Source:www.jimippolito.com

Two days ago I posted information about transferring huge files, today's hint deals with the opposite, downsizing your files, but without a loss in quality.

I know the camera manuals and help groups advise you to use a very low resolution when shooting pictures for email, or use on a non-commercial website but I don't agree with that, with one exception.

My advice is to use all the pixels you paid for, archive the original files on removable media, and scale back copies of the files later, if necessary.

Case in point, your Mom complains that you haven't emailed her any photos of her favorite grandchildren in over a week, so you gather up the kids, and go out to the backyard to shoot pictures of them.

You set your digital camera to low resolution, take your pictures, and after you load them into your computer you realize that you've captured the best shots ever of little Alphonse, and his new sister, Baby Mergatroid.

Too bad you used the lowest resolution setting because now anything lager than a 4X6 print will be loaded with digital artifacts and unacceptable.

The only time you should start out with low resolution is when, for example, you want to email a picture of something like your new dining room set. Then you may as well start with what you want and save time resizing, because it's doubtful you'll want a gallery sized print of that.

There are many ways to resize, and some email programs do it for you automatically, but for those times when you need to resize, up or down, nothing beats the ubiquitous adobe photoshop program for changing a picture's size without sacrificing quality.

Check out this link for a great explanation of how to do it.

Today's picture was taken at Zion National Park, in Utah, last November. I took it as part of a test of my Olympus C700uz. That camera is only 2.1 MP by the way, but the camera has a great lens and yields results that are OK for smaller enlargements, say up to 8X10.

I got that camera, used, off eBay, for a song and it makes for a perfect knock around or back up camera.

Too bad there aren't some nice fluffy clouds in that sky. Maybe I'll use Photoshop to add some.