Lesser Goldfinch

[Jon Saperia]

I almost did not post this because I was having difficulty getting an image downsized to 800 in the vertical dimension to look good. I did look at the resizing information sticky but that was a long time ago. It just did not seem to produce an image I wanted to look at. When I went to upload, I was told the size restriction was 600k. I saved something of that size and it was downsized to something less than 400k. A lot is lost in the process. Is there new information on resizing effectively? Now to the image.....

This was taken in my backyard in NM near one of my feeders on August 9 around 1:30 in the afternoon. I used a Nikon D850 with the Nikon 70-200 2.8 lens and the 1.7TC. It was shot at ISO 1250 at 1/5000 (I was looking for hummingbirds) at f 5.6. I used +1.7 EV as I was in Auto ISO mode. The reason for the strange combination is that I did not want to use my 600 and wanted to see what I could do with what I had at hand for a hand held shot. I know some people can hand hold a 500 or 600, I am not one of them.

[Daniel Cadieux]

Great pose here with the full wings and tails flares, and I love the softly cloudy background. These guys are FAST! Even at 1/5000s. you have some motion blur on the face area (at least that's what it looks like as posted). Nice pastel colours throughout, and good comp. How are you resizing? With such a "plain" background it should be easy to resize to 1200 high under 600kb.

[Jon Saperia]

Great pose here with the full wings and tails flares, and I love the softly cloudy background. These guys are FAST! Even at 1/5000s. you have some motion blur on the face area (at least that's what it looks like as posted). Nice pastel colours throughout, and good comp. How are you resizing? With such a "plain" background it should be easy to resize to 1200 high under 600kb.

Thanks very much. For this work, I am using PS, current cloud version. I am using the 'save as' option and setting the vertical dimension to 1900. When I did that, the image was over the 600k file limit. I also tried Photo Mechanic which I greatly prefer for that type of work. Even with that, I could not get the image to be below 600k. In terms of the motion blur, I won't say there isn't any but it looks much better at a higher resolution. I have found this to be true more an more lately and I don't know why. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

[Randy Stout]

Joe:

I find that 1200 pix is very good for portrait cropped images, and 1600 for landscape crops. I agree with Daniel, that with the relatively featureless background, you should be able to maintain excellent quality at less than 600K. Try to save it again, at 1200 pix vertically.

Randy

[Jon Saperia]

Here is an image at 1200 vertically.. The background is not the issue for me. It is the sharpness of the head that takes a real hit going down to this size. All I did to "save as" was to set the vertical dimension to 1200. Perhaps I am doing something wrong. Just to be sure, I have uploaded a larger version to my website. I think there is a big difference. Here is the URL, what do you think?

https://jonsaperia.zenfolio.com/p925...267c#hebac267c

P.S. - I just compared what is on the website with what I just posted and what I see of the JPEG before uploading. The one on my desktop is best, followed by the new one to you I just posted above, followed by the one on my webstie.

[John Mack]

The pose is very nice. I like the faint clouds.

[Jon Saperia]

Thank everyone for the comments. I have only recently started to post after a number of years. One thing I have never understood is the file size on my computer is always larger than the downsized file on this site after it is posted. Is there an algorithm I can use to help me size larger than the 600Kb limit so what I post ends up on the site as just under 600k?

Thanks for any pointers about resizing.

[Daniel Cadieux]

Hi Jon, when you do your resizing you can lower the quality to 11, or even 10, without having the image take a hit in quality. What Randy and I were saying about the background is that when an image has a nice clean background, the file size is usually smaller, thus easier to resize under 600kb.

[Jon Saperia]

Ah... thanks now I understand about the background. I also see from your comment about the quality, that I was using a different method in PS to create the JPEG. I was using 'export' which does not have a quality setting. I tried 'save as' on the same psd file as the one that I generated the pictures I posted and set the quality to 8. The file was still 981K. I did not see a place to change the dimensions with this work flow. I am sure I am missing something simple. Would it be possible for you to post a couple screen shots of the dialogs you go through? Thank you.

[Jon Saperia]

Just to close this out, I did get one image to work the way you suggested. I have written it down here in case I have any errors. Because I mostly use Photo Mechanic for creating JPEG files, using PS to do this was a bit of a (re)learning experience for me. To get a good image that meets the requirements for posting here I had to:

1. Create a new file in PS.
2. Resize the image to the desired size. Here I used 1200 in the vertical dimension.
3. Use the export as function to set the size again and do the conversion to sRGB and set Bicubic Sharper for Resample.

That got good results. It was a one step process in Photo Mechanic for me.

Thanks again for everyone's patience.