch the pic and uploaded it to Photobucket in the original size. Photobucket did the resizing since I have it set to a max size for pics. Obviously that doesn't work if you want them small enough to attach on BF but I seldom post pics that way.

As you can see it was in the shadows too.

DSCN1794.jpg
 
Try to keep your subject either completely in direct sunlight, with the sun behind you (optimally at about 45 degrees to your backside), or keep the entire subject in the shade, as BlackHills did with his photo. Cameras can't really handle the range of light from sun on snow to black grips in shadows. It's just too much dynamic range for a photo.
 
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