I've been working with a few new clients lately that have had questions about resizing images and formatting them for use on the web. Other friends have also asked me about resizing images for use in their profile pictures on sites like Facebook and twitter.
Obviously the picture above wouldn't make a good profile photo. Almost my entire face is cut off in the image. The reason is the original resolution of the image as it came from my camera.
You see each one of those megapixels, which gives you a higher quality image, means that your original image isn't quite suited for use on the web. The picture above has been cropped and resized as well. The image above has the dimensions of 590 pixels by 248 pixels. Grabbing that sized square off the original image just gave me the end of my nose. The original photo was 3072 pixels by 2304 pixels and a total file size of 2.04MB.
The original image in its entirety looks like the one below
It's been resized to 300 pixels by 225 pixels and is now just under 12k in file size. That's quite a difference between the original photos.
I cropped the image above a little more to make it work as my Facebook profile photo and it's shown below at 200 pixels by 150 pixels and is just over 6k in size.
Why am I sharing all of this? Because there's a difference between actually resizing and resampling your images and just stretching them or squeezing them by the corners to make them "look" smaller. If you take your original photo and just stretch/squeeze it, you're making the same super large image file (over 2MB in our example) look like the smaller image file. But you've just changed the look. Your browser still has to load the larger file completely. This is why many sites have problems when you try to upload an original photo from your camera without resizing.
Since I can't cover all the how-to's for each of your image programs, I just want to point you in the direction of learning more about how to do resizing and resampling with whatever program you use. Just look for the Help section and search for the terms resizing and resampling.
Also learn how to crop images, a cropped image can have a much louder impact than one that was just resized to fit in the original format. Be creative use a bg remover app. Get out there and have fun.
If you're looking for a great image editing program, here are a few I use, have tried and or recommend highly: Picasa, IrfanView, Picnik, Paint.NET, Snagit.