Heeeeelllllpppppppp with camara settings.

Okay... I know that the best way to learn is to read the instructions before doing things. But... I've never been a patient person and that's not going to happen anytime soon either. My credo is "When all else fails... read the instructions".

I purchased a nice 6.0Mp camara a few months ago to replace the perfectly good 3.1Mp camara I had been using. I had no problems uploading pictures to Railimages with the 3.1Mp camara... the quality of the pictures just wasn't all that great. More than likely the quality of the pictures had more to do with ME than the camara. I have been using a tripod and setting the flash to delay and other things to improve the quality of the shot. I will also be using more lighting to eliminate the flash altogether. But those are not the issue presently haunting me. I am having a problem uploading images because they are HUGE... over 4Mb each. Even using IrfanView... I'm not getting them below 900k at 640 x 480. Obviously there is a setting on this camara which is giving me extremely LARGE pictures... or extremely DETAILED shots which take-up a lot of memory. RailImages is not accepting them even after resizing/resampling.

The camara is a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX3. If you have one of these or something very similar... PLEASE help. Even if you don't have one of these... perhaps you can steer me towards the problems causing these MEGA SIZED images.

 

As a new owner of a Digital Rebel I feel your pain. The best advice I can give is to resize the picture first, then save it as a JPEG. Adjusting the JPEG compression amount should allow you to get under the 900k limit.

ct_mike

 

Okay... umm... being a digital camara 'nooby'... I'm not sure if I can do the resizing on the camara itself... and I'm not sure if I can choose which format to save the image as on the camara. I almost certain that the camara is saving them as JPEG.

The interesting thing is that the when I use IrfanView to resize/resample... the image is saved as a BMP instead of a JPEG. This could be one reason that I cannot upload to RailImages too.

 

There should be an image quality setting on the camera where it gives you something like fine, extra fine, ultra fine. The number of pixels increase with the higher settings there by causing the picture to become larger.

I recently filled a memory card with only ten pictures that I took, that had room for about 200 more because I accidentally bumped this setting over to higher sixe/quality.

Personally I do not think that picture quality distorts that bad when you shrink the photos by 50% to get them fit in the gallery.

Here is a recent photo that I took that was shrunk about 50% from its original size. Taken with a hand held Sony. Did not use a tripod... It is 5 mega pixels.

http://www.trainboard.com/railimages/data/500/Coal_Mine_052.jpg

Hope this suggestion helps... I am like you I never read the instructions - but honnestly it may help in this case.

Mr X

 

Grandpa Joe.

After you select the setting of 640 * 480 in IrfanView, you need to select File > Save As. An option in the Save box is save as file type, scroll down through the list until you see JPG, select that and pick a name for the file name you want it saved as and the file will be saved as JPEG. That will get it saved as a JPEG rather than a BMP. I just tried it and the file size changed from 13 meg to 120k.

Remember all files combined during download cannot exceed 2 meg

 

Hmmm... time to take more pictures. Thank goodness I don't have to pay for the processing of these .

The IrfanView software is pretty straightforward and Charlie's tutorial was very good. I don't remember seeing that choice for file format. Once I'm back home tonight I'll have to do the resize/resample again. Hope that works!!

Thanks all for your input.

 

So what your saying is that the image is to big for RailImages correct?

 

Joe,

If your saying that it says the image is to big to upload on RI then you need a photo editing software. Normally your camera comes with a software for editing photos. But if you can find the RESIZE button on your software then you need to downsize to 1017X734. My camera is also a 6mp camera and you just gotta know hot to use a software to edit your photos.

 

YEP REALLLLLY BIG.

IIRC, the image file for each photo on IrfanView was 2172 x 1629 before resizing/resampling.
The buttons on the camara are... uhhh... basically N scale sized . There are a lot of functions which I haven't tried yet. I do remember using "best" quality settings whenever I came across them. More than likely that is one of the issues. I also noticed on IrfanView another set of numbers for pixels which were set at 72 x 72 (when multiplied is 5184 pixels?); but, I don't know what those numbers all about.

 

As a general statement, the better the Digial Camera the large the image so you are not doing anything wrong. It's not a camera setting that is the issue it just that the image is larger becuase the camera is taking a better picture.

The balence is the image size the camera produces is great for printing but not for posting on the internet. Just using a simple software package most have an option to resize the image that is good for internet posting but keep your full size image for printing or other activities later. The #1 thing not to forget in Digital Photography is that image is your "Negative" so keep it safe on a CD, DVD, etc. and unlike a "Negative" you can make several copies and store them in different places.

Check you PC and see what software you have related to images and I'm sure you will find one that will help without spending any $$$ doing it. You can later spend the $$$ when you want to do more than just resize the image.

We will help you through this process so just keeping asking questions and trust me at some point the :lightbulb: will turn on and a whole new world of Digital Photography will open up in your mind.

 

I'd like to thank all of you for the comments and support.

The problem has been fixed... the files were resized/resampled and saved as JPEG. The file setting for IrfanView was saving with BMP which was not compressing the files at all. Using JPEG, the file sizes are all about 60kb... a huge difference in file size and at still at a resolution of 1024 x 768.

 

There are always people here to help...

:thumbs_up: :thumbs_up: :thumbs_up: :thumbs_up:
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