Reduce the file size of an image

In order to reduce the file size of your images, you'll need to reduce the quality of the images, called optimising.

What does that mean? Well, imagine an image as being a massive grid made up of thousands of coloured dots. Each dot resembles a certain colour — placed next to each other, all the coloured dots together form an image.

Optimising basically takes a number of similar coloured dots whose shade only differs slightly and replaces them with one coloured dot that has the "average" colour shade.

So, for example, instead of having 500 shades of red dots, you'll have a hundred, e.g. if an image originally had say a million colours, after optimisation it will have only 200 000 (depending on the amount of optimisation), which translates into a significantly smaller file size (less information).

To optimise a photo, however, you'll need a photo editing application. Fortunately you won't have to spend thousands of rands on this, as there are quite a number of free applications available on the Internet.

Have a look at About.com's suggestions of eight killer photo-editing applications. I've personally tried out the Serif PhotoPlus 6 one and it really works well. To use it, however, you need to register it online, but the process is simple and it's free of charge. The only downside to it is that you'll receive some ads in the mail.

Personally I don't have a gripe about this, because you're getting a pretty powerful piece of software for free in exchange and you can unsubscribe from all the mails as you receive them. What I normally do is to create a web-based e-mail account, such as Gmail, and then use that for all my registration purposes. That way your personal e-mail account won't get targeted by unwanted ads.

Anyway, let's get back to reducing those pesky file sizes.

Reducing the file sizes of your photos is one thing, but you'll find that a manageable file size will not translate all that well with regards to photo quality (the less colours, the lower the quality). So I suggest you make the image itself smaller as well.

Using 'Serif PhotoPlus 6' then, you can reduce your photos' file sizes by following these instructions:

1. Open 'Serif PhotoPlus 6' and register the product if you've not yet done so.
2. You will now be greeted by a "Startup Wizard" designed to help you get going quickly. But let's side-step this so that you can know how to do things from scratch. So click on "Cancel".
3. Click on "File" and then on "Open".
4. Browse to the image you want to optimise and click on "Open".
5. Now to resize it — go to "Image" and then select "Image size". A dialogue box opens up.
6. In the area titled "Pixel size" type in the width (you'll have to experiment a bit to get a size that suits your taste). Make sure the box titled "Maintain aspect size" is ticked — this will resize the height automatically when you type in the width to keep the aspect ratio of the width to height, i.e. if you type in 600 in the width box, it will automatically adjust the height to 450 pixels.
7. Click "OK".
8. Now to make the file size smaller — go to "File" and select "Export Optimizer". Another dialogue box opens.
9. Move the slide at the bottom left in the area marked "Quality" to adjust the... erm... quality of your image, keeping an eye on the preview area on the right. Also note the "JPG File size" notifier at the top of the box, which indicates the file size of the image at the current quality setting. This shows what the final file size will be after optimisation.
10. When you're happy click on "Export".
11. Browse to where you want to store the file and give it a name (don't save it with the same name in the same directory as the original file or it will replace the original).
12. Click "Save".
13. Slap yourself on the back — you've just optimised your first image. Graphic manipulation grandeur awaits you.

Of course, optimising an image is only one function in photo-editing. Explore the tutorials to really get to grips with what you can do with a photo.

Happy hunting!