[Jimbo]

Any help would be appreciated on compression software. NEWBIE! JIMBO

[Canada_Rockies]

Any help would be appreciated on compression software. NEWBIE! JIMBO

PEF is somewhat compressed compared to DNG, which is not compressed. PEF does not appear to lose very much in the compression algorithms.

JPEG is a compressed image format. It loses a considerable amount of precision.

If you are talking about other compression software, I am quite pleased with WinRAR.

[Jimbo]

Thanks, will load the demo of WinRar. JIM

[AVANT]

winrar is used primarily to compress your everyday files, not really used for pictures. JPG is the standard for image compression as it retains a large amount of detail while reducing the filesize significantly. Most image editing software (including the one that comes with your camera) can save pictures into JPGs natively.

[raz-0]

If you want viewable compressed pictures. Then Jpeg is about it. There are newer standards that are btter, but support is poor.

If you want to archive your raw files, then pretty much anything set on high compression is decent. Filzip is free, and supports RAR. However, RAR is more about trading warez via netnews. If you just want good compression of a single archive, zip,lzh, and lha are all good. (filzip supports all of them IIRC).

[SteveB]

I tried loads of compression utilities a few months ago to see which gave the smallest lossless compressed PEF files (K100D). The best I found was 7-Zip using its native 7z compression using the Bzip2 option which got the 10Mb files down to 6.6Mb, but it takes about 7 seconds for each file on a 3.5yr old PC 2.4GHz AthlonXP. A new PC would probably do it much quicker.

The main problem with using compressed PEFs is that you are then totally reliant on the compression software being supported over the forthcoming years, especially when operating systems change.

[Jimbo]

Great comments guys and it did give me a few ideas. I was lookiong for compression to e mail photos as many friends are interested in seeing some of my pictures. Found a way in my Lightroom demo to reduce which worked very well. Agian thanks fgor all you help now wishing for better weather to get out! Cheers JIMBO

[Duck Dodgers]

Great comments guys and it did give me a few ideas. I was lookiong for compression to e mail photos as many friends are interested in seeing some of my pictures. Found a way in my Lightroom demo to reduce which worked very well. Agian thanks fgor all you help now wishing for better weather to get out! Cheers JIMBO

Why not host your photos online (either privately or publicly, and send the URL in an email? That way, you don't clog their email box, and they can decide when they wish to download them. And they don't have to hassle with decompressing them, remembering where they ended up on their drive, etc.

Google's PicasaWeb offers 1 GB free, as does Yahoo's Flickr...there's a bunch of them.

[mattdm]

Great comments guys and it did give me a few ideas. I was lookiong for compression to e mail photos as many friends are interested in seeing some of my pictures. Found a way in my Lightroom demo to reduce which worked very well. Agian thanks fgor all you help now wishing for better weather to get out! Cheers JIMBO

Are you e-mailing RAW files? If not, compression software won't do much, because JPEGs are already inherently compressed. Instead, scale the images down (with an algorithm that sharpens inherently or applying an unsharp mask afterwards) and then save at the lowest JPEG quality that still looks good to you.

[distudio]

Great comments guys and it did give me a few ideas. I was lookiong for compression to e mail photos as many friends are interested in seeing some of my pictures. Found a way in my Lightroom demo to reduce which worked very well. Agian thanks fgor all you help now wishing for better weather to get out! Cheers JIMBO

The best package I found was from XAT, it allowed images to be compressed to varying degrees across the image in order to reduce image file sizes. For instance you could apply pretty vicious compression to a portrait shot but paint back in detail around the eyes and teeth etc giving the image a far more crisp look than it otherwise would.

xat.com: GIF JPEG Compression software download, JPEG Optimizer, Image Optimiser, Slide Show/Screensaver for PC and TV/DVD/Digital Camera

[Jimbo]

Man, you guys are great. This is all new to me and each day I learn something for this forum. [same as all great forums I have been on / old gaming days] No I am not e mailing in Raw. Too new at it but I am shooting in Raw when I comes to landscape, which is what I am really interested in. That and macro... gardening photos. I have spend almost a hour a day on this forum looking to pick up ideas and there have been many. I am looking at on line Ducky and your suggestion helped. Like I side this is very new to me and I want to thank each of you for your input. It has been 30 years since I was interesting in this hobby and I am jumping in with a open mind to make great pictures that I know will take time. I am taking a coarse where I bought my camera to better understand the K10's potential and then like any other hobby, go out and make the mistakes to learn. Its been interesting reading through the threads on people that have thought the K10D was the best thing since slice bread and others who were so quick to switch to another camera. In the end it is nothing different then any other thing we purchase. There will be those that go about it with a passion and learn their equipment and others that will throw the towel in and move on to the next purchase mistake. When I bought me K10 the salesman summed it up like this. All the cameras in this price range and above will make good pictures and it is no different today then it was 50 years ago. It is the guy behind the camera that makes it a great picture. I had many camera's to choose from but when it came down to the last two [D80 being the other] it was the price / versus features that the K10 came with where it could cost me twice as much with other camera's. Sure there are better and still bad photos are made. Oh well, carried on way longer then I meant to guys. Cheers and my all your photo's be great! Cheers JIMBO

[bymy141]

Hi Jimbo,

There is a new JPEG standard, called JPEG XR.
It is developed by Microsoft which called it the HD Photo format.
It seems to maintain better image quality than JPEG now.
We can expect to see future products to support this format.

Microsoft released a HD Photo plugin for Photoshop: Download details: HD Photo Plug-in for Adobe® Photoshop® Software

I have not tried this. Perhaps it is worth while looking in to. Since this is to be the future standard format.

Otherwise; using gmail and/or hotmail you can send 25Mb mail messages.
So, what's the point of compressing?

- Bert

[Canada_Rockies]

Hi Jimbo,

There is a new JPEG standard, called JPEG XR.
It is developed by Microsoft which called it the HD Photo format.
It seems to maintain better image quality than JPEG now.
We can expect to see future products to support this format.

Microsoft released a HD Photo plugin for Photoshop: Download details: HD Photo Plug-in for Adobe® Photoshop® Software

I have not tried this. Perhaps it is worth while looking in to. Since this is to be the future standard format.

Otherwise; using gmail and/or hotmail you can send 25Mb mail messages.
So, what's the point of compressing?

- Bert

That's fine for you, but how about the recipient? His/her ISP will block the oversize messages.

[Jimbo]

Thanks again guys. Found a interesting feather in the Lightroom software demo I am trying. [makes we want to purchase even more now] It seems if I export my pictures for e mails it compresses the photo for me with very little lost of detail. So cool. It also automatically saves it, along with the older file under it own edited tag number. Will try this today and see how my friend makes out. Cheers and keep those ideas coming! JIMBO