Paint Shop Pro
Paint Shop Pro (PSP) is an affordable alternative to Photoshop, with capabilities somewhere between Photoshop and the its cut-down Elements version. The instructions here refer to PSP version 8. Later versions won't have significant differences.
Having loaded your photo into PSP, you need to resize it before saving the web version. If you want to crop it as well, do this first:
To Crop:
- Select the Crop tool:
or type R. Press F4 to open the Tool Options palette in the toolbar if it's not showing. - Enter the target width and height, setting unit to Pixels, and ticking "maintain asp" to keep proportions the same as the selection changes.
- Drag the edges of the crop rectangle to select the part of the picture you want. Drag from the centre to move the whole rectangle.
- Double-click in the cropping rectangle, or click the tick in the toolbar, to make the crop.
To Resize the picture (pixel dimensions may have changed during cropping):
- Select Image » Resize (Shift+S)
- Enter the target width in the Pixel Dimensions section. Height adjusts itself as long as Lock Aspect Ratio is ticked.
- Click OK
- Select View » Zoom » Zoom to 100% (Ctrl+Alt+N) to see the image at its normal size.
To "save for the web", use the Export command:
- Select File » Export » JPEG Optimizer. "Before and after" images are shown, with file size information below.
- Adjust compression to reduce file size as far as possible while preserving quality (target: 20-40,000 bytes).
- Click OK and save the picture. Don't overwrite the original!
- Close the original without saving!