emailing high quality pictures

5beatles · Feb 15, 2008

Okay, so my husband just got back into the photography business. Previously, he had worked strictly with film. Now he has a Nikon d300 with a d80 for backup. He's been doing documentary pictures for a construction project and I, being the more computer literate of the two of us, have been burning them to disks and he hand delivers them to the client. Now, the client wants us to start sending (emailing) some over to the website developer. What would be the best way to do this? Of course the files are huge. If I have to resize, am I going to lose quality? Do I zip them? And how about for print? We also have to send some to newspapers. Is there a standard way that these people (web developers and news papers) want to get them? Oh we use Photoshop 6 (I know, we need to upgrade) if that makes a difference.
TIA

TCimages · Feb 15, 2008

I would consider I website or server space where you can upload the files and send the URL (site address) to your clients. They can download them. Many email service providers limit the size of files you can send.
I would get the requirements for image size from the webmaster and the newspaper. It's likely the original is not needed.

FSTOPMIAMI · Feb 15, 2008

If the pictures are to be used on the web, they do not have be that big of a file. Most PS have a "save as" stricklty for the web.

Armando

Big Mike · Feb 15, 2008

Welcome to the forum.

It would help if you knew the requirements of the people that you are sending the images to. For example, a website developer might not need a high resolution file, so you could down size them before sending. Just make sure you ask when they need first.
You shouldn't loose quality when downsizing but you can loose quality when compressing the image (Jpeg quality setting).

I guess it also depends on the number of images that you are sending. If it's only a few at a time, it shouldn't be a problem...but if there lots of them, it might be better to set up some sort of FTP connection so that you are loading them directly from one side to the other.

There are two main ways to reduce the file size. One is to resize the image (reduce the number of pixels). The other is to compress the file. When you save the image as JPEG, you can set the compression/quality level. This does damage the image...but greatly reduces the size. Might be good if they just want to look at them, but if they want something to print, it's probably best not to shrink or compress the image. Although sending a JPEG will be much smaller than sending a Tiff or RAW file.

The_Traveler · Feb 15, 2008

Use a free FTP server like yousendit.com where you can send files up to 100 MB.

Zip up the jpgs in one file and send them through yousendit

works great