How to resize a photo without compressing image?

August 29, 2014 8:56 AM

Trying to resize two photos without compressing them so much that they are unviewable.

I need to upload two photos to a technical Q&A forum and each photo must be a jpg and no more than 19.07 MB and 1200 Width and 3600 Height.

The two photos are currently 3456 x 2592 (only 3 MB so all set there).

I have tried resizing them with Gimp and the Gimp Liquid Rescale plugin.

At 1200 Width the image has been compressed so much that it does not resemble what the original photos captured.

I tried changing the size from pixels to % but while it was less compressed it was still no good.

Can someone help me figure out how to resize the photos without compressing them to death?

Photo 1 and Photo 2

posted by mlis to Media & Arts (10 answers total)

It would help if you post the unsatisfactory versions so we can see what's going on.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:01 AM on August 29, 2014

Best answer: Here's your first image resized using Bicubic Sharper in Photoshop at max jpeg quality.
posted by Oktober at 9:05 AM on August 29, 2014 [1 favorite]

If you want to highlight just that detail, it would probably be better to crop it so you're not wasting so many pixels.
posted by Oktober at 9:06 AM on August 29, 2014

If you want to highlight the detail, crop to the interesting bit and leave out the rest of the engine bay. Use Cubic or Sync interpolation for resizing, and use Save for Web to preview size and quality.
posted by scruss at 9:10 AM on August 29, 2014

Best answer: Here's your second image, resized to 1200px wide. Weighing a svelte 340k.

It would be interesting to see your "after" attempts, to see what happened. This is not a difficult or tricky re-sizing.
posted by Thorzdad at 9:14 AM on August 29, 2014 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thank you so much Oktober and Thorzdad! I had to run out for a work thing but will be back at the desktop in a few hours and I will post the ones I botched so we can see what I did wrong.
posted by mlis at 9:24 AM on August 29, 2014

Response by poster: Ok, here is what I was coming up with using the Gimp scale function and reducing using the default setting (pixels).

Then I used the Gimp Liquid Rescale plugin and reduced by % to 55% and this is what I ended up with.
posted by mlis at 12:16 PM on August 29, 2014

Best answer: It looks like with the Gimp scale function, you didn't have the width and height change together. Mine (v2.8.10 for ubuntu) has a chain link next to the width and height, which you can click to change the appearnce of the chain between "break" or "link". You want them to be linked.
posted by czytm at 12:22 PM on August 29, 2014 [3 favorites]

Response by poster: czytm, that was the problem, thank you!
posted by mlis at 12:35 PM on August 29, 2014

Best answer: For future reference, Liquid Rescale is rarely the right tool for the job. It is doing something quite sophisticated, much more than just changing the size of the image.

See the examples given here for further explanation.
posted by liliillliil at 5:05 AM on August 30, 2014 [1 favorite]