Not quite the title I originally had in mind. But after yet more and more frustrating rounds of image degradation to get the photo to meet the miniscule size requirements of this site, I present you: these three pixels. Enjoy.
Statistics
Place: 5 out of 196 Avg (all users): 6.6648 Avg (commenters): 7.5000 Avg (participants): 6.7800 Avg (non-participants): 6.6202 Views since voting: 4169 Views during voting: 346 Votes: 179 Comments: 22 Favorites: 4 (view)
It still looks great. I agree with the Save For Web idea, too, but it's only a couple kilobytes of data. I use FastStone Image Viewer (freeware) for resizing and saving for web:
To resize, I sharpen the full-size image with a strength of 5-10, then resize to 640 (or 720) using the Lanczos-3 algorithm (it's sharper than bicubic and by the time you resize using bicubic in FastStone, you'll have white hairs in places you don't have ANY hair now). I also like it more for sharp edges that would have aliasing using other algorithms. And speaking of other algorithms, it has about 10 different ones.
To save for web, it has a slider for the JPEG quality in increments of 1 and pretty cool preview options (click to switch between saved and current quality, view side-by-side, view in full screen, etc.).
You have to use Save For Web, not just the regular save to get your image ready for challenges. For example, all of your exif data is still attached to your image.(It was taken at 9:46 PM and was a 20 sec exposure) This data is wasting file space that could be used for image quality. Check out this tutorial for getting challenge entries ready for challenges. It is for an older version of photoshop, but it works the same for your version of CS2. It will allow you to get those files right up to size limits. Good Luck.
Ok, thanks for the tip and link. I need to print out the specs cuz I forget them every time I upload a new pic.
You have to use Save For Web, not just the regular save to get your image ready for challenges. For example, all of your exif data is still attached to your image.(It was taken at 9:46 PM and was a 20 sec exposure) This data is wasting file space that could be used for image quality. Check out this tutorial for getting challenge entries ready for challenges. It is for an older version of photoshop, but it works the same for your version of CS2. It will allow you to get those files right up to size limits. Good Luck.
surlybiff: I like your sense of humor: including the validation rant. Nice photo as well. I used to live in New Mexico where I could get these kinds of shots, but unfortunately I didn't have a decent camera then. Hopefully I will get the chance to try and catch some lightning one of these days.
Oh goody, my image is up for disqualification. Those wonderful people who gave me a vote of 1 must be having a particularly miserable week.
But yes, they're right in asking for justification. It's not actually real lightning at all. It's the sun shining out my arse at night, drawn entirely in Photoshop with the smudge tool.
Looks like the perfect size to me (but what do I know all of my recent entries have been below 5). I do like the shot a lot. Lightening is so hard to catch. This is nicely done.
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