How to reduce the size of a photo without losing quality?

2024 Author: Sierra Becker | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-26 03:45

Modern camera matrices allow you to take photos of incredibly high resolution, which, in turn, increases the size of the picture. This could be tolerated if most of the photographs taken would not be uploaded to the Web. Unfortunately, many sites seriously limit the size of uploaded images or automatically create small copies, which is why the images are greatly reduced in quality. This raises the question of how to reduce the size of a photo while retaining as much color information.

Ways

There are several ways to shrink a photo:

• use built-in Windows tools;
• use special converters;
• crop photo;
• remove EXIF information (however, this method does not allow you to cut the weight of the photo too much).

If you process a large number of photos in Lightroom, you can use the export settings. This program, of course, has a built-in converter that can reduce the size of a photo both during saving and during operation.above them. In the export window, it is enough to set only the size of the wide side of the photo and watch how the program itself optimizes the pictures by size.

Adobe Photoshop also has a built-in converter that allows you to both reduce photos and stretch them. To do this, call the image size menu by pressing Ctrl+Alt+I and select the desired values for the future image. There are no complex settings in the window, so we will not dwell on each item.

How does the reduction work?

To reduce the weight of a photo, compression is divided into several types: lossless and lossy compression. When reducing the size of a photo without losing quality, as a rule, the deterioration is imperceptible to the eye and can be used for pictures with any content, especially for those where maintaining the integrity of the picture is important. When using this compression format, a drastic change in the image size is not possible.

Lossy compression is preferred for small, abstract and medium quality images. The size can be significantly reduced, but a significant part of the image information is lost.

Usually, the second method is used to crop a photo. Weight reduction is achieved by subtracting various junk data, such as duplicated or too light pixels, replacing pixels with numerical values, and cutting out unnecessary information. In any case, the photo reduces not only in weight, but also in quality. Although it is worth noting that the deterioration in quality is directly proportional to the resulting sizereduction. But how to reduce a photo without losing quality and is it possible to do it without third-party programs?

Can I shrink a photo without distortion?

There are converters that do the job really well and almost imperceptibly for visual perception. However, reducing the size of a photo without losing quality is possible only with a slight reduction in weight. If you want to optimize the image to the maximum, you will have to select such compression values at which the quality remains acceptable.

However, greatly reducing the size of images is useful only when uploading them to the network, to save space on servers and speed up site loading. For simple home PC storage, extra file size reduction is not essential.

How can I reduce the size of a photo using Windows?

The easiest way to reduce an image is to reduce its physical size. This does not require the presence of any special programs or third-party services. You can use the good old Paint editor. In order to reduce the size of the photo, as in the previous case, perform a few simple manipulations:

• right click on the photo and select "Edit" from the list;
• by default, the picture will open in the Paint editor;
• on the top panel, find and select the "Resize" icon or go to the settings window with the combination Ctrl+W;
• enter the desired value and click save.

Reducing in size with third-party programs

Many sites limit input files to 1MB. Reducing the size of the photo both in terms of physical size and weight will be the best option to achieve the desired result. For example, you can crop part of an image in the editor, and then compress it to the maximum.

Although 1 MB for images is enough to store a lot of information, photos with an original size of several thousand pixels may still not fit into this limit.

There is a wonderful service on the net called Optimizilla, which can compress files to record-breaking low sizes. For example, an original 3.5 MB photo loses 90% of its weight at 70% quality, which practically does not degrade the image. The converter handles large images effectively, but still, it's better not to upload too large photos, as reducing the photo size to 1 MB from the original 20 MB is quite problematic anyway.