2012 – Photograph Works

Scrunching Images With JPEG mini

Jennifer from Random Acts Of Photography told me about Jpegmini, which is a free online service for scrunching jpegs.

There are also two downloadable versions for Mac computers. These are a free ‘lite’ version that restricts use to 20 photos per day, and a full version that supports jpeg images as big as 28Mpx and allows unlimited scrunching.

I tried the online version with a full-size jpeg and it scrunched it from 7MB to 1.8MB with no discernable degradation of the image.

I can’t see that there’s a way to resize images.

With the full version of the downloadable app, you can batch process JPEGs.

The only question in my mind is how much the image is degraded on multiple saves compared to saving and re-saving the original jpeg. I might do a test to find out.

I resized this image for the web using Photoshop and then pushed the image through JPEGmini and it shaved about 7KB off the image.

Here it is:

And here is a side by side of a part of the original and the scrunched version viewed at 100%.

I think that JPEGmini has held all the detail and the highlight and shadow information.

Take a close look and let me know what you think.

In fact, can you tell which is which? I wouldn’t be able to.

Editing With Picasa Creative Kit

Well I’ve learned something interesting and that is that Picasa can be used to resize photos. My thanks to Rebekah of Colder Weather who pointed it out.

Here is a screen shot of Creative Kit, and then the image that I resized to 600px wide. Picasa did a good job and the image is 20KB.

Update September 2013

It seems Google have discontinued Creative Kit, although the picture isn’t entirely clear. If it has happened then it is perhaps connected with the online editing in Google’s Chrome browser. That uses a native client application based on Nik software that Google bought a while ago.

I took a quick look on the forums and people are recommending Picmonkey and Picadilo as alternatives. I didn’t look in detail and I don’t know whether it’s possible to resize images using these web-based applications.

The reason I didn’t look at them in detail is that I resize photos with Photoshop before uploading them.

I would not upload a full-size version of one of my images to a third party company. Full-size images are many megabytes in size. It’s just not practical to upload them to the web for editing. And what if a company is disreputable and sells on the uploaded images? What if an employee of the company grabbed the images? What if the company was hacked?

I am not imputing any lack of ethics or poor safeguarding to either of the companies I have mentioned. However, I simply would not upload when there are desktop applications that do a very good job. Adobe Elements and Adobe Lightroom are good value for anyone who doesn’t want to get the full Photoshop capability.

Save For the Web With Picmonkey

The Eternal Traveller mentions that she uses Picmonkey to resize her images for the web.

Picmonkey is an online solution – and it’s easy to use. Just upload an image; resize it to the desired dimensions and save at one of three qualities (with three file sizes of course).

Here is a photo of a rabbit that I processed in Photoshop at 42% (that’s a fairly high quality for the web) which gave me a file size of 14KB.

And I also resized and saved at the lowest quality with Picmonkey, which gave me a file size of 37KB.

What do you think? The top one is the one I processed in Photoshop. I think there is more detail in it than in the Picmonkey version, but both are fine for the web.

So that’s a useful suggestion from Eternal Traveller, and one that can be accessed anywhere there is an internet connection and with no need to use a program on one’s computer.

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Update September 2013

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