Reducing photos for uploading - what's the best way?

I was doing a little reading last night about sharpening/noise reduction and the author pointed out something I hadn't been taking into consideration - When you resize your images, all your sharpening and noise reduction goes out the window. And the more I understand the process of sharpening and noise reduction, the more I see what he's talking about

I've been doing it the simple way by using Microsoft Office and hit "resize" but I'm beginning to wonder if that's a bad way to resize our images. I then tried using Photoshop but the resulting images were extremely small even when I tried to reproduce that same parameters I was using with MS Office.

So this brings me to my question - what is the best way to resize your images? And what are others using to shrink their images before up-loading them to Nikonites. And do any of you re-sharpen their images after you resize them? Is there an easy way that will always produce that same sized images that works better than MS Office?

TIA

Most of my photos will end up in photoshop. I work on them adjustments and then save a photoshop file in a folder. Then, I resize the photo by reducing the "dpi" settings to 72 and then make the largest side/height 900 pixels. Then I bring the pic to 100% and apply "unsharp" filter. Then I save it as "jpeg" to another folder that contains all my jpegs (every month gets a new folder). I leave this folder on my desktop and it's easily accessible to upload to Nikonites.

This is the way I do it for all photos, and, even if it sounds like a lot of work, it's kind of a 20 seconds thing once you apply yourself to doing it every time.

Hope this helps.

I use CS -> Image -> Bicubic Sharpening option, resample selected, 100 pixels, 8x10 approx size.

and output the size to be less than 400K to make the image only useful for web viewing.

Excellent!! Thanks guys, that's exactly the information I was looking for!

Okay, here's a couple tests, the first is only 99k @ 100 ppi and the second on is 660k @ 100ppi. Which do you think looks better? Is the 660k too large or the 99k too small? (ie - papa bear vs. baby bear and I need to find mama bear?)

[btw - these are from later in the evening as the sky continued to get more and more colored. Once I figure out which is the best (I took a LOT of photos last night) I'll post the better ones.]

I prefer the larger one myself. Much easier to look at without having to click on the picture and resizing it to full size. Great shot, by the way.

fotojack said:

I prefer the larger one myself. Much easier to look at without having to click on the picture and resizing it to full size. Great shot, by the way.

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Thanks Jack! Does it "look" like an HDR image to you? I want to make higher dynamic images but I don't want that over cooked unnatural dream-like look. To me, this looks a little drippy (over saturated) but not so much an HDR so I'm wondering what it looks like to your eyes.

Dave_W said:

Thanks Jack! Does it "look" like an HDR image to you? I want to make higher dynamic images but I don't want that over cooked unnatural dream-like look. To me, this looks a little drippy (over saturated) but not so much an HDR so I'm wondering what it looks like to your eyes.

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I think it's just a tad over-saturated, but not by much.

Nothing overcooked about this shot, Dave. Looks vibrant and very pleasing to the eye. Maybe (just maybe) a tiny bit over saturated....but nothing I would worry about. This looks like a wall hanger to me, bud. Nice work. Picture how this would look at 11x14 on your wall.

Marcel said:

I think it's just a tad over-saturated, but not by much.

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I'd add that it's just the green-yellow that seems over cooked. Try removing a bit of saturation just for the green on the rocks.

Good, it looks like we're all in agreement. It is a tad bit over saturated and I've noticed I trend toward the drippy Velvia-like color images. And thankfully no one has said it looked HDR-ish, which is what I'm shooting for.

Dave, try using "Fusion Adjusted" and use the Exposure Fusion "Process". Yes you have less sliders but it's harder to overcook an image and to me looks more natural. The hardest slider to control in the last one midtones.

If you want a full choice of sliders "tick" Tone Mapping instead of Exposure Fusion, but I think this is were everyone gets carried away with things and overcooks images without knowing.

Just a thought

AxeMan - Rick S. said:

Dave, try using "Fusion Adjusted" and use the Exposure Fusion "Process". Yes you have less sliders but it's harder to overcook an image and to me looks more natural. The hardest slider to control in the last one midtones.

If you want a full choice of sliders "tick" Tone Mapping instead of Exposure Fusion, but I think this is were everyone gets carried away with things and overcooks images without knowing.

Just a thought

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Thanks AxeMan! I went ahead and gave the Fusion Adjusted option a try and I really like it. And as much as I adore Nik's software, I'm really digging on this Photomatix program. Although I think HDR Efex can probably do the same thing as Photomatix, it seems Photomatix is a bit more intuitive and you can get up to speed a bit faster than with the Nik program. But both programs are excellent programs and having both is really nice