New size limitations on image attachments

[Michele Rushworth]

Chris, compression has to do with the relationship of a jpeg file's image quality and the amount of computer file space it takes to store it, or bandwidth to transmit it. It doesn't have anything to do with the actual pixel or print dimensions of a file. A tif file from your camera uses no compression at all and gives the best quality, but takes up the largest amount of storage.

When you store a file as a jpeg in Photoshop, and you choose the absolute lowest quality/highest compression setting, the number of megabytes the file takes up will be dramatically less. Unfortunately the appearance of the file can be dramatically worse too. It can look all fuzzy and lumpy (the best words I can think of to describe what over-enthusiastic jpeg compression looks like. Try it and you'll see what I mean.

Somewhere in the middle of the quality/file size continuum usually works best for web images. No noticeable degradation in quality (at least at computer screeen resolution) and a lot less storage space taken up on the server.

[Cynthia Daniel]

Michele,

We were pressing the submit button at the same time.

Chris,

I would recommend saving your original tif file as the source file and then make jpgs from that. Tifs are needed if you ever want to do hard copy printing. Tifs are very large and some people save them on CD to save hard drive space.

The dimension in pixels has something to do with amount of hard drive space an image consumes. But, as you can see in my examples, the dimensions were all 400 x 600, but dramatic differences in hard drive space consumed.

[Steven Sweeney]

We were pressing the submit button at the same time.

Do they ever issue these to guys, or do only girls get them? I'm going to check eBay.