improving photo quality

mustbemad

Sorry if this sounds like a really silly question!

I'm uploading some photo's to put in a calendar for my mum but i am getting an 'image of poor quality' message on some of the pictures they ideally want pictures that are between 300kb and 900kb. This is probably really silly, but is there anyway of saving them so they have more kb? lol usually i'm trying to make them less!

Anyway, I hope someone can help

MBM x

woo

You can tweak them in something like photoshop, but this will still be governed by the original photo. what camera did you use?

amcluesent

I imagine they are suggesting a size of between 300-900KB as that means that the pictures haven't been compressed or the resolution reduced (much) from the original image in the camera. Printing small, highly compressed images on the calendar will not look very good.

Sadly once an camera image has been compressed, there's no sure means to recover the size/quality - the best you can do is use Photoshop filters to try removing the JPEG compression artefacts.

mustbemad

Thanks for the suggestions so far.

Okay, this is probably going to sound insane! The picture was taken with my camera phone, but looks fine to my very untrained eye... so, I have taken a screenprint of it and saved it in paint as a .bmp image. It has uploaded to the site fine and now is 600 odd kb, so no 'low quality image' message. Does this sound like it might work?

MBM x

woo

Bitmap images are bigger compared to JPG anyway because of less / no compression (can't remember which).
Depends on how big the picture on the calendar will be, but sadly doubt it will look any better. sorry.

wolfman

Yeah .bmp (bitmap) is uncompressed.

Converting a .jpg (Jpeg) to a bitmap won't help though. All it will do is increase the file size. You can't regain any quality/data that doesn't exist in the original. You'd be better off just keeping it as a jpeg if that's how it originated.

I'd imagine the photo quality off your phone could do with being higher if you want it to go into print. Typically a 3 mega pixel camera will print at most just under A4 size as a rule of thumb (before quality is lost from blowing it up too much).