Now let’s take this knowledge and apply it to a real-life scenario. I have a picture here that I took while I was in Africa this summer. I edited it in Lightroom and exported it as a .jpg file to my hard drive.
Here are the specs so far…
Here’s a link to the original file on Dropbox.com: IMG_4831
Now, I’m going to resize and compress the file with FastStone Image Viewer. So, I open the file in FastStone Image Viewer and hit “Ctrl + R” to open the resize dialog. I’ll make it 1200px by 800px.
Now, we need to save our resized file, so we hit Ctrl + S to bring up the “Save As” dialog. Here we will set the compression settings with the “Options” button.
I chose a setting of 85 for this particular picture, you have to experiment to find the best options. You can compare the two results side-by-side, or you can click and hold the little green arrow (circled in yellow below) to overlay the compressed over the original.
Now just save the image, and we can compare it to the original!
From 6.70 MB to 178 KB, not bad! That comes out to only 2.657% of the original!
Finally, here’s the final resized & compressed version. (Click on it to open it in the lightbox.)
Wow, that is one pile of attachments at the bottom! @JamesStaddon, if you want, you can remove them, as long as it doesn’t actually delete the file, just “hide” it from the post.
